Small government advocates praised the Obama administration’s 2015 efforts to re-think the militarization of American police departments following national uproar over officers taking to the streets in armored vehicles and uniforms fit for battle. But recent attacks on officers have the White House rethinking bans on police use of military equipment.
Shortly after the tragic attack on police officers in Dallas, American law enforcement experts predicted that the progress made in recent years walking back the militarization of American police departments would soon come to an end.
“It could take some of the political steam out of current arguments that police ought to give up protective gear and militarized weapons,” Michael S. Scott, who heads Arizona State University’s Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, told McClatchy.
It didn’t help that Dallas was at the forefront of finding new alternatives to militarized tactics following national concerns that police on American streets were beginning to look like soldiers on the battlefield than peace keepers.
When Dallas Police Chief David Brown took charge of the department in 2010, he emphasized the importance of de-escalation tactics, transparency and officers patrolling in normal uniforms rather than military-style gear. And his efforts paid off. Dallas cops over the next several years logged fewer arrests for petty offenses, were the subject of fewer complaints about excessive force and, more importantly, had fewer numbers of officer-involved shootings.
Now, the heads of some policing organizations are using the deaths of officers in the city as proof that making police less intimidating to residents in the community also makes them less safe.
“All we have heard for the last few years is how cops are racist and our training isn’t right and we don’t need basic equipment like riot gear, helmets and armored vehicles and we all need to ‘soften’ our uniforms,” Major Travis Yates of the Tulsa Police Department, who lectures on police safety, recently said. “This is all pushed down our throats even more every time we have to use deadly force against individuals attacking us.”
Detractors of heavy-handed and militaristic policing tactics, Yates contends, are most definitely wrong. Why? Because “we are at war.”
Yates certainly isn’t the only member of the law enforcement community who believes the men and women in blue are at constant war with an ever-changing and always-deadly enemy everywhere in America.
William Grigg recently did a great job pointing out all of the new calls for police to take a military mindset. And since his column was published, the number of voices expressing the view have only increased.
If the police are at war, they need war-like gear. And it seems Washington is listening.
In 2015, President Obama made it more difficult for U.S. police departments to get surplus military equipment such as helmets, grenade launchers and tracked armored vehicles. But earlier this month, leaders from law enforcement groups throughout the nation met with the administration pointing to the growing “war on cops” as a reason to end the ban on new military equipment.
The White House says it is currently reviewing the ban to make sure cops have “the tools that they need to protect themselves and their communities” against growing threats on the streets.
The post Battlefield on Main Street: Feds use recent shootings to renew police militarization appeared first on Personal Liberty®.
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