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

• Author: Gregory, Anthony
• Position: Book review

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

By Radley Balko

New York: Public Affairs, 2013.

Pp. xvi, 383. $27.99 hardback.

There exists no broad coalition critiquing domestic police. Left radicals in the 1960s decried their militarism. Conservatives favored stronger police powers through the 1980s; in the next decade, disasters such as Ruby Ridge and Waco convinced many on the right that federal law enforcement was becoming militaristic and excessively violent. Their criticisms subsided during George W. Bush's war on terror, but recent news has begun to awaken Americans across the spectrum to the danger posed by cops.

Journalist Radley Balko provides some of this valuable history in Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. His reporting on police abuses helped save a man from death row and never ceases to raise blood pressures. His newest book carries immense potency, page after page delivering incisive and enraging indictments of modern law enforcement trends. Balko concludes that "America today isn't a police state. Far from it" (p. 336). We might forgive someone for concluding differently based on the frightening erosion of due process rights and amplification of state power Balko documents, although he is correct that it "would be foolish to wait until it becomes [a police state] to get concerned" (p. 336).

Balko prefaces his accessible history of early American policing with a provocative rhetorical question: "Are cops constitutional?" Although he says that "[t]here has never been a serious constitutional challenge to the general authority of police," he also cites legal scholar Roger Roots, who has written that for more than a century modern policing techniques have "fundamentally altered the balance of power between the citizen and the state in a way that would have been seen as constitutionally invalid by the Founders" (pp. ix-x).

Indeed, Balko hails the supposedly anachronistic Third Amendment as "not just a prohibition on peacetime quartering [of soldiers in domestic homes], but a more robust expression of the threat that standing armies pose to free societies. It represented a long-standing, deeply ingrained resistance to armies patrolling American streets and policing American communities" (p. 13). He returns occasionally to this "Symbolic Third Amendment" in describing the tension between basic traditional liberties and anything resembling the modern police force.

Even older than the Constitution, the Castle Doctrine, firmly established in English law by 1572, held that, "before entering without permission, government agents must knock, announce and identify themselves...