Police Militarization Gave Us Uvalde

[ck4829]

All my adult life I’ve been around policing, including working as a civilian cop, training and leading military police battalions, and studying police culture as an academic and a researcher. I’ve spent hundreds of hours riding along with cops, interviewing police leaders, and helping educate trainees. I love the police, and I love policing. Few professions will expose you to the gamut of human experience and emotion with quite the same immediacy.

It’s because I love the profession that the police response at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has me so sick at heart.

There’s a lot we still don’t know, and hopefully the promised Department of Justice investigation (run by leaders from the Community Oriented Policing program, a hopeful sign) will fill in the gaps. What we do know suggests that this is among the most profound police betrayals of the public trust. For those who care about the policing profession, it should be an occasion for deep self-reflection. The adoption of aggressive, military-style tactics and weaponry put American policing on the wrong track for decades. Uvalde is the sickening dead end.

For two decades, a group of police analysts (myself included) have been warning about the corrosive effects of police militarization, which have been unfolding for more than 40 years. Through the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, the federal government has been dumping military weaponry, armored personnel carriers, even grenade launchers and drones, on police departments large and small. People of a certain age should reflect: You probably don’t recall police regularly hanging out with armored personnel carriers and automatic weapons when you were a kid. But sometime after this nation embarked on the War on Drugs, these scenes became normal.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/police-training-militarization-mass-shootings-uvalde/661295/

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Policing with technology is different from actual policing

[roscoeroscoe]

2. Paywalled out

OP, where does the author tie his concerns about police militarization to Uvalde? Not seeing it from your snip.

[ck4829]

3. Odd. It was not paywalled for me, and I don't have a subscription, but here's some more

Police militarization, it turns out, is largely swagger, and short on substance. What strikes me as I study the Facebook photo of the Uvalde SWAT team, standing in their tactical gear, is the theatricality of the whole thing. Any thoughtful observer of policing over the past 20 years has come to recognize the increasing childishness of the rhetoric about police militarization generally, and SWAT specifically. The journalist Radley Balko and others have documented police units’ use of military insignia and tough-guy mottos totally unsuited to civilian agencies (examples: “Hunter of men,” “We get up early, to BEAT the crowds,” “Baby Daddy Removal Team,” and “Narcotics: You huff and you puff and we’ll blow your door down”). Police education and training standards are abysmally low. In Texas, more training hours are required to be a hairdresser than a cop. National standards for SWAT training and tactics are essentially nonexistent.

So much of this turns out to be LARPing: half-trained, half-formed kids playing soldier in America’s streets and schools. Many of the thousands of SWAT-team members in this country don’t have the training and expertise to respond like they’re SEAL Team 6. It’s time to stop pretending that they do.

After this tragedy, some people will call for pumping more weapons, more training, and more money into the rotting edifice of police militarism. Resist that temptation. The New York Times has reported at length on the school-security drills that local Uvalde police conducted just months ago. The Uvalde SWAT team’s Facebook page shows that it was drilling in schools to learn their layout as recently as 2020. The materials reviewed by the Times suggest that local police were working with up-to-date training and tactics manuals. Everything necessary was in place for police militarism to fulfill its promise last month. Its failure stems not from a lack of training, but from a fundamental misapprehension of the purpose and goals of policing. The solution is not more militaristic training, but attention to police professionalism.

[Probatim]

5. LARPing - that's a well-deserved slap in the face to the Cowards of Uvalde County.

[snowybirdie]

4. I'm close to

someone who keeps saying this very thing. Police have lost the trust of many people and the profession attracts the military minded, not those who want to better mankind. Spot on article.