The founders of modern policing quelled foreign uprisings. ‘De-militarizing’ police will be harder than taking away their tanks
For the past week, our social media and television screens have been dominated by images of police officers in head-to-toe body armor wielding batons, pepper-ball guns, riot shields, and teargas against mostly peaceful protesters. Many Americans are now more certain than ever that we need to “demilitarize” our police.
In fact, we’ve gotten slightly closer. The aggressive response – and in many cases, over-response – of American law enforcement agencies has invigorated a bipartisan push in Congress to ban transfers of military materials to police. Yet the twentieth-century history of US policing shows that truly demilitarizing the police will be more difficult than simply removing the body armor. Our law enforcement agencies learned many of the most routine aspects of contemporary policing from US imperial excursions abroad for the purpose of stamping out rebellion.
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