Sunday, September 23, 2018

Police Militarization Undermines Mission

First, some background: the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a nonprofit society of scholars created by an Act of Congress that President Lincoln signed into law in 1863. It's not some site founded to subvert the government, or undermine the rule of law. To the contrary, its purpose is to advance the sciences. The National Academy of Medicine, for example, was founded under its charter.
NAS' publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America recently published "Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation," which includes graphs that suggest adding SWAT teams to police departments causes more assaults against police officers.  Of interest to those who like to argue militarization serves some kind of beneficial purpose in protecting police may be the observation that "Estimates for officer deaths, both accidental and felonious, are precise and near zero, partly because they are so rare[.]"  Although there was little increase in death to explain even after SWAT teams' exacerbation of conflicts elevated them, data "show[] a statistically significant 3.2% increase in noninjurious assaults" before adjustment for time trends.  Although the evidence for increasing officer risk is iffy, "there is no evidence that acquiring a SWAT team lowers crime or promotes officer safety."
The article observes that aggressive policing strategies disproportionately target minority communities, but that defenders of militarization claim it's necessary to protect officers. The data disagree. The author concludes that "the routine use of militarized police tactics by local agencies threatens to increase the historic tensions between marginalized groups and the state with no detectable public safety benefit."