A new ACLU report shows that excessive police militarization is a nationwide trend, and the time has come to deescalate.
After obtaining and analyzing thousands of documents from police departments around the country, today the American Civil Liberties Union released the report War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.The ACLU focused on more than 800 SWAT raids conducted by law enforcement agencies in 20 states (including Utah) and on the agencies’ acquisition of military weaponry, vehicles, and equipment.
In Utah, heavily-armed SWAT teams are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged.
Excessive police militarization is a nationwide trend, and the time has come to deescalate. Our neighborhoods are not warzones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. Any yet, every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments – departments that then use these wartime weapons in everyday policing.
As a new report from the ACLU makes clear, American police to need to remember that they are supposed to protect and serve our communities, not wage war on the people who live in them.
It’s not uncommon for SWAT teams to brutalize bystanders in their search for a suspect. One family in Atlanta, profiled in the report, was woken up in the middle of the night when officers burst into their home and threw a flashbang grenade into the playpen where a toddler was sleeping.
It is widely known that policing tactics across the country often unfairly target communities of color. According to our investigation, the use of paramilitary weapons and tactics appears to be no different. For instance, all of the drug-related SWAT raids we studied were more likely to impact people of color than whites, though all people use drugs in roughly the same rates.
Not every situation requires 20 heavily-armed SWAT officers and an armored personnel carrier. And yet, we collected reports of full deployments to homes where no contraband was found, where there was no justifiable reason for thinking the people inside would be armed or awake, and where children and the elderly were present.
It’s not too late to undo this trend. We need to ensure that hyper-aggressive tools and tactics are only used in situations where they are truly necessary to protect people. It’s also time to push for greater transparency and ensure that the federal government is not excessively incentivizing the militarization of our state and local police.
Help us remind police that they should be protecting our communities, not invading them. Take action here to urge states to put needed restrictions on the use of SWAT teams.