The protests must continue

The political elite use policing to manage the consequences of their own policies that deny Black working-class communities access to basic necessities. Instead of improving access by expanding social programs, the establishment routinely doubles-down by divesting from social programs to bolster further tools of surveillance and punishment. In this way, the role of the police is not about ‘managing disorder’ but enforcing a certain social order that is, by design, a perverse hierarchy.

As a result, the demand to defund the police is merely a reversal of longstanding establishment practice of defunding social programs to preserve the state’s capacity for violence. Like confronting the forces of capitalism or militarism, this effort will require a mass movement.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has highlighted the importance of social movements in translating policy ideas into actual policies. Taylor writes that “after demands have been delivered and promises have been made, someone has got to fight to make them a reality.” So the policy recommendations that emerge from these mass movements are given ‘teeth’ by the very movements that produced them in the first place: “without a social movement on the ground to create the muscle necessary to coerce the political establishment to shift from its intransigence, how would any of it become achievable?”

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests are successfully transforming our country. They must continue. The following policy recommendations are tailored to create more favorable conditions for the BLM organizers who are doing the real work on the ground. Confronting an intransigent political class should not also require confronting militarized police forces.

SPRI policy recommendations

Much of the fight to demilitarize police will be local. But Congress can make serious inroads by adopting these policies in the (very) near term. The following should be integrated into the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 during the impending full committee markup period.

1. End the 1033 program

2. Require all police forces to return all military equipment to DOD

Most policy proposals are designed only to restrict the flow of military equipment to police forces. Some have admirably called for its immediate halt. But what about the military equipment out there already? There must be a universal, unconditional return of this class of matériel. DOD must repossess all “controlled” equipment it has transferred to police.

• Manned aircraft

• Fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft

• Weaponized aircraft, vessels, and vehicles of any kind

• Tracked armored vehicles

• Unmanned aerial vehicles

• Wheeled armored vehicles

• Wheeled tactical vehicles

• Command and control vehicles

• Grenade launchers

• Firearms of .50 caliber or higher

• Specialized firearms and ammunition under .50 caliber

• Breaching apparatus

• Bayonets

• Riot batons

• Riot helmets

• Riot shields

• Camouflage uniforms

3. Ban the use of tear gas and ‘less lethal’ impact munitions — including rubber bullets — by police forces

Rubber bullets and other ‘less lethal’ impact munitions must also be banned. The 1033 program does not distribute the munitions, but does transfer the weapons from which they are fired. The police have demonstrated that they are unable to use them safely. Forensic experts say that it’s impossible for them to be used safely at all: these munitions are intended to cause harm and are notoriously inaccurate. Numerous articles published in medical journals concur, reporting instances of serious harm and death caused by these projectiles.

Existing policy proposals fall short

Yet as was the case with health care, climate change, the ongoing public health crisis, and any federal spending bill in the past 20 years, these policy proposals fall short of what’s needed.

These proposals do not sufficiently address the links between the military and the police with respect to shared strategy, tactics, and — crucially — weapons and equipment.

The most visible failure in this regard is the transfer of military equipment to domestic police forces. By neglecting meaningful change to this dangerous norm, establishment Democrats tacitly endorse the direct and indirect violence that is the inevitable consequence of police departments functioning as paramilitary forces.

These policies would add layers of congressional oversight to the 1033 program. The actual value of this congressional oversight is questionable. Considering its persistent failure in using its oversight authority for global arms sales, there is little reason to believe Congress would now wield its authority to curb domestic arms transfers.

More fundamentally, DOD’s role as the agency in charge of monitoring the program and reporting findings back to Congress would persist. Allowing DOD to grade its own homework is only slightly better than allowing law enforcement agencies to monitor and evaluate themselves: the police and DOD have a shared interest in continuing, if not expanding, the 1033 program.

Put simply, the problem with the proposed police reform legislation is that it attempts to make fundamental changes to a system that cannot be reformed. It must be dismantled and, critically, the trail of military equipment left in its wake must be removed from public life.

The US military-police nexus cannot be reformed. It must be dismantled.

For DOD and law enforcement, there is a self-serving political dimension to police militarization. The 1033 program inflates DOD’s budget and those of state and local police departments. Perhaps this is why one of the primary justifications used by police forces to justify the receipt of military equipment from DOD is that it saves money.

Yet this justification assumes that police forces would purchase military equipment anyway. They would not — police forces say so themselves. In a 2018 study, small police departments reported that they use the 1033 program to obtain equipment they otherwise couldn’t afford, such as MRAPs, aircraft, and rifles. One survey respondent from a small police force said that the cost of a single MRAP would exceed the department’s entire annual budget. Large police forces report the same thing, but note how the program allows them to obtain really expensive military items like surveillance aircraft.

Still, police forces report these military acquisitions as ‘savings’ commensurate with the cost of the equipment received. This assumes that the equipment is both necessary (it isn’t) and would be purchased anyways (it wouldn’t).

For state and local governments, there are no savings to speak of. Police departments must pay to retrieve the equipment or pay for shipment, training, and for all costs related to operation and maintenance. The more ‘free’ equipment a police department receives, the more costs it incurs. This results in greater numbers of lines in state and municipality budgets occupied by police at the expense of social programs.

The 1033 program is useful in this pursuit. The more things DOD claims as ‘excess’ (and gives to police forces) the more things DOD can say it needs. A 2014 Government Accountability Office report found that the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) had disposed of a significant amount of matériel that it would likely request to purchase in the future. What’s more, Congress has expressed concern that the Department has declared a number of items as ‘excess’ and gave them away to state or local police while purchasing the same items (or newer versions) in the same year.

Parochial interests aside, a review of DOD’s track record suggests a profound lack of institutional competence to self-monitor and evaluate. DOD failed its first and only audit. The DOD agency governing the 1033 program, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), neglected to properly document over $800 million in construction projects. Oversight reports on DLA have reported waste, mismanagement, and other forms of gross incompetence since the 1990s, but it is still the largest agency within the Department of Defense, with 25,000 employees and a $40 billion per year budget. DLA’s Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), the direct administrators of the 1033 program, has a similar track record. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued several reports on it, most notably a 2017 report that reveals how GAO created a fictional police department and was able to obtain over 100 controlled items worth $1.2 million through the 1033 program.

Conclusion: Why foreign policy matters to domestic policing

Owing to its imperialist ethos, US foreign policy is complicit in a range of domestic problems. Police militarization is no exception. Decades of imperial power projection abroad is an often overlooked but preeminent force driving this trend. The years of experience repressing leftist political movements abroad produces the archetypes for mass incarceration and new forms of militarized policing domestically. In this way, the design of the War on Crime and the War on Drugs lends unwelcome credence to the precept that foreign policy ends at home.

It is imperative that the foreign policy community not sit on the sidelines while the weapons, tactics, and hierarchies it produces vitiate Black communities.