Abstract
Does increased militarization of law enforcement agencies (LEAs) lead to an increase in violent behavior among officers? We theorize that the receipt of military equipment increases multiple dimensions of LEA militarization (material, cultural, organizational, and operational) and that such increases lead to more violent behavior. The US Department of Defense 1033 program makes excess military equipment, including weapons and vehicles, available to local LEAs. The variation in the amount of transferred equipment allows us to probe the relationship between military transfers and police violence. We estimate a series of regressions that test the effect of 1033 transfers on three dependent variables meant to capture police violence: the number of civilian casualties; the change in the number of civilian casualties; and the number of dogs killed by police. We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings across all models.
?I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.?
Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966)
?Soldierin? and policin? ? they ain?t the same thing.?
Major Howard ?Bunny? Colvin, The Wire Season 3, Episode 10 (2014)
Introduction
The summer of 2014 saw protracted protests to the non-response associated with the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. By the second day of protests, police officers showed up in armored vehicles wearing camouflage, bullet-proof vests, and gas masks brandishing shotguns and M4 rifles (Chokshi, 2014). That militarized response led to a wave of criticism from observers including former military personnel and politicians from both sides of the aisle. In response, the federal government launched an investigation that ultimately resulted in Executive Order 13688 (EO). The EO sought to regulate the Department of Defense 1033 program, which makes surplus military equipment available to state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies (LEAs) at no cost. The EO banned LEAs from acquiring certain equipment, and restricted them from acquiring others.1 It also called for transparency and training regarding the materials received. Some feared the demilitarized police departments would no longer be able to keep up with drug dealers, rioters, and terrorists. US Representative John Ratcliffe introduced the Protecting Lives Using Surplus Equipment Act to the House of Representatives that would nullify all aspects of the EO.2 In an interview, he said ?It would be one thing if there was some evidence that showed state and local law enforcement had abuse [sic] or misused the equipment, and then caused undue or unnecessary harm to American citizens. That isn?t the case? (Jennings, 2016). This paper provides the first attempt to analyze whether and to what extent military transfers have increased the propensity by which LEAs cause ?undue or unnecessary harm.?
Drawing from Kraska (2007), we argue that increasing LEA access to military equipment will lead to higher levels of aggregate LEA violence. The effect occurs because the equipment leads to a culture of militarization over four dimensions: material; cultural; organizational; and operational. As militarization seeps into their cultures, LEAs rely more on violence to solve problems. The mechanism mirrors psychology?s classic ?Law of the Instrument,? whereby access to a certain tool increases the probability that the tool is used for problems when other tools may be more appropriate (Maslow, 1966), including access to weapons increasing violent responses (e.g. Anderson et al., 1998; Berkowitz and LePage, 1967).
We evaluate this proposition using county-level data on police killings in four US states: Connecticut, Maine, Nevada, and New Hampshire (Burghart, 2015); and the data on 1033 program receipts (
https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-1033-program). Estimating a series of regressions, we find that 1033 receipts are associated with both an increase in the number of observed police killings in a given year as well as the change in the number of police killings from year to year, controlling for a battery of possible confounding variables including county wealth, racial makeup, civilian drug use, and violent crime. Given that establishing a causal effect between 1033 receipts is potentially problematic due to concerns of endogeneity, we re-estimate our regressions using an alternative dependent variable independent of the process by which LEAs request and receive military goods: the number of dogs killed by LEAs. We find 1033 receipts are associated with an increase in the number of civilian dogs killed by police. Combined, our analyses provide support for the argument that 1033 receipts lead to more LEA violence.
We organize the rest of the paper as follows. First, we provide an argument that links police militarization and police violence. Next, we briefly introduce the reader to the 1033 program and why it is appropriate for studying the question at hand. Next, we describe the data and empirical strategy. Then we present the results. Finally, we conclude with some thoughts about how the research should influence policy and can be expanded in the future.
Militarization
Borrowing from Kraska (2007: 503), we define militarization as the embrace and implementation of an ideology that stresses the use of force as the appropriate and efficacious means to solve problems. Kraska (2007) provides four dimensions of militarization: material; cultural; organizational; and operational. We contend these dimensions reinforce one another so that an increase in one can lead to an increase in others. More specifically, the military equipment obtained from the 1033 program directly increases the material dimension. With the new equipment, martial language (cultural), martial arrangements such as elite units (organizational), and willingness to engage in high-risk situations (operational) increase (Balko, 2014). Military equipment naturally increases military-style training for said equipment. That training can increase the other dimensions of militarization. One trainer?s quote illustrates well the uptake of militarized culture: ?Most of these guys just like to play war; they get a rush out of search and destroy missions instead of the bullshit they do normally? (Kraska, 2001, quoted in Balko, 2014: 212). But the trainees would not have to settle for the normal ?bullshit? for long. Many LEAs began practicing SWAT raids on low-level offenders as a way to train and then as a matter of normal policy (Balko, 2014; Sanow, 2011). Officers running military operations with military tools and military mindsets organized militarily will rely more on the tenets of militarization (e.g. the use of force to solve problems) which should increase the use of violence on average. Since 1997, LEAs obtain much if not most of their military equipment from the 1033 program.
1033 program and militarization
President Bill Clinton signed into law H.R. 3230 (National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997). The bill contains section 1033, which allows the Secretary of Defense to sell or transfer excess military equipment to local LEAs. Between 2006 and April of 2014 alone, the Department of Defense transferred over $1.5 billion worth of equipment including over 600 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, 79,288 assault rifles, 205 grenade launchers, 11,959 bayonets, 50 airplanes, 422 helicopters, and $3.6 million worth of camouflage and other ?deception equipment? (Rezvani et al., 2014). Eighty percent of US counties received transfers, and those transfers increased over time from 2006 to 2013 by 1414% (Radil et al., 2017). These variations allow us to test the proposition that, all things being equal, the receipt of higher levels of 1033 equipment will lead to increased levels of violence from LEAs.