Police Militarization Gave Us Uvalde

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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/