There has been recent pushback against Bloomington Police plans to buy some advanced equipment including an armored vehicle. And some people worry about the militarization of police agencies nationwide as tactical units, automatic weapons, body armor, and armored vehicles called M-wraps proliferate to cities across the nation.
A noted scholar who will appear at Illinois State University on March 28 said that's really nothing new.
Julian Go is the Robert Bone Distinguished Lecturer this year. The University of Chicago professor is the author of the book Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in the U.S. and Great Britain.
Go said the militarization of law enforcement has been going on since the dawn of modern policing. Before the London Metropolitan Police formed in 1829 there were no uniforms or departments. There were constables and watchmen, often volunteers. Then came uniforms, ranks, and administrative structure. Go said those things were copied from colonial occupation forces.
“They're specifically copying the types of military forms that were occurring in the colonies in Ireland, in the Caribbean, and the United States in the early 20th century would be U.S. colonial Philippines. These are forces that have been developed to control the population, to not only prevent crime, but also more particularly, to prevent insurgency and rebellion," Go said.
For example, he said the concept of pin-mapping crimes originated overseas to help locate insurgents. Police also borrowed from mechanisms used during slavery to control captive populations on plantations in the British Caribbean and the American South, called "slave patrols." Go said they now call it a beat system.
“They would cover certain territories, near and around the plantation. They would make sure that the slaves were under control. They would inspect slave dwellings for weaponry. They would make sure slaves weren't having mass meetings. This kind of territory-based control was a crucial part of the slave patrol,” said Go.
In what Go calls a "boomerang effect," police tactics overseas were brought back to home countries in successive waves of police militarization. Another happened during the late 19th century and early 20th century as anti-immigration sentiment rose.
“It's not only immigration from Europe, but mass migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities. It's in the West Asian populations moving around. What this created was a fear of crime among white populations in the cities that, oh, these immigrants and these migrants are coming in. They're creating all this crime. It's a familiar narrative and rhetoric that we know from discussions of immigration today."
Such fears were used, he said, to strengthen policing, and in so doing racialized the response to crime and disorder, just as race was used overseas to justify imperialism.
“‘We need this weaponry to deal with the savages in our midst, in our streets.’ So, there was a racialized language there, too,” said Go.
He said the fears of crime waves at various points in history have been overblown.
“You saw this in the ‘50s, there was a huge fear of a crime wave when, in fact, crime went down in the 50s. There's this constant sort of exaggeration."
He said it’s hard to base policy that is sensible when irrational fears drive emotion. The emotion continues to drive what he termed ‘excessive policing.
“And the thing is, these tactics and techniques and weaponry that police might adopt initially out of the sphere of crime from immigrants, they always end up being usable on other populations, too. So, this fear is a bad thing,” said Go.
