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

• Author: Blanks, Jonathan
• Position: Book review

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

Radley Balko

New York: Public Affairs, 2013, 383 pp.

Criminal justice reform has been gaining momentum in Washington, attracting policymakers from both sides of the aisle. Draconian mandatory minimum sentences, overcrowded prisons, and bloated criminal justice budgets have made reform a bipartisan issue. This is undoubtedly a positive development, but--as is typical with the political process--the most popular reforms are not enough. Most of the political capital and rhetoric focuses on "back-end" criminal justice reforms, such as sentencing reform, early release, and alternatives to incarceration. While these reforms are sorely needed, the "front end" of the criminal justice system--criminal laws, the courts, and policing itself--also needs thorough examination. Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop is an exemplar of what these assessments should look like in the American context.

So many popular policy solutions today seem cut and dry. Whether it's the War on Drugs, Obamacare, or the Federal Reserve System, critics can look at where a bad policy started, put a finger on it, and say, "That's where the government went wrong. If we undo it, things will be better." With police militarization, neither the cause nor the solution is so simple, and Balko goes to great lengths to show why that is.

Starting with patrols in ancient Rome, to the shire reeves in medieval England (where we get the word "sheriff'), to slave patrols in antebellum America, and through to modern times, Rise of the Warrior Cop traces the evolution of policing from a community institution to a governmental entity. In the past 40 years in the United States, there has been a dramatic change from flatfoots walking the neighborhood beat to aggressive teams serving warrants on nonviolent suspects with the help of armored personnel carriers, flash-bang grenades, and battering rams. Through each decade since the 1960s, Balko explains how these changes took place.

Looking at police officers' Internet message boards where cops talk shop, or even at many police departments' websites, one may reflexively blame the officers for this change. Plenty of police talk about suspects as if they were enemies to be resented and destroyed. Some don camouflage gear and pose with their militaristic hardware, becoming virtually indistinguishable from a military assault team. SWAT teams were the brainchild of former LAPD police...