Why Police Resist Reforms to Militarization

Others told her that they believed small-town departments possessed too much equipment that they would likely never use. Katzenstein spoke to officers who questioned instances where departments were fully equipped with military-grade weapons, shields, and training but failed to “protect and serve.”

The anthropologist was conducting field work when the mass shooting occurred in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Seventeen people were killed, and 17 more injured when a 19-year-old gunman with a semiautomatic rifle entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and began firing. An armed school resource officer at Stoneman Douglas failed to respond to the shooting and was accused of hiding instead.

“Many officers were highly critical of the Parkland officer, though some also said they could understand why he would fear entering the school alone,” Katzenstein said. “In active shooter trainings I attended, police were often taught that active shooter situations were exceptional in that they might be asked to sacrifice themselves to save innocent lives.”

Despite incidents like Parkland, many officers viewed demilitarization efforts “as preventing them from doing their jobs,” she said. They argued against being expected to run into a mass shooter situation without shields, weapons, and armored personnel vehicles needed in those instances.

Katzenstein has noted in her work the centrality of self-protection in police trainings and culture.

Some law enforcement officers also spoke about the complications brought by suspects with mental health issues. “Officers often encounter people with mental health issues that police are simply not equipped to deal with humanely — not only due to a lack of training, though that too is an issue, but also due to the nature of their work,” she said.

Officers also tended to link mass shootings with mental health issues “rather than to gun control policies, violent masculinity, [and] white supremacy,” she added.

A forthcoming paper by Katzenstein argues that the way that militarization reforms are often posed grant legitimacy to portions of the practice. “Even the strictest demilitarization policies limiting the kinds of equipment police can obtain nonetheless carve out exceptions for disaster preparedness, terrorism, [and] active shooter preparedness,” she said. “This does not mean that such equipment will in reality be used only for such purposes, just that departments must justify their equipment requests under the auspices of these exceptions.”

Many seeking reforms, including abolitionists, see demilitarization as a step toward replacing policing with other systems of public safety, or, at minimum, reducing the mandate of policing, she said.

“I believe in [prison abolitionist] Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s distinction between reformist reforms and non-reformist reforms, reformist reforms being those that increase the power or the funding of policing, and non-reformist reforms being harm reduction or steps along the way toward shrinking the mandate of policing and therefore shrinking its violence,” she said.

Many of the demilitarization policies advocated by organizations that gain legislative traction on the federal and state level, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the R Street Institute, are those that, at best, allow for some forms of militarization while limiting others, and, at worst, are merely symbolic, she noted.

In 2015, President Barack Obama placed restrictions on the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program, which transferred surplus military equipment to police departments around the country. Those restrictions were rescinded two years later under the Trump administration but were brought back and expanded in 2022 under President Biden.

Obama’s restrictions prohibited the program from transferring equipment that was never included in the original transfers and some efforts towards transparency, Katzenstein said. Still, police departments can obtain some military aircraft or vehicles if that equipment will primarily be used to respond to disasters, active shooters, hostage situations, or terrorism.

“Demilitarization efforts that rely on this distinction between good and bad militarization and that allow certain forms of militarization as legitimate, unfortunately, end up shoring up the idea that police are and should be these professional stewards of crisis and the people in the institution that we rely on to protect and serve, in ways that unintentionally end up enlivening the anti-Blackness of police work in the U.S.,” she said.

Katzenstein added that U.S. police work is “fundamentally anti-Black in that police enforce the social status quo, in which poor Black communities are exploited, abandoned, treated as combatants, and subject to state violence and death.”

Nikki Rojas is a Harvard Staff Writer. This article is published courtesy of the Harvard Gazette, Harvard University’s official newspaper.