Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces QUOTES

1 " Detroit, for example, a new police commissioner took over in 1971 and began implementing a more Nixonian approach to illicit drugs. Chief John Nichols doubled up the personnel on his narcotics unit and started arresting and imprisoning heroin dealers instead of merely chasing them off, as the city had done in the past. The result was an impressive stat sheet on the enforcement side: 1,600 arrests. But cracking down on dealers opened the city up to turf wars. In one ten-day stretch in June, Detroit logged forty murders.28 It was one of the first examples of the sort of self-perpetuating, self-escalating feedback loop created by the modern drug war. Crackdowns upset the established black markets. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

2 " Turner [Reagan's "drug czar'] was especially determined to purge psychiatrists from federal drug agencies. "They're trained to treat," he said, "and treatment isn't what we do." Methadone was out, so Turner blocked advocates of the treatment who were still in the federal government from speaking about it publicly. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

3 " No one made a decision to militarize the police in America. The change has come slowly, the result of a generation of politicians and public officials fanning and exploiting public fears by declaring war on abstractions like crime, drug use, and terrorism. The resulting policies have made those war metaphors increasingly real. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

4 " have my own army in the NYPD—the seventh largest army in the world. —NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

5 " In the summer of 2002, Biden was pushing his RAVE Act, an absurdly broad law that would have made venue and club owners liable for running a drug operation if they merely sold the “paraphernalia” common to parties where people took Ecstasy—accessories like bottled water and glow sticks. After attempting to sneak the bill through Congress with various parliamentary maneuvers, Biden was finally able to get a slightly modified version folded into the bill that created the Amber Alert for missing children. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

6 " Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will watch the watchers?) "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

7 " He started America’s first SWAT team. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

8 " Police officers today are a protected class, one no politician wants to oppose. Law enforcement interests may occasionally come up short on budgetary issues, but legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent.
In short, police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn’t have anticipated.
This isn’t to say we’re in a police state, a term that’s often misused. Generally speaking, we’re free to travel. We don’t face mass censorship. We still have habeus corpus. And the odds of any single person being victimized by a wrong-door raid, shot or beaten by a cop, or otherwise victimized by militarized police violence are slim to nil. But perhaps we have entered a police state writ small. At the individual level, a police officer’s power and authority over the people he interacts with day to day is near complete. Absent video, if the officer’s account an incident differs from that of a citizen— even several citizens— his superiors, the courts, and prosecutors will nearly always defer to the officer. If other officers are nearby, there are policies in place—official and unofficial—to encourage them to back one another up. Even if the officer does violate the citizen’s rights, the officer is protected by qualified immunity. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

9 " Maryland cop Neill Franklin. “Number one, you’ve signed on to a dangerous job. That means that you’ve agreed to a certain amount of risk. You don’t get to start stepping on others’ rights to minimize that risk you agreed to take on. And number two, your first priority is not to protect yourself, it’s to protect those you’ve sworn to protect "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

10 " Bad cops are the product of bad policy. And policy is ultimately made by politicians. A bad system loaded with bad incentives will unfailingly produce bad cops. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

11 " As I've written and spoken on this issue over the years, I've even had current and former members of the military tell me they object to the word militarization--not because they disagree with the basic premise of what's happened to police departments in recent years, but because from their own experience, the military is more accountable and disciplined than many police departments today. Several have even told me that military raids on residences where they suspected insurgents may be hiding are done more carefully and with more deference to the rights of potential innocents than some of the SWAT raids they see and read about today. The police today may be more militarized than the military. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

12 " Law enforcement is just like any other interest group,” Santarelli says. “They’re always after greater power. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

13 " FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had made the Black Panthers a top priority and, naturally, had publicly “declared war” on them. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

14 " Nixon’s dehumanization and demonization of drug offenders had been a (literally) smashing success. Tactics like these had rarely been used in the United States, even against hardened criminals. Now they were being used against people suspected of nonviolent crimes, and with such wanton disregard for civil rights and procedure that the occasional wrong door or terrorized family could be dismissed as “an insignificant detail” or as cops “just trying to do their job. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

15 " The Numbers Value of the property that Nixon claimed in 1972 was stolen each year by heroin addicts: $2 billion . . . claimed by South Dakota senator George McGovern: $4.4 billion . . . claimed by Nixon administration drug treatment expert Robert DuPont: $6.3 billion . . . claimed by Illinois senator Charles Percy: $10 billion–$15 billion . . . claimed by a White House briefing book on drug abuse distributed to the press: $18 billion Total value of all reported stolen property in the United States in 1972: $1.2 billion Number of burglaries committed by heroin addicts each year, per Nixon administration claims: 365 million Total number of burglaries committed in the United States in 1971: 1.8 million "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

16 " Brennan writes, allowing for those exceptions violates the presumption of innocence twice: "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

17 " What we might call the “Symbolic Third Amendment” wasn’t just a prohibition on peacetime quartering, but a more robust expression of the threat that standing armies pose to free societies. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

18 " Using general warrants, British soldiers were allowed to enter private homes, confiscate what they found, and often keep the bounty for themselves. The policy was reminiscent of today’s civil asset forfeiture laws, "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

19 " So long as partisans are only willing to speak out against aggressive, militarized police tactics when they’re used against their own and are dismissive or even supportive of such tactics when used against those whose politics they dislike, it seems unlikely that the country will achieve enough of a political consensus to begin to slow down the trend. "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

20 " says the thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less volatile means of serving search warrants. “The thing is, it’s so much safer to wait the suspect out,” he says. “Waiting people out is just so much better. You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine. So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a routine traffic stop and you arrest him. That’s the safest way to do it. But you have to understand that a lot of these cops are meatheads. They think this stuff is cool. And they get hooked on that jolt of energy they get during a raid.”54 "

― Radley Balko , Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces