Police with Lots of Military Gear Kill Civilians More Often than Less-Militarized Officers
of military gear for police in general, it is not the only source of military equipment for police: There are other similar federal and state grant programs, and many big-city police departments have massive equipment budgets of their own with which they can purchase military-grade hardware.
The 1033 Program often requires receiving agencies to use the equipment within the first year after getting it, according to research done by the American Civil Liberties Union, even if a situation may not truly need it. That requirement exists alongside the proliferation of heavily armed SWAT teams and other military-style units in U.S. police departments, officers’ veneration of the revenge-killing comic-book character “The Punisher” and adoption of its logo, as well as militaristic training programs such as “killology.”
Together, research has shown, those influences lead police to emphasize the use of force to solve problems they encounter in the community. The equipment comes at no cost to the departments, but they have to pay to maintain it, which can be very expensive. To justify the costs, and help defray them, police often use the gear to serve search warrants targeting drug crimes. That can make the departments eligible for additional federal grants – and for a share of the value of any property and money seized during drug raids.
As a result, supposedly free weapons and vehicles can lead some police to use aggressive deployment strategies that make civilian casualties more likely. Other departments may already have a military-style mindset and are taking advantage of an opportunity to stockpile more equipment.
These increasingly aggressive deployment strategies of militarized police disproportionately harm communities of color, for instance in Maryland, where SWAT raids consistently target majority-Black neighborhoods.
Tragic, and Deadly, Results
While police often claim that militarized gear is a necessity in order to prepare for “worst-case scenarios,” there is ample evidence that receiving agencies use military gear in inappropriate situations. While the killing of Black EMT Breonna Taylor in her home in March grabbed headlines, she is but one of many civilians killed by police under questionable circumstances during no-knock raids, when police force entry into a building or home without announcing themselves.
For obvious reasons, such raids carry an unreasonably high probability of death in a country with more guns than people. These and other overaggressive deployments are the direct result of public policy that gives militarized gear to local police, with little training or oversight.
In our research, we don’t make any determination of whether specific killings by police were justified or not. In our view, too often the question of legal justification takes a very narrow look at the few seconds just prior to a lethal interaction. We believe that a wider perspective is useful: Local, state and federal rules and training influence the behavior of police agencies across the country. When policing strategies are overly aggressive, an increase in civilian casualties tends to follow. While the resulting killings are often called “justified,” they’re more often the avoidable result of policy decisions made well before the incident in question.
Casey Delehanty is Assistant Professor of Global Studies, Gardner-Webb University. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.
