Balko: 'We're in dire times'

 RADLEY BALKO writes The Watch on substack.com:

Quaint disputes about the proper role of police and military have been superseded by a more urgent threat: Donald Trump is creating his own, personal paramilitary force.

One of [America’s] great strengths is that . . . we do not allow the Army, Navy, and the Marines and Air Force to be a police force. History is replete with countries that allowed that to happen. Disaster is the result.

— Marine Major General Stephen Olmstead, testifying before Congress in 1989

For about 40 years now, civil libertarians have been warning about the threat posed by police militarization. For the past 20 years, I’ve been one of them. My position has long been that a soldier is trained to annihilate a foreign enemy. A police officer’s job is to promote public safety while protecting our constitutional rights (or at least it’s supposed to be). These skills are not interchangeable. They are, in fact, often in direct contradiction to one another. And it’s dangerous to conflate the two.

There has long been an important and consequential discussion about the proper, constitutional role of police, the proper, constitutional role of the military, and the ramifications of blurring the lines between the two. In many ways, it’s a debate that dates back to the founding era, when British soldiers stationed in the streets of colonial American cities — Boston in particular — led to animosity, anger, and eventually violence. It was a precipitating factor in the Revolutionary War, it’s a big reason why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and it’s why the Founders were deeply distrustful of standing armies.

In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it.

We are now in territory so uncharted that the framing of the police militarization debate no longer works. Having that discussion requires at least a shared understanding that both police officers and soldiers are obligated to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. Over the years, I’ve had clear, often pointed disagreements with police officials and their supporters over how to balance police safety, public safety, and individual rights, and about whether we do a sufficient job holding cops accountable for abuse and misconduct.

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