OPINION: I was a cop for 27 years, and I've witnessed how the militarization of police leads to more violence against citizens. By giving police military equipment, it sends a message that they are at war.
The unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd after being pinned to the ground by the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has left parts of U.S. cities looking like a battle zone.
Setting up the enemy As a former police officer of 27 years and a scholar who has written on the policing of marginalized communities, I have observed the militarization of the police firsthand, especially in times of confrontation. “ A study of police-involved deaths between 2012 and 2018 found that on average, police kill 2.8 men every day in the U.S. ”
In the years that followed, domestic law enforcement in the United States began a strategic shift toward tactics and practices that employed militarized responses to even routine police activities. And there appears to be a correlation between militarization and police violence. A 2017 study analyzed spending by police departments against police-involved fatalities. Summarizing their results in The Washington Post, the authors of the study wrote: “Even controlling for other possible factors in police violence , more-militarized law enforcement agencies were associated with more civilians killed each year by police.
The need to address the escalation of police confrontations — both during protests and in individual encounters — was a focus of the last big push for police reform, after the killing of a unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. As with the case of George Floyd, it led to violent scenes in which protesters confronted militarized officers.
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