Politics > Politics-USA > Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments
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"James" |
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22 May 2004 01:40:20 PM |
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Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments |
http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-050es.html
Briefing Paper No. 50 August 26, 1999
Warrior Cops
The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in
American Police Departments
by Diane Cecilia Weber
Diane Cecilia Weber is a Virginia writer on
law enforcement and criminal justice.
Executive Summary
Over the past 20 years Congress has encouraged
the U.S. military to supply intelligence, equipment,
and training to civilian police. That encouragement
has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American
law enforcement.
The 1980s and 1990s have seen marked changes in
the number of state and local paramilitary units, in
their mission and deployment, and in their tactical
armament. According to a recent academic survey,
nearly 90 percent of the police departments surveyed
in cities with populations over 50,000 had paramilitary
units, as did 70 percent of the departments surveyed in
communities with populations under 50,000. The
Pentagon has been equipping those units with M-16s,
armored personnel carriers, and grenade launchers.
The police paramilitary units also conduct training
exercises with active duty Army Rangers and Navy SEALs.
State and local police departments are increasingly accepting
the military as a model for their behavior and outlook. The
sharing of training and technology is producing a shared
mindset. The problem is that the mindset of the soldier is
simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer. Police
officers confront not an "enemy" but individuals who are
protected by the Bill of Rights. Confusing the police function
with the military function can lead to dangerous and
unintended consequences--such as
unnecessary shootings and killings.
Full Text of Briefing Paper No. 50 (PDF, 14 pgs, 73 Kb)
http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp50.pdf
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| User: "Genie" |
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| Title: good article |
27 May 2004 04:49:26 PM |
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11202
Less Than Zero: The New Age of Intolerance
By Dean Kuipers, LA Weekly
July 18, 2001
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will
lose both, and deserve neither."
– Thomas Jefferson
You're not going to see Drug War movies like Traffic made about Ryan
Huntsman. He's not a hotshot local drug dealer or anyone's fortunate
son or some kind of dude character. He's just an O.C. regular – a
white kid from Newport Beach, now attending UC San Diego – who thought
he had a little slack. In fact, he's the kind of person being hit hard
by the realities of America's infatuation with zero tolerance: an
ordinary kid who makes ordinary mistakes.
In February 1998, when Huntsman was a senior at Corona del Mar High,
he headed out to run some after-school errands for his mom. The
Newport Beach police stopped him for blasting the Grateful Dead out of
his pickup truck, and during a search of the truck officers found a
pipe and a baggie containing remnant amounts of marijuana. There
wasn't even enough for a ticket. Huntsman was free to go.
The cop who made the search, however, reported his findings to the
high school authorities, and that is where Huntsman's nightmare began.
The school could make consequences where the law could not. Like
thousands of school districts across the country, Newport-Mesa Unified
has a zero-tolerance prohibition against drug paraphernalia on school
grounds, at school functions, or even driving to or from school. No
matter that Huntsman and his mother both asserted that he wasn't going
to or from school. Huntsman was suspended. The kicker was that when
the suspension ran out, he was no longer welcome at school, so he was
transferred to Newport Harbor High. He had no right of appeal, and the
decision was final and effective immediately. It was only 89 days
until graduation.
Huntsman's bust landed him on the frontlines in what has become a
national war over school discipline and, more broadly, our
determination to make hard-line moral choices in an increasingly
complex culture. Like hundreds of other students, he found out that
school officials could not care less about his character, or the legal
right to due process, or about the notion of intent. Since 1994, when
Clinton signed the Gun Free Schools Act and zero tolerance became a
grade school byword, cases of excess have become almost mundane. There
were the two Dayton, Ohio, eighth-graders, Erica Taylor and Kimberly
Smartt, expelled in 1996 for taking Midol for menstrual cramps. Or the
7-year-old Queens, New York, boy charged that same year with sexual
harassment and suspended from the second grade for kissing (after
being invited) a female classmate. Or the infuriating case of Wiley, a
deaf boy recently expelled from a junior high in Canton, Texas; he was
threatened with criminal prosecution for playing with a piece of
small-caliber ammunition found on his playground, even though school
officials had found the same ammunition there the week previous and
never reported it to parents. Or the case of Brad Monroe, expelled
last fall from Edison High in Huntington Beach, California, after
school officials searched his truck and found a small pocket knife
left there by his older brother, a city lifeguard.
These are just kids, and they'll probably recover from their
encounters with intransigence. But zero tolerance is more than just a
tough-sounding quick fix for schools. Over the last 15 years, it has
become the way we deal with ambiguity. Zero tolerance solves the
problem of humanity by removing the human from the problem: It's a
kind of colorless, odorless solution in which all moral quandary is
dissolved – not by deliberate assessment of intent or circumstance,
but by rendering all such questions moot. It fuels a War on Drugs that
cannot be won, that, indeed, doesn't even have a definition for
winning. It reduces interaction between the sexes in the workplace to
a paranoiac limbo of connotation and silence. It prosecutes and jails
needle-exchange advocates despite government findings that clean
needles cut the rate of HIV transmission by half. It fosters the
Peruvian policy of shooting down suspected drug-trafficking planes,
which this year killed a missionary's wife and infant child. It
imprisons petty thieves for 25-to-life for boosting a package of AA
batteries. It contributes mightily to the 2 million people in U.S.
prisons (We're Number One!) – about a half-million of them nonviolent
drug offenders serving long sentences.
Combine fatigue with horror, and you end up with zero tolerance. It's
the product of fear, when the problems are daunting and conventional
fixes don't seem to work. Zero tolerance has made us hostage to
paint-by-numbers morality, to political expediency at the expense of
real lives and even the truth, to soundbites over sound policy. It has
made us a nation of cowards.
Some people try to buck the trend. Carol Monroe not only sued to get
her son's pocket-knife expulsion suspended, but started an Internet
support group called Parents Against Zero Tolerance. "The problem is
that it's a one-size-fits-all policy," she said. "If a kid's going to
walk into school with a gun, that kid is expelled anyway. They don't
need a zero-tolerance policy for that."
But Monroe, who worked for 10 years in the school where the incident
occurred, is pessimistic. The policy remains in place, and the damage
has already been done. "My son was a perfectly normal, happy kid,"
Monroe said. "He doesn't trust anybody anymore."
Likewise, though Huntsman and his lawyer, David Shores, sued the
Newport-Mesa schools and won, tolerance in that school district is
still next to zero. When a Superior Court judge ruled that the school
board had violated Huntsman's right to due process, the Newport-Mesa
district changed its policy only slightly to allow for a disciplinary
hearing before handing down verdicts.
Huntsman also filed civil suits against the police and the city, and
another challenging the school district's zero-tolerance policy as
unconstitutional. But Kathleen Huntsman, Ryan's mother, told me over
the phone that they recently dropped these lawsuits and stopped
talking to the press. "He wanted to get on with his life," she said.
Over the past year, a raft of such radical organizations as the
American Bar Association, Harvard Law School and, in May, Indiana
University all made strong recommendations that schools dismantle
their all-or-nothing discipline codes. But at Newport-Mesa, fear
proved more powerful: In April, under pressure from parents who could
not shake the specter of the recent shooting at Santee High School
near San Diego, the district became one of the first in the nation to
implement a zero-tolerance policy against bullying.
Students will be referred to counseling for a first offense, and then
suspended or expelled if found disturbing "safe and harmonious
relations" at the district. I wonder what they would have done with
Eddie Haskell?
About 10 years back, I visited a midtown recording studio in New York
City to talk with rock legend Ted Nugent about his rabid advocacy for
hunters' rights. After introducing me to Jack Blades (former Night
Ranger) and Tommy Shaw (the voice of Styx), he produced a hunting bow
he had brought along. He was showing me how to draw and target the
thing when he was suddenly distracted by something happening outside
the window.
"Look down there," said the Motor City Madman, aiming the empty weapon
at two figures huddled in an alley across the street. "If they'd give
me a permit, I could whack crackheads all day from up here. That'd
solve the drug problem real quick. Whack 'em and stack 'em."
It was an absurd notion, of course, but I had the feeling the Nuge was
only half joking. And if you keep an eye on the headlines coming out
of Washington, you'll see he's not alone. Maverick senator and media
darling John McCain has gone on record advocating the death penalty
for "drug kingpins." And Dubya's new drug-czar nominee, John Walters,
has been gunning them down for almost a decade already.
Walters is widely regarded as the biggest Drug War hawk in Washington.
As the deputy in charge of supply reduction under drug czar Bill
Bennett during the first Bush administration, Walters dismissed
efforts to reduce federal sentences for drug offenses, pressed for
longer terms for marijuana violations and rejected federal subsidies
for needle exchanges.
And, borrowing a page from Ted Nugent's playbook, Walters was the
architect of the Peruvian "shoot first" policy now under investigation
by Congress. During recent hearings, the U.S. State Department
testified that about 50 planes were destroyed during the 1990s. A
couple of years ago, however, before this was a hot topic, General
Charles Wilhelm testified for the U.S. Department of Defense that its
last count was 123 planes. Whether any of the fliers truly are
narco-traffickers is of course moot after they're dead.
Bush may have a reputation as a dullard, but he was too crafty to name
Walters without some sort of cover. Indeed, when the president
outlined his approach to the Drug War at a White House news conference
a couple of weeks ago, the rhetoric was balanced with much discussion
of prevention and treatment. But when it came to introducing Walters,
Bush wrapped his soft talk around the old hard line, saying, "The only
humane and compassionate response to drug use is a moral refusal to
accept it."
Advocates of a new strategy for the Drug War rose immediately to
challenge the new czar. Arianna Huffington called it "an advanced case
of rampant hypocrisy – the latest manifestation of the
administration's penchant for talking one kind of game while actually
playing another." Added Marc Mauer, assistant director of the
Sentencing Project, a group fighting the use of mandatory minimum
sentences, "I think any movement toward treatment is just designed to
deflect criticism from the approach that [Walters] has been taking for
many years now."
Late in his life, in the science-fantasy novel The Place of Dead
Roads, William S. Burroughs envisioned a world peopled by either
"Johnsons" or "shits." The Johnson is a classic American type, the
kind of independent thinker lionized in John Ford Westerns and World
War II comic books, a common-sense citizen who lives by his own lights
and, in so doing, looks to protect his freedom and yours, too. The
*****, by contrast, regards all that easygoing ambiguity as harboring
evil. The ***** has a pathological need to control, and instead of
looking for space to be free, he's looking for freedom to effect those
controls. The ascendance of zero tolerance might be regarded as the
triumph of the shits, a logical extension of our Puritan past. Today,
the Johnsons are on the run.
The phrase "zero tolerance" derives from the physical sciences, and
first began cropping up in public discourse in the 1970s. Curiously,
perhaps because it is so intrinsically absolute, it always occurred in
a moral context – in debates over environmental policy, or welfare
cheats. But we can thank Ronald Reagan for giving us a good healthy
shove down the road to shitdom, and then ourselves for going along
with it.
In May 1981, a Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler jet crashed on the deck of
the aircraft carrier Nimitz, and autopsies revealed that six of the 14
sailors killed had been smoking pot. Then–Chief of Naval Operations
Admiral Thomas Hayward launched a new policy of zero tolerance for
drug abuse, saying, "Not on my watch, not in my division, not in my
Navy." The policy spread quickly throughout the military, but that
wasn't enough for Reagan. In 1982, Reagan created the Vice President's
Anti-Drug Task Force under George Bush – first to tackle marijuana
trafficking in Miami, then all drugs everywhere. Ron coordinated with
his wife Nancy, who had already begun her infamous "Just Say No"
campaign. Bush took his cues from the military and involved it heavily
in interdiction.
Spending on drug interdiction tripled under the Reagan administration,
but so did cocaine shipments, according to the DEA. Undaunted, in 1986
Reagan called for a renewed commitment against "public enemy number
one."
"The next step in the crusade for a drug-free America ... is to
enforce a policy of zero tolerance of illegal drug use."
The timing of Reagan's initial Drug War address said a lot about the
way we've run things ever since. Just as he was announcing the
Anti-Drug Task Force in 1982, a hefty report comprising six years of
research from the prestigious National Academy of Sciences landed on
his desk. Titled "An Analysis of Marijuana Policy," the report openly
recommended decriminalization of marijuana and states' regulation of
its sale and distribution.
"On the same day that that report came out, President Reagan came out
with his first big Drug War speech," says Kevin Zeese, former head of
the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws and now president
of Common Sense for Drug Policy. "He talked about ‘raising the battle
flag' and ‘no tolerance for drugs.' Most people haven't heard about
that National Academy of Sciences report, because Reagan stole the
day. He had the bully pulpit."
Reagan's true genius was that he could come off as a Johnson while
acting like a *****. He shrugged off his scientific advisers as just
another bunch of pinheads and pushed ahead with uncompromising
criminalization. Along the way, he gutted an already inadequate
treatment budget and closed clinics across the country. Just in time
for the appearance of crack in 1982 and the explosion of drug-related
crime, especially gang crime, which seemed to validate his approach.
"I think it began with the ‘get tough' movement of the early '70s or
so," says Mauer, "with that politically inspired approach that
identified crime as being a product of individuals doing bad things,
rather than looking at a whole set of causes and options. Once the
punishment model was in place, then it kept getting ratcheted up."
And in case you think I'm ignoring Richard Nixon, believe it or not,
he looks positively judicious when it comes to drugs. To be sure,
President Nixon coined the phrase "War on Drugs," but according to The
Fix, Michael Massing's study of national drug policy, Nixon's first
priority was to honor a 1968 campaign promise to bring the crime
numbers down. So he hired a real, honest-to-god pharmacologist and
heroin expert, Dr. Jerome Jaffe, to do it. Unlike our last four drug
czars, Jaffe was not a moralist (William Bennett), an ex-governor of
Florida (Bob Martinez), a police chief (Lee Brown) or a four-star
general (Barry McCaffrey). He was a doctor, and he recommended
treatment on demand. Nixon gave him hundreds of millions of dollars to
open methadone clinics and treatment centers. Sure enough, crime went
down. Nixon didn't have any tenderness for the drug user, but he
created better, if not good, drug policy.
Subsequent administrations might have done well to follow Nixon's
example, because the numbers went against them. One of the more absurd
contradictions of Drug War rhetoric is the use of an increasing number
of arrests, prisoners, or dollars spent in interdiction efforts as
evidence of success. Surely they confuse success with total failure.
According to a 1999 FBI crime report, there were 328,670 arrests for
drug-law violations logged into the FBI system for the year 1973. For
the year 1998, that number rose to 1,559,100. Yet more, cheaper and
better cocaine and heroin continue to be sold and used every year,
like clockwork. Isn't the Drug War supposed to be creating fewer
users? Instead, it is creating more convicts. Right now, 1 out of
every 137 U.S. citizens is in jail, and 1 out of every 34 is either in
jail, on parole or on probation. For black men, the number is almost 1
in 3. Most of those are from nonviolent drug offenses.
"Cracking down actually has the opposite effect, in terms of affecting
drug use and crime," says Sanho Tree, senior drug-policy analyst at
the Institute for Policy Studies. "Drug markets are Darwinian. We've
been selectively breeding supertraffickers for decades now."
That is not to say that zero tolerance is totally ineffective in all
applications. As construed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), it
has inspired legislation that has significantly reduced the number of
drunks on the road. Drive drunk, they take your license away. I think
we'd all agree that the only acceptable number of drunks on the road
is none. But is there any limit? How far do we go to get to zero?
According to Rich Laffin, MADD vice chairman for California, MADD is
now pushing to have driving under the influence listed as a violent
crime and included in California's "three strikes" statute. Alcohol is
a legal drug, and its use is encouraged by the culture as a whole.
Should drunks go to jail for life? I asked Laffin if he thought their
efforts could go too far.
Laffin considered the question, then reached abroad for an answer. "In
El Salvador, don't make the mistake of getting behind the wheel if
you've been drinking, because your first DUI will be your last. You'll
be executed by firing squad," Laffin said. "I think that's a little
extreme."
You certainly don't have to go as far as El Salvador to find zero
tolerance twisting justice into cruel and unusual punishments. You
only have to look in Southern California, where our minimum-sentencing
and "three strikes" laws, both zero-tolerance answers to the "problem"
of lenient judges, are creating what's been called a "new American
gulag."
Take the case of Michael Riggs, currently serving his sixth year of a
25-to-life sentence in Corcoran State Prison for shoplifting a bottle
of vitamins. He had some youthful scrapes with the law in his 20s,
passed some bad checks and even did a stint in jail. By the 1980s,
Riggs had gotten himself right – he had become a car salesman, and he
lived in West Covina with a wife and three kids in a house with a
pool. One day he received a phone call at work telling him that one of
his sons had drowned in the family pool. The pain and guilt caused by
his son's death initiated a long slide into depression and petty crime
that would be his ruin. He started drinking and eventually doing
heroin. During one weekend in 1988, he robbed a series of ATM
customers for drug money. He was caught and convicted on four counts.
After he got out of jail, Riggs ended up living in his car. Homeless,
broke and using again, he drifted into an Albertsons on October 13,
1995, and lifted a bottle of vitamins. According to court records,
when the store employees chased him down in the parking lot, "He said
at one point he was hungry. He was very sorry," and he told the
employees that "If we gave him a job, he'd scrub floors or clean the
place to pay for what he had."
After Riggs' public defender recommended against taking a six-year
plea bargain, the prosecutor re-filed the misdemeanor shoplifting as a
"third strike." And since he was caught red-handed, he'll do at least
24 years before getting parole. Why? Is this the sort of crime people
want to get tough on? Do we really want to pay for it? (In 1995,
Justice Department figures show, it cost $71,184 a year to keep an
inmate.) Or is this a strategy of convenience for a society that
simply can't deal with a broken guy like Riggs, who's probably no
different from tens of thousands of lifetime recidivists who struggle
with depression and substance abuse?
"You're just one step shy of what people were fleeing [in]
18th-century England, when they were hanging shoplifters," says Donald
Falk of Mayer, Brown & Platt of Palo Alto. Falk has filed a federal
appeal of Riggs' conviction on grounds that it was mishandled by his
public defender and violates the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual
punishment. "In a sensible, civilized, ordered society, you cannot put
any set of facts together to bump misdemeanor shoplifting to a life
sentence."
But that's just what we're creating: the kind of society that festers
under repression. One of outward conformity and constant fear.
Depressed and cynical due to rampant miscarriage of justice. Replete
with finks and shits. In such a culture, the only critique that
accounts for the poor, disabled or just plain weird is that they must
have done something wrong.
Maybe the hypocrisy of scapegoating youths, pot smokers and petty
thieves for the ills born of institutionalized inequality, poverty,
racism and plain old diversity is finally beginning to nag at the
average citizen. Cracks have recently appeared in the armor of zero
tolerance. California is now figuring out how to apply Proposition 36.
Pot laws were recently relaxed again in Nevada, despite the Supreme
Court ruling that medical-marijuana clubs violate federal law. New
York Governor Pataki is finally taking a look at changing the
30-year-old Rockefeller Drug Laws, which were the first mandatory
drug-sentencing laws in the nation. Right now in the Senate, there's a
bill co-sponsored by unlikely bedfellows Orrin Hatch and Joe Biden,
putting money into treatment instead of Colombia – a growing, if still
minority, sentiment in Congress.
In one of the biggest turnarounds of all time, even the politically
ultrapopular DARE program has had to reconsider its zero-tolerance
approach. Over 75 percent of all schools nationwide pay for the Drug
Abuse Resistance Education curriculum, as do 54 foreign countries, in
which police officers come into the classroom to warn students of the
health, social and criminal costs of drug use. A mountain of evidence
suggesting that the program does little to curb drug use – in fact,
statistics show that those who've gone through the program are
slightly more likely to use drugs than those who haven't – finally
became too much to ignore. When the U.S. Surgeon General and the
National Academy of Sciences came out with recent negative reports,
the organization announced it was retooling.
One of the well-worn saws about addiction is that you can't get better
until you've hit bottom. Maybe that's where we are at in terms of our
public policy and our hearts, and so in some mad sense we're lucky. We
have nowhere to go but up.
"We're about as mean as you can get," says Kevin Zeese. "We're
shooting people out of the sky, we're letting them get AIDS, we're
incarcerating because of race. We're throwing people out of school. I
don't see us protecting health by making treatment available like any
other health service. It's a heartless and inhuman approach to dealing
with people. Certainly not 'compassionate conservatism.' It is really
abusive conservatism."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PAZT
Parents Against Zero Tolerance
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EAZT
Educators Against Zero Tolerance
www.endzerotolerance.com
http://ztnightmares.com/index.htm
A non partisan web site. We are a group who
is for kids getting educated not castrated.
We have people from the religious right to
the liberal left, for the most part, in agreement.
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