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A new study reveals that police militarization does not keep anyone safe
According to a new study of 9,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S., arguably the first systematic analysis on the use and consequences of militarized force, police militarization neither reduces rates of violent crime nor increases officer safety. The report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, found that Maryland police are more likely to deploy militarized units in Black neighborhoods, confirming a long-held suspicion. Many law enforcement leaders consider SWAT teams and other militarized units as a necessity for police and public safety, especially for “high risk” hostage situations or active shooters. The Department of Defense transferred $4.3 billion in military equipment to local law agencies between 1997 and 2014. But the study found that police militarization may work against police in the court of public opinion, and that merely seeing militarized units can erode public confidence in law enforcement and lead people to believe that a police department is overfunded. [Nsikan Akpan / PBS News Hour]
The 2014 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown sparked a wave of clashes between protesters and law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri, and the public saw images of unarmed people of color standing up against snipers and police atop armored vehicles. The ensuing conversation about race and police militarization inspired Stanford graduate student Jonathan Mummolo, who conducted the study. “I started getting curious about what we actually know about militarized policing, in terms of the claimed benefits and the purported costs that are asserted by critics,” said Mummolo, a political scientist who now works at Princeton University. [Nsikan Akpan / PBS News Hour]
The study focused on data from Maryland, where a state law required that police agencies submit reports on how and how often they used their SWAT teams. The law was in effect from 2010 through 2014, after which the legislature allowed it to expire. After controlling for variables such as crime rates, Mummolo found that for every 10 percent increase in the Black population, there was a 10 percent increase in the likelihood that a SWAT team will conduct a raid in that ZIP code. [Radley Balko / Washington Post]
In two separate surveys, Mummolo showed volunteers a story about a police chief asking for a budget increase. Volunteers got one of four photos with the story: One depicted cops in their traditional blue uniforms, and the other three showed various degrees of militarization, culminating with a photo from Ferguson of heavily armed officers surrounding an armored vehicle, with a sniper perched on the roof. He then asked the respondents questions about crime and policing. The high-militarization photo caused a statistically significant increase in the perceived level of crime and a drop in desire for more police patrols in their own neighborhoods. It also caused support for police funding to fall. “Hey, maybe this is the way to bring law enforcement on board with demilitarization,” suggested Radley Balko in the Washington Post. [Radley Balko / Washington Post]
SWAT teams are not incorrect when they argue that they are needed to confront hostage takers, active shooters, and other immediate threats to public safety, but in practice “they’re mostly used to serve warrants on low-level drug offenders.” The Maryland data showed that 90 percent of SWAT raids in that state were to serve search warrants, half for nonviolent crimes, the overwhelming majority of those being drug crimes. In Utah, data released in 2015 showed that less than 5 percent of SWAT deployments were in response to a violent crime in progress, 0.5 percent turned up illegal firearms, but 83 percent were to serve search warrants for drug crimes. [Radley Balko / Washington Post]
“In a federalist system with more than 15,000 state and local law enforcement agencies and virtually no standardized reporting requirements, reliable and comprehensive data on police behavior, including the presence and usage of militarized units, have eluded scholars for decades,” Mummolo writes. “And even those with the time and resources to gather and assemble the records themselves face systemic barriers.” He sent hundreds of open records requests to local agencies, but many don’t track militarized activity at all, and those that do often track it poorly, refuse to share it, purge it after a set number of years, heavily redact, or demand exorbitant fees. Mummolo focused on Maryland’s short-lived law requiring every police agency in the state to record SWAT activity in a uniform manner. This was not a quixotic quest to better understand of law enforcement, but rather a “response to intense political pressure following a botched SWAT raid in which a local sheriff’s department forced its way into a suburban Maryland mayor’s house, shot and killed his two dogs, and interrogated him and his wife on unfounded suspicion of drug trafficking.” [Jonathan Mummolo / The Atlantic]
“[I]n a nation led by politicians who claim to value transparency and a commitment to improving the quality of policing, it should not be this difficult to learn what police do,” Mummolo concludes. “If America is serious about improving police behavior tomorrow, policy analysts need to know what police are doing today.” All the good intentions avowed by Republicans and Democrats intent on criminal justice reform “won’t do a thing … unless governments first commit to bringing police behavior into the light.” [Jonathan Mummolo / The Atlantic]
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