Yes, American police act like occupying armies. They literally studied their tactics
For the past week, our social media and television screens have been dominated by images of police officers in head-to-toe body armor wielding batons, pepper-ball guns, riot shields, and teargas against mostly peaceful protesters. Many Americans are now more certain than ever that we need to “demilitarize” our police.
In fact, we’ve gotten slightly closer. The aggressive response – and in many cases, over-response – of American law enforcement agencies has invigorated a bipartisan push in Congress to ban transfers of military materials to police. Yet the 20th-century history of US policing shows that truly demilitarizing the police will be more difficult than simply removing the body armor. Our law enforcement agencies learned many of the most routine aspects of contemporary policing from US imperial excursions abroad for the purpose of stamping out rebellion.
Created in the 1990s, the so-called “1033 program” allows police departments to obtain surplus material from the vast stocks of the world’s largest military. Not all the material is what most would consider war-fighting hardware. Some of the inventory consists of exercise gear or even musical instruments. But the renewed clamor to “demilitarize” the police is usually directed at the helmets and body armor, rifles and armored vehicles that have been on abundant display since Minneapolis police killed George Floyd last week.
To be sure, police departments are more heavily armed than ever, in part because of post-9/11 fears of terrorism. But the transfer of military surplus gear long predates the War on Terror. It results from both demand on the part of police and oversupply in the military, particularly as wars wind down.
Every overseas war has reshaped policing in the United States, including by filling the ranks of police departments with veterans and pushing surplus materials into their hands. But many campaigns abroad have also entailed policing civilian populations, with US experts advising other governments while also learning lessons to repatriate in the process.
When the US started to occupy the Philippines at the end of the 19th century, its military forces were met by an anti-colonial guerrilla campaign. In response, army soldiers engaged in grueling search missions, hoping to ferret out insurgents, who were difficult to distinguish from innocent bystanders. The army also established a constabulary of native Filipinos to help pacify the US colony. Though nobody used the term at the time, this was counterinsurgency.
Many of this campaign’s veterans rose to prominence as police administrators in the US in the early 20th century, as documented by the sociologist Julian Go. These ex-soldiers applied the lessons of their Philippines search-anddestroy missions to the US: mobile patrols, horses, bicycles and then motorized vehicles. Field communications in unfamiliar terrain informed how police built their telecommunications networks. And the type of rigorous training, including in marksmanship, that defined soldiering would be adopted by police too. The era’s most famous police leader, August Vollmer, got his start in the infantry in the Philippines and constantly referred to that experience as he reshaped the profession.
Later, after the second world war, the American forces occupied Germany and Japan for several years. While regular police at home received notice from the FBI that they could now obtain surplus machine guns and leg irons from the War Assets Administration, US police trendsetters like Vollmer, his protege Orlando W Wilson, and future Los Angeles police chief William Parker were working to “democratize” the German police, while also making sure to keep tabs on communists. Similarly,
in Japan, a young policeman from Kansas City named Byron Engle helped to reorganize the police there, introducing US-style uniforms, handcuffs and teargas.
Upon return to domestic soil, after administering martial law in Germany, Orlando Wilson published the most widely read police textbook, which remained in use for decades. For him, rigid adherence to authority was essential. He even referred to it as a semimilitary ethos. Line officers were supposed to submit to command authority, and civilians, therefore, to line officers. Wilson was, in some ways, a reformer. But he was uninterested in reforming the racialized despotism of the police encounter itself, where questioning authority could mean arrest, beating or death.
Byron Engle went on to distribute Wilson’s ideas globally, including during a stint with the CIA. For him, policing and counterinsurgency were synonymous. Engle directed the US Office of Public Safety, which operated in 52 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where it delivered guns, vehicles, tear gas, radios and fingerprinting technology. It also trained officers from 77 countries in its Washington DC academy. Engle’s creed was simple: use cops to prevent communist revolution.
In some cases, these police would commit torture, forced disappearances and massacres. The largest US police assistance mission coincided with the war in Vietnam. When Engle’s operation closed down, many of his subordinates came home to become police chiefs, prison wardens, Washington law-enforcement bureaucrats, private security contractors or criminology professors. One later remarked that his experience in Vietnam remained front and center in his mind while a chief because it was “far more fascinating than any work of fiction”.
Although the gear has changed, American police have always directed their attention toward suppressing political rebellion. Distant lands, colonial occupations and theaters of war have served as crucibles for testing and advancing policing techniques. Demilitarizing police is absolutely necessary – but it will require more than just ending one surplus equipment program.
Stuart Schrader is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, 2019)