06/27/14 – Kara Dansky – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Worden and this is my show, The Scott Worden Show.
Our first guest on the show today is Kara Dansky from the ACLU.
And she's helped with this new report, War Comes Home, The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.
Welcome to the show, Kara, how are you doing?
Hi, good, thanks for having me.
Good, very happy to hear that and very happy to have you here.
Appreciate you joining us today and appreciate this work.
It's such important work and like I always tell the people, I learned this lesson I guess watching 20-20 when I was a kid.
Wow, so if these lawyers don't show up at work at their non-profit and sue the government all day, it doesn't get sued.
If the ACLU does not demand accountability, there is no accountability in the American system.
That's basically the way it is and that's not just the ACLU.
There are other groups like you of course that pursue the same sort of work.
But this kind of thing is so important to preserving freedom in America, what we have left of it at this point anyway.
And so thank you so much for doing it and helping draw attention to this.
And I even think that maybe this is actually going to do some good.
And that maybe this is really just a drop in that wave of real pushback against this.
As it becomes more of kind of common knowledge among everyone, not just sort of infringe political opinion, but among all American society that this militarization of our local deputy sheriffs has just gotten completely out of control here.
So enough of my rant and rave and that's just a big extended thank you is all really.
Before we get to the beginning about the military training and the turning of the cops into the soldiers, I was hoping that you could start with sort of the second section here obviously ties into how the study was actually done.
What information you were able to get and what police agencies even had any information to give you, to what degree they were willing to cooperate to let you know about what it was that they were up to and all that kind of thing.
If you could get that out of the way for us, please.
Absolutely.
And I appreciate you having me on and I appreciate your calling attention to this.
And it's a really important point that you raise in terms of what is known and what is not known about this problem.
Transparency is a real issue here and data on the militarization of policing is very difficult to come by.
We went directly to local law enforcement agencies.
We didn't submit record requests to DOD or DHS or DOJ or any of the state agencies.
We went directly to local law enforcement and we asked them to give us records of all of their SWAT deployments for a two-year period of time.
We were looking at 2011 and 2012.
And we also asked them to send us records of equipment that they may have gotten from DOD during that time period or money that they may have gotten from the Department of Justice or Homeland Security that they used to buy military equipment.
So we asked for a lot of information.
And to answer your question directly, they were all over the map in terms of how they responded.
Some law enforcement agencies turned over a lot of information.
Some gave us none.
And other agencies were at different points along the spectrum.
Part of what makes analysis of this issue so difficult is that law enforcement agencies really vary a lot in terms of how they keep records of their SWAT deployments.
Some keep a lot of information.
Some don't keep very much information at all.
So we did our analysis based on the information that we had available, but one of our biggest concerns is that there's not a lot of information available and we're really hoping that will change.
Alright, now another thing here is something that was highlighted by Radley Balco at the Washington Post about this Massachusetts, I don't know exactly what they call it, but some kind of multi-jurisdictional task force that they put together here, that they refused to answer any kind of open records request on the grounds that they're a private company and not actually a public police agency at all.
I guess first of all, did I even really say that right at all?
But then secondly, what exactly does that mean?
Is that just a trick of paperwork in order to avoid public records?
Or is this actually a new creature, more of a Blackwater type of a situation under local and state law enforcement in Massachusetts?
You know, my friends at the ACLU of Massachusetts, as you probably know, are filing suit to challenge that very situation.
I think that you said it correctly, that the multi-jurisdictional task forces are claiming exemption from public records law on the basis that they're a private company.
You know, I wish I had my colleagues from the ACLU of Massachusetts here with me so that they could get into some more details of that situation.
They're much more up on it than I am, but that does seem to be the situation.
But at the same time, even though they are claiming an exemption as a private company, we also know that they get money from the Department of Homeland Security through Homeland Security's Homeland Security Grant Program, which certainly seems to suggest that, at least on some level, they think of themselves as a public law enforcement agency.
So we'll have to see how that turns out.
But the ACLU of Massachusetts could definitely tell you a lot more about that.
Okay, well, we'll see if we can get Kate Crockford on the show next week.
That'd be great.
She's my lady there.
All right.
Okay, so now I guess if we could just sort of work through the table of contents here a little bit and if we could start out with the military training.
It's not so much the way that they fight.
I know they go to Fort Hood or Fort Bliss or whatever and they do their military training, that kind of thing.
But what I'm interested in, if you could tell me about what they're taught, what they are led to believe about the people that they're out enforcing the law against.
Because at least the theory as I learned it in, you know, I don't know, high school or junior college or whatever or watching Matlock is the cop's job is to protect the rights of the suspects.
The guy with the bloody hands is the guy who their job is making sure that nothing bad happens to him before he gets his fair trial.
More than anything, right?
That's the deal.
And then just because he's accused doesn't mean he did it, et cetera, et cetera.
And yet it sounds like we're not even all suspects, which would be bad enough, but we're considered the enemy.
We are like the fighting age males of Fallujah.
We may or may not have just planted an IED against these guys and we're all guilty as hell before proven innocent, it seems like now.
Well, one of the things that we found when we analyzed 800 incident reports of SWAT deployments was that the vast majority were for the purpose of serving search warrants in people's homes.
And to get to your point, you know, I think we need to understand that when there's a search warrant to search a person's home, there, you know, some judge or not even always a judge, sometimes a magistrate or other public official has determined that there's probable cause to think that drugs are in the home.
That's basically all that's going on there.
There have been no charges filed.
There certainly have not been any convictions entered.
So a service of a search warrant is basically a domestic criminal investigation, but there's been no finding that there's been any wrongdoing.
So to use a paramilitary squad to serve a search warrant on a person's home for often a small amount of drugs seems to us is extremely problematic, especially given the often tragic results that can happen.
But in terms of the training, we were given some documents by some of the agencies that responded to our request that really did seem to suggest that officers are being trained to think of themselves as warriors.
Some of the training documents that we received taught police officers to, quote-unquote, feel your battle mind when you go into the field.
And it really does seem like there's an effort to make the police think of themselves as soldiers fighting a war and the people that they're policing as the enemy.
You know, we consulted with law enforcement during the course of this investigation because we are ourselves not, you know, we're not police officers.
We're not necessarily law enforcement experts.
And so we consulted with law enforcement and we spoke to a number of police officers who said that this is absolutely true.
It's a cultural problem.
Policing has become much more militarized, which really erodes public confidence in law enforcement.
So we definitely think that there's an issue here in terms of training police officers specifically to think of themselves as soldiers.
All right.
Well, there's the music's already playing.
We're going to have to go out and take this short break, Kara.
But I hope you'll stay with us and we'll do one more segment here on this new report from the ACLU on the militarization of the police.
War comes home.
We'll be right back in a sec.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Kara Dansky from the ACLU and this report, terrifying new report that you already knew but with details.
War Comes Home about the militarization of the police.
And to make it a little bit interesting here, Kara, I'm going to try to pick a little bit of a controversy with you which is that the ACLU has got to get good on guns because, as you know, half the population of America is armed.
And in a society where all of our deputy sheriffs and city police are trained to be, you know, the wannabe 82nd Airborne looking for somebody to kill and anybody even owning a gun increases their point system on the threat matrix up to the level of sending the Waco killers this is leading to catastrophe all over the place.
And, of course, you want to talk about race and dishonest application of the law forget the pot laws, look at the gun laws.
It's just insane that we have a situation you know, it's like alcohol, tobacco and firearms all of them are legal and yet we have an entire federal police agency armed to the teeth out there persecuting people for, you know, gun charges which means they hadn't done anything they just have a gun that the government says is contraband which is just like having drugs that the government says is contraband just like someone selling drugs or selling a gun to someone who wants to buy drugs or buy a gun there's no crime involved other than the government said no and then it becomes because a gun is so scary it becomes then the excuse for, hey, well, the rumor is these people have guns there was one where the guy had a gun and he had been cited publicly saying the word constitution before so that meant he was a political zealot and that gave him another three points on the threat matrix so they came with an armored personnel carrier to his family house, right?
So, anyway, get good on guns because isn't that a huge part of this the cops' attitude towards gun ownership by American civilians who, after all, have the right to bear arms?
You know, a couple of points about that one thing is that when we were reviewing the 800 SWAT deployments that we analyzed we did not come across I don't think a single time when the police distinguished between lawfully owned firearms and unlawfully possessed firearms when determining whether to deploy a SWAT team so there didn't appear to me to be any effort on the part of the police to determine whether if they were going to consider the fact that a person may have had a firearm in their home whether that firearm was lawfully owned or not another thing I would just say part of what happens here when they deploy a SWAT team they often do so in the middle of the night and they do so using tactics that are absolutely terrifying for the people who are subjected to them and there have been a number of scenarios in which a person's family is at home sleeping in the middle of the night as you'd expect the family owns a firearm which they're entitled to do in the state where they live I know one case like this that happened in Texas and one that happened in Utah and they used their firearm and actually police officers have died in this way police officers have been killed when people believed that they were being burglarized and were acting to defend their home so I think that this is something that we really need to shine a light on and getting back to my earlier point there's been almost no transparency or oversight into the militarization of policing and I think we need to really be better about that Right, well and you know there's got to be some kind of checks and balances and I'm not really one to just leave it up to a police hunch to decide necessarily but then again outsourcing decision making to something called a matrix which is like some kind of magical abacus that knows how dangerous people are it's like calling a polygraph a lie detector it puts all this truth and knowledge and judgment on something that can't possibly have any right?
It's the threat matrix and the matrix has decided this is the way we need to do it it's almost like zero tolerance in government school where the valedictorian gets expelled over the butter knife or something because what the computer screen says overrides any kind of knowledge like hey are we sure this house doesn't have kids in it or whatever is that part of the computer program you know how sure are we there are no kids present before we kick in this door this is a question a squad leader might wonder but a computer might not when it's doing its calculation you know the threat matrix is interesting because in theory it's supposed to bring some objectivity to the decision to use SWAT which could be a good thing but the problem is that when they check off the boxes in the threat matrix it still doesn't give you any insight into why they thought what they thought for example many of the threat matrices that they use will have a check box for drugs a check box for as you were saying earlier guns so if they check drugs and guns that weighs in favor often of deploying a SWAT team to serve a search warrant but it doesn't tell you anything about why they thought that it doesn't give any substantiation to the officer's belief that there are drugs present or that there are guns present those are just two examples we came across a threat matrix that was in use in a town in North Carolina that used a person's religious use as a factor in deciding whether to deploy a SWAT team so in some sense having a threat matrix could bring some objectivity which could be a good thing but on the other hand the threat matrices that we've seen don't seem to help the situation because they don't provide any insight into the underlying factors that the police are considering right I want you to enjoy this book by Neil Postman called Technopoly he's the guy that wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death but he talks about how all this technology changes what we even mean by knowledge and what we mean by decision making and how so much of it has to do with outsourcing our decision making to like you're saying supposedly objective machines that really it's just a matter of garbage in and garbage out even if the guy owns guns and he's from around here and all the cops and all the old cops know him and he's a good old boy or is it because we think that maybe he's you know smuggling Mexican immigrants and is armed to the teeth with him and his crew with AK-47s or something like it doesn't say that it doesn't say what about what gun or how likely how criminal the person they suspect is or how desperate they might be or anything like that that's all the kind of question that can only come up in a soft human brain not in a computer yeah we did not see in the course of our investigation very many incidents where there was that kind of analysis that was being done we just didn't see it a few I mean there were a few cases where you could tell that somebody was doing some really good work to figure out whether they really needed a SWAT team but the majority of cases we didn't see that kind of analysis being done we said at the beginning we're talking about super majorities of all of these raids are about just contraband you know black market trade in contraband and that kind of thing no actual crimes being committed against anyone else at all and now can you tell me how many of these are actual bank robbery with hostages like on TV where they would justify this kind of thing what percent is that we found that of the 800 SWAT deployments we studied 800 is a tiny sliver of the number of SWAT deployments that happen nationally every year this is really an attempt to shine a light on a problem that we think is much broader but we were not able you know by any means there are tens of thousands of law enforcement agencies we really examined a tiny sliver of what's happening across the country so I just want to make that clear but of the 800 that we studied almost 80% was for the purpose of serving a search warrant about 7% were for the purpose of dealing with some kind of emergency scenario such as a hostage taking or a barricade or an active shooter and then the rest were other kinds of situations some of them involved VIP protection, visiting dignitaries things of that nature but nearly 80% were for the purpose of serving a search warrant and then I guess because it goes along with the war on drugs and I'm sorry we're so short on time but can you address race and how this is implemented against minority groups that have so much less political power yeah absolutely I mean we've seen over and over again over the last several decades how the war on drugs unfairly impacts people of color, communities of color, we know that people use and sell drugs are roughly the same race across race and yet it's been people of color who have really been unfairly impacted by the war on drugs and the use of paramilitary weapons and tactics appears to be no different so of the 800 incidents that we studied we tried to figure out who was being impacted by these SWAT raids and so we reviewed the reports and we tried to get a sense of who was involved who was in the home, were there families involved, were there children involved and we counted up all the people who were impacted by the SWAT raids that we studied and we found that the majority were people of color about 54% of the people impacted were people of color.
Significantly if you break that down further into the percentage of cases where the purpose of the SWAT raid was for a drug warrant 61% of the people impacted were people of color.
Alright we gotta go, all out of time.
Thank you so much Cara appreciate it.
For having me That's Cara Dansky from the ACLU War Comes Home Go read it.
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