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Kurt Wallace: This is Kurt Wallace and our guest today on Rare is Shane Bauer, author of “The Making of the Warrior Cop” at Mother Jones; and, Shane, thanks for being with us today on Rare.
Shane Bauer: Thanks for having me.
Kurt Wallace: Well, you’ve covered a lot of territory in the information of your article. Let’s start with the convention, and the types of products being sold to police departments. You went to a convention last month, and you saw quite an array of devices and weaponry and tools that are kind of scary.
Shane Bauer: Yeah the convention I went to is called, “Urban Shield”. It was in Oakland, California and the organizers say it’s the largest first responder convention in the world — mostly, SWAT team and SWAT team-related.
It’s been happening for years and the convention — it’s a four day event. There’s two components to it. The first couple days is expo hall and the second couple days is training exercise — training competitions between SWAT teams.
And, also, I want to say the convention’s put on mostly through funding from Homeland Security; but, also, from funds from these various companies that are advertising their equipment.
So, there’s a lot of gun companies — sniper rifles, assault rifles that kind of stuff. There’s a couple of companies that sell the large APV type armored vehicles. There are a number of drone companies. They were something that I saw quite a bit — was technology of having 3-D printable drones where police out in the field can print the body of a drone and just put the wiring in for a little robot that takes video and rolls around.
I saw some new kind of equipment like this device that attaches to a gun that send out a radio frequency that blinds whoever it’s pointed at for 10 minutes. The vendor told me that it works by scrambling your ocular fluid — and that’s supposed to be out in January.
Kurt Wallace: Well, that can’t be safe.
Shane Bauer: Yeah, and the name of it is Z-Ro, as in “zero damage”. I’ve been trying to get the science behind it, but nobody has really broken it down for me yet. They haven’t responded to my calls.
Kurt Wallace: It would be interesting to have an eye doctor like Senator Rand Paul take a look at a device like that and determine — because he’s spoken out against the militarization of police. During this event, they had a SWAT competition. Who competes in this? What is that like?
Shane Bauer: You have around 35 teams. Most of them are from the bay area. There are a couple of international teams — this with Singapore and South Korea and Bahrain and Israel. And, then there’s some teams from other states.
Basically, it’s 48 hours straight. There’s almost no time for them to sleep in that 48 hours, and they’re going from one challenge to the next. The scenarios: there’s active shooter type situations, IED situations — there was one scenario where a militant atheist group had taken hostages in a church. There was sovereign citizens’ eviction. In past years, there’s been scenarios all about the Occupy movement.
And, basically, they go through these and get points on each site, and one team comes out the winner. The one that I witnessed was on the Amtrak train, and it was actually involving the team — which was the U.S. Marines.
Kurt Wallace: The Marines? At a police event?
Shane Bauer: They were one team competing, and I asked them afterward why they compete in this police event. And, they said they learn a lot from the police and take these tactics back to the military.
The spokesperson for Urban Shield made a comment to me: J. D. Nelson said, “People are talking about the militarization of police, but they should, also, be talking about the policization of the military.” Because, now, we’re in this moment where the tactics are in many ways — are going in the other direction.
Undoubtedly, there’s still companies from the military. There were some companies there that were set up as military companies by former soldiers that are now working in domestic policing market. And you still have — most SWAT teams in the country still have active duty military and, sometimes, Special Forces training them.
Kurt Wallace: What’s the process for police departments in acquiring federal funds for this militarization?
Shane Bauer: Well, there’s a couple ways that it happens. One, there’s the Defense Department program which is giving old equipment from the military called the 1033 Program — usually from Iraq or Afghanistan.
The military’s given about $5 billion worth of equipment since 1997. A much larger program is through the Department of Homeland Security, and they have given out about $41 billion since 2002; and they’re giving money — not equipment. A police department applies for a grant, they get the money, and then they go to this industry and buy things.
A lot of these companies that I talked to were founded after — post 9/11 when these grants started coming in. These grants are marked for counter-terrorism. All the funding is justified by counter-terrorism; but, the equipment, once it’s obtained, can be used for any kind of police work.
There’s some companies, actually, will do the work for the police department to get the grant. One company I talked to was the Armored Group which sells armored vehicles. And, you go to their website. You see that they have a grant writing specialist, who will help police departments write a grant to buy their vehicles.
They, also, point out that forfeiture money can be used to buy the vehicles. This is money or property or goods that police confiscate in the course of criminal investigations including investigations where the person is not ultimately prosecuted. This money is often kept by the police, and they can use that to buy — the website of this company says they can use that money to buy their trucks as long as they’re used for drug enforcement in some capacity – and, then, they can be used for anything else.
Kurt Wallace: Shane, with this huge ramp up of militarization of the police, there’s some interesting facts you have in your article about crime and crime against police and how it’s kind of gone in opposite directions.
Shane Bauer: If you were to make a graph, one line is showing how much gear the police have and another line is showing how much they’re being killed or assaulted — they’re going in opposite directions. Police deaths have been going down since the 1970’s. 1971 was the height, and, I think more notably, assaults have gone down a lot. Deaths that can be attributed to bigger equipment, but assaults that tend to hurt or attack a police have gone down, also, since the 1970’s significantly. And, then, violent crime since the early 1990’s has dropped by half in this country. So, all indicators are suggesting that police work is actually becoming less and less dangerous.
Kurt Wallace: Now, in terms of how they approach civil liberties, individual rights, the Fourth Amendment — this ramp up of police militarization has also brought in to question their activities and the amount of use of SWAT teams which wasn’t designed to do some of the activities that they’re doing now. Can you discuss these issues?
Shane Bauer: Yeah, SWAT teams were set up in the late 1960’s and early 70’s to respond to extreme scenarios like hostage taking — active shooter situations where somebody is shooting at people randomly. But, now, the vast majority of uses of SWAT teams is for drug raids. About almost 80% of SWAT teams are used for drug raids in this country now. So, there are situations where they’re kind of — one scholar said to me they’re drug raids on people’s private residences.
So, this isn’t someone firing on people. We need to get somebody in there that’s equipped to deal with it — kicking the door in — often before dawn and searching for drugs. A lot of these are no-knock raids.
There was recently a couple cases that I wrote about in Texas where there were — in two different cases, separate cases, there were predawn no-knock raids.
The SWAT team that’s just busting in before sunrise to do drug raids. In both cases the person in the house fired on the police as they were entering. They may not have even known they were police. They were probably sleeping — woke up and somebody’s busting into the house.
In both cases, a police officer was killed. The difference in the two cases is that one was the house of a black man; one was the house of a white man. And, the black man is now facing the death penalty; and the other is not.
Kurt Wallace: Same exact situation?
Shane Bauer: And, actually, the African-American man’s house did not have drugs, but the other one did.
Kurt Wallace: Shane Bauer, your article “The Making of the Warrior Cop” at Mother Jones — thanks for spending some time with us today on Rare.
Shane Bauer: Thank you.
