Rise of the Warrior Cop (8 page)

The champion of the professionalism movement was August Vollmer, who served as chief of police in Berkeley, California, from 1905 to 1932. Vollmer pioneered the use of police radios, squad cars, bicycles, lie detector tests, and crime labs. As Walker writes, “The professionalism movement created the modern police organization: a centralized, authoritarian, bureaucracy focusing on crime control.”
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But the morals-oriented progressives also had some victories, at least in the short term. They succeeded in passing anti-obscenity laws, and in some cities (most notably New York) they were able to put shutting down brothels, adult-book stores, and other sex-related businesses high on the list of police priorities. Their biggest victory was of course the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the production, sale, and importation of alcohol.

The amendment was enforced by the Volstead Act, passed in 1919. The prohibition of alcohol has some clear parallels with the modern drug war. Homicides spiked during Prohibition, as did public corruption. The federal government had created a lucrative new black market. In legal markets, businesses compete by providing a
better product, a less expensive product, or better customer service. In black markets, they compete by warring over turf. Disputes are settled with guns, not in courtrooms. As the bootleggers obtained bigger guns to war with one another, law enforcement agencies felt that they needed bigger guns to go after the criminals. In larger cities, the ensuing arms race produced heavily armed police forces.

Like today’s drug prohibition, the Volstead Act was a failure. It almost certainly reduced the amount of alcohol the country consumed, but it came nowhere near stamping out booze entirely. The true believers responded by calling for tougher crackdowns and less coddling of bootleggers and drinkers. In his book
The Spirits of America
, journalist Eric Burns writes that some politicians and civic leaders suggested sending drunks and booze distributors to Siberia or the South Pole. Burns notes that David Blair, the federal commissioner of internal revenue at the time, “recommended that all American bootleggers be lined up in front of a firing squad and shot to death.”
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Foreshadowing the cries the country would hear from drug warriors sixty years later, Henry Ford wanted the military to enforce the laws against illicit substances. Anti-alcohol activist Clarence True Wilson demanded that the Harding administration call up the Marines, “arm them to the teeth and send them to the speakeasies. Give the people inside a few minutes to depart, and if they chose not to, open fire anyhow.”
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But as hard as the temperance activists tried, they couldn’t demonize and dehumanize drinkers the way drug warriors have since succeeded in denigrating drug offenders. One likely reason was that the Volstead Act didn’t criminalize the possession or consumption of alcohol, only its production and sale. So the feds could raid speakeasies, but they couldn’t raid a home based on a tip that someone had a cupboard full of gin—unless they suspected there was a distillery inside. Since simply ingesting alcohol was not a criminal act, it was more difficult for Prohibition’s supporters to cast drinkers as villains. The country was also more federalist in the 1920s. Even after the Eighteenth Amendment passed, some states, cities, and counties simply refused to enforce it.

After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the professionalism model returned to police departments.

Although some of the aims of professionalism may have been noble, the story of early American policing is one of overcorrection. While the professionalism reformers were able to end the patronage system, in some cities they managed to insulate police departments from politics altogether, making it difficult for mayors and city councils to hold police officials accountable. At the level of individual cops, the use of squad cars and radios clearly brought a lot of benefits, but could also isolate police officers from the residents of the communities they patrolled. Cops out walking beats could chat with citizens, form relationships, and become a part of the community. Squad cars gave cops a faceless and intimidating presence. They tended not to get out of them except in the event of problems or confrontations. Police and citizens interacted only when police were ticketing or questioning someone, or when a citizen was reporting a crime. In poorer communities, that could bring about an increasingly antagonistic relationship between cops and the citizens on their beats.
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Perhaps no police chief better illustrated that double-edged sword of professionalism than William Parker in Los Angeles. Parker took over the LAPD in 1950 and imposed a rigid, hierarchical, militaristic bureaucracy. He took on corruption in the department—successfully—and stressed efficiency and crime fighting above all else. Parker had also worked in public relations for the military for a time, and he used that experience to sell his ideas about policing to the public. He helped create the show
Dragnet
, a virtual commercial for Parker-style police management—or at least an idealized form of it.
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But Parker also loathed community policing, the idea that cops should have a stake in the communities they served. He preferred to have a wall between cop and community. That sentiment probably stemmed from the goal of ridding the department of the sort of localized interests that existed in the patronage era. But completely walling off cops from their communities presented its own problems. Making cops indifferent to the areas they patrolled, instilling
in them the notion that they were all that stood between order and anarchy—all of this could make police view the citizens in their districts as at best the
other
, and at worst, the enemy. Consequently, while Parker’s management rid the LAPD of political patronage and corruption, and instilled some needed structure and standards, he seemed oblivious to growing animosity toward police in the city’s black and Latino populations.

Parker’s efforts at instilling professionalism provide a good segue into the age of militarization for a couple of reasons. For one, as we’ll see, when the racial tension in LA finally blew up in the form of the Watts riots, it went a long way toward scaring middle America about crime, to the point where they were willing to embrace an all-out “war” on crime and drugs to clean up the cities.

But Parker also had a much more direct impact on militarization. Shortly after taking office, the chief made a young LAPD cop barely a year into the job his personal chauffeur, and eventually his protégé. That set the young cop’s career on a fast track. By the time of the Watts riots in 1965, Parker’s young protégé would take command of the city police department’s response. The experience would scar him. The protégé would eventually become LA’s police chief himself. And in large part because of his experience in Watts, he did more to bring about today’s militarized American police force than any other single person. His name was Daryl Gates.

T
HERE ARE TWO FORMS OF POLICE MILITARIZATION: DIRECT
and indirect.
Direct militarization
is the use of the standing military for domestic policing.
Indirect militarization
happens when police agencies and police officers take on more and more characteristics of an army. Most of this book will focus on the latter form of police militarization, which began in the United States in the late 1960s, then accelerated in the 1980s. But the two forms of militarization are related, and they have become increasingly intertwined over the
last thirty years. So it’s worth looking briefly at direct militarization in the twentieth century as well.

As discussed in the previous chapter, direct militarization has a longer history in the United States but has been more limited in scope. One reason may be that deploying military forces domestically usually requires a formal declaration by the president, which means such deployments have been limited to self-contained events. By the middle of the twentieth century, federal troops had been deployed in response to dozens of domestic disturbances, but the incidents were highly visible, and once the crisis abated the troops left the scene.

One of the more significant policies to move the country toward direct militarization was the Militia Act of 1903—sometimes called the National Guard Act. The antifederalists, remember, advocated that the country rely on state militias for national defense. That didn’t work out, but the militias stayed around and were often called up by state governors to dispel less threatening uprisings.

But the militias were also sometimes called into war. In fact, the 1903 law was a response to widespread sentiment that the militias had performed poorly during the Spanish-American War. The new law took what remained of the state militias and converted them into what is today the National Guard. It also established an office in the Pentagon to oversee the Guard and appropriated funds to run the office and train Guard troops. Guard units would still report to their respective states and could still be called up by their governors when needed. But if called up by the president and federalized, they wouldn’t be noticeably different from the military. One legacy of the National Guard Act was to make some state governors more likely to request military help from the president and thus more reliant on the use of the military to quell disruptions. Military leaders weren’t keen on this trend. They knew from history that sending soldiers to dispel citizens was usually a bad idea, and sowed ill will toward the Army among the public.

The ensuing confrontations between the military and labor protesters and strikers, antiwar activists, and other demonstrators certainly
had that effect. Worse, they also sowed a certain contempt for protesters among some in the military.
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That sentiment, along with public anxiety about World War I and the Red Scare fears of communists and anarchists that followed, opened up a brief period in American history when military leaders seemed more willing to intervene in domestic life than ever before.

The most infamous incident came in 1932. In June of that year, forty thousand World War I veterans and their supporters descended on Washington, DC, to demand the bonus payment they had been promised for their service. They set up camps on the Anacostia Flats, a marshy area across the river from the US Capitol, and named their makeshift city “Hooverville” to mock the president. As the Bonus March began on July 28, 1932, there was an altercation in which police shot and killed two marching veterans. President Hoover responded by sending in the US Army. Two regiments and six tanks moved into the nation’s capital, under the leadership of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Maj. George S. Patton. Maj. Dwight Eisenhower went along as an aide to MacArthur. The protesters initially cheered the military, thinking the troops were there to support them. Those cheers quickly turned to screams when the troops charged the protesters with guns and tear gas.

When the protesters retreated back to Hooverville, Hoover ordered MacArthur to stand down. MacArthur defied the order and went after the protesters, razing the Hooverville shacks and chasing veterans, their families, and their supporters out of the makeshift town at the points of bayonets.
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The sight of veterans being lied to and then bloodied by the same US Army in which they had served didn’t sit well with the public. Angry condemnations rang out from newspapers, civil rights organizations, and veterans across the country.
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The crackdown doomed Hoover’s already dim prospects for reelection and turned what had been an ambivalent public firmly in support of the veterans.
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Later that year, Patton wrote a remarkable paper recounting the lessons he had learned from the Bonus March. Titled “Federal Troops in Domestic Disturbances,” it revealed a startling contempt
for free expression—and for civilians in general. The paper first assesses periods of unrest throughout history. Patton ridicules nations and empires that hesitated to use violence against citizen uprisings and praises those that did. “When the foolish and genial Louis XVI lost his head and the Seine ran crimson to the sea, the fault lay not with the people, but with the soldiers,” Patton writes. “Yet less than ten years later, Napoleon with a ‘whiff of grape shot’ destroyed the mob and saved, only to usurp, the directorate.” Patton attributes the success of the Bolshevik Revolution to “the hesitating and weak character of the Russian officers,” which prevented them from properly slaughtering the Communists while they were merely protesters.

Most alarming are Patton’s own suggestions and recommendations on how the military should handle domestic riots and uprisings. He calls the writ of habeas corpus “an item that rises to plague us” and recommends shooting captured rioters instead of turning them over to police to bring before “some misguided judge,” who might release the rebellious citizen on a legal technicality. On establishing geographic bearings while breaking up a protest, Patton advises: “It may be desirable to fly over the city to become oriented. If fired upon while in the air, reply at once with small bombs and machine gun fire.” Using all-caps for emphasis, he later writes, “When guarding buildings, mark a ‘DEAD’ line and announce clearly that those who cross it will be killed. Be sure to kill the first one who tries to cross it and to LEAVE HIM THERE to encourage the others.”
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Elsewhere he writes, “If it is necessary to use machine guns, aim at their feet. If you must fire, DO A GOOD JOB. A few casualties become martyrs; a large number becomes an object lesson.”
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