Examples Of Militarization Of Police

THE MILITARIZATION OF LOCAL POLICE
Derrick A. Harris

Abstract
SWAT teams are increasingly being deployed across the country -- and it 's happening with almost no supervision. For nearly half a century, America’s police forces have undergone a process of “militarization.” They’ve upped their cache of assault weapons and military defense gear, increasingly deployed SWAT teams to conduct ops-style missions on civilians, and inculcated a warrior attitude within their rank. While major metropolitan areas have maintained SWAT teams for decades, by the mid 2000’s, 80 percent of small towns also had their own paramilitary forces. But beyond deep reporting of individual journalists and scholars, little is known about the extent of militarization across
The photos coming out of the town--of heavily armed officers in full combat gear squaring off against unarmed protesters--look like images we 're used to seeing from places like Gaza, Turkey, or Egypt, not from a mid-western suburb of 21,000 people. One of the ways police departments have armed themselves in recent years is through the Defense Department 's excess property program, known as the 1033 Program. It "permits the Secretary of Defense to transfer, without charge, excess U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) personal property (supplies and equipment) to state and local law enforcement agencies (LEAs)," according to the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center. The 1033 program has transferred more than $4.3 billion in equipment since its inception in 1997. In 2013 alone it gave nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies, according to the program 's website.
No longer associated with Reconstruction, it is a useful way to prevent the U.S. armed forces from directing their efforts against U.S. dissident groups. In October of 2008, the ACLU filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act with the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security, demanding an explanation for the Army 's decision to station an active-duty military unit inside the United States. The program, entitled the Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear, and Explosive (CBRNE) Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF, were stationed for one year at Fort Stewart, Ga., with the expectation that another active-duty brigade will then take over, and that the deployment will be permanent. The first unit to be deployed will be the 3rd Infantry Division 's 1st BCT, or "First Raiders", which spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq. The unit 's explicit mission will be to provide support for civilian law-enforcement branches like local police and rescue personnel: it may be called upon in situations involving civil unrest, crowd control, or catastrophes like chemical, biological, or nuclear attack, and it will be trained in skills like search and rescue and crowd control. This is a direct violation of Posse Comitatus. The deployment of an active unit within the U.S. is also troubling given recent evidence of the Department of Defense 's involvement