PoliceMilitarization of police fails to enhance safety, may damage police reputation

Published 21 August 2018

This month marks the four-year anniversary of protests over the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, an incident met with a heavily armed police response that stoked widespread concern. While proponents say militarized police units enhance officer safety and prevent violence, critics argue these tactics are targeted at racial minorities, and diminish trust between citizens and law enforcement.

This month marks the four-year anniversary of protests over the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, an incident met with a heavily armed police response that stoked widespread concern.

While proponents say militarized police units enhance officer safety and prevent violence, critics argue these tactics are targeted at racial minorities, and diminish trust between citizens and law enforcement.

A study published by Jonathan Mummolo, assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, reveals that militarized policing is ineffective in decreasing crime and protecting police, and may actually weaken the public’s image of the police.

Princeton says that Mummolo tested several claims about the costs and benefits of militarized policing using a combination of administrative crime and officer safety data, records of when and where militarized police units were created and deployed, and survey experiments.

He found that militarized policing does not lead to less violent crime or less violence against police officers. Seeing militarized police in the news also may harm police reputation, which prior work shows can create obstacles for police efficacy. The study also shows that militarized police units are more often deployed in communities of color.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that curtailing militarized policing may be in the interest of both the police and citizens.

The routine use of militarized police tactics by local agencies threatens to further the historic tensions between marginalized groups and the state with no detectable public safety benefit,” said Mummolo, who is on the faculty at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Politics.

In recent decades, police units have grown more militarized in part due to the “War on Drugs” campaign as well as federal initiatives that supplied neighborhoods with excess military equipment and funds to purchase arms. To understand the effects this has had on policing, Mummolo investigated Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) deployments, as the formation of SWAT teams represent an increased commitment to the use of militarized equipment and tactics.