To David’s excellent post on the need to have well armed police forces, I’ll add a point I’ve made before. It is rich of the federal government to complain about the militarization of local police forces when it is much more a problem at the federal level.
It is perfectly obvious that police in cities need to have access to military-grade weaponry: They are the front line and the terrorists can project military force, so the police must be able to overcome them. How silly for Obama to say that access to such firepower makes the community feel like it is “occupied.” I believe the cops need to have ready access to high-power guns because you cannot predict when an emergency requiring them will occur. But no one is saying the really heavy artillery needs to be rolling down the streets regularly; only when it’s needed. In any event, most Americans outside the Obama administration regard the police as the good guys; their presence and ability to project force makes us feel safer, not occupied.
What is utterly unnecessary is for outfits like the federal Fish and Wildlife Service to have SWAT teams and military hardware. Recall our John Fund’s eye-opening report on the militarization of federal agencies last year:
Dozens of federal agencies now have Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to further an expanding definition of their missions. It’s not controversial that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Prisons have them. But what about the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? All of these have their own SWAT units and are part of a worrying trend towards the militarization of federal agencies — not to mention local police forces.
“Law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier,” journalist Radley Balko writes in his 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop. “The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop — armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”
The proliferation of paramilitary federal SWAT teams inevitably brings abuses that have nothing to do with either drugs or terrorism. Many of the raids they conduct are against harmless, often innocent, Americans who typically are accused of non-violent civil or administrative violations.
Take the case of Kenneth Wright of Stockton, Calif., who was “visited” by a SWAT team from the U.S. Department of Education in June 2011. Agents battered down the door of his home at 6 a.m., dragged him outside in his boxer shorts, and handcuffed him as they put his three children (ages 3, 7, and 11) in a police car for two hours while they searched his home. The raid was allegedly intended to uncover information on Wright’s estranged wife, Michelle, who hadn’t been living with him and was suspected of college financial-aid fraud.
The year before the raid on Wright, a SWAT team from the Food and Drug Administration raided the farm of Dan Allgyer of Lancaster, Pa. His crime was shipping unpasteurized milk across state lines to a cooperative of young women with children in Washington, D.C., called Grass Fed on the Hill. Raw milk can be sold in Pennsylvania, but it is illegal to transport it across state lines. The raid forced Allgyer to close down his business. . . .
What to make of a Leviathan that can’t bring itself to say “jihadist terrorism” but has the FDA make like SEAL Team 6 over unpasteurized milk?
That’s what makes me feel occupied . . . along with the absurd number of federal officials who are given security details — some so elaborate they would make an emperor green with envy. That, coupled with the fact that these officials conveniently exempt themselves from the security checkpoints they impose on the peons.