10/23/14 – Shane Bauer – The Scott Horton Show

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Now, our guest is Shane Bauer writing at Mother Jones Magazine.
And this one is The Making of the Warrior Cop.
You may well have noticed his tweets back during this gigantic SWAT team convention in San Francisco, I guess, what, about six weeks ago, something like that.
Well, now the article's published.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Shane?
Good.
Thanks for having me on.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
So, yeah, tell us all about this convention.
I guess, first of all, if you...
No, actually, before the convention, if you could, tell us about this $1.9 billion that you talk about that has been transferred from the national government by different methods to the local police for the arming up of these SWAT teams across America.
Sure.
Well, it's actually a lot more money than that.
There's been a lot of attention on the Pentagon issuing gear and weapons to local police.
The Pentagon, since 1997, has issued $5.1 billion worth of equipment to local police.
But Homeland Security has actually given $41 billion since 2002.
And this is money.
So it's like, you know, money that goes to the police departments that they then use to buy from companies that were at this convention that I was at.
So Homeland Security really, since 2002, has kind of created a huge industry.
A lot of these companies that I saw formed in response to this kind of massive funding from...
Now, is $41 billion...
I mean, honestly, man, I don't know exactly how to measure how much money that is, how many M-16s that buys, how many SWAT trucks for...
There's about 20,000 different local police departments, county, sheriff, and city police departments across America, right?
Something like that.
Is there any way that you can kind of paint a picture for just, you know, is that really overkill?
I mean, assuming you want every cop to have a rifle and an armed personnel carrier, is this three times as much as you even need for that?
Like, it's just an ultimate blank check?
I mean, I don't know what, like, the total budgets or regular budgets are for police.
I couldn't tell you that.
But this is money.
I mean, this is aside from the kind of rifles and the regular stuff.
They actually can't use this money for that.
This is for the kind of APC-type vehicles for that kind of, you know, armored gear, the military-type gear, military clothing, drones, you know, the kind of additional equipment that police use.
And another, actually, another huge pot of money is from civil forfeitures.
And there was a company that was telling... that actually advertised this on their site, one of the companies that sells these huge APC-type vehicles, recommends that local police use money that they...and, you know, property that they seize in criminal investigations, cars, houses, cash, and use that to buy these vehicles.
So, in other words...
And that's even more than the DHS money.
Right.
So, but it's so much that there really is no kind of downward pressure on them to stop at any point, right?
Other than maybe the ACLU out there complaining or something like that.
There really is no... inside the government, there's no committee head in the land who wants to see them end this.
Yeah, and once you have this stuff, you know, once you have it, you have kind of an incentive to use it.
And, you know, something that... one example that I think shows how powerful and important the industry side is, is Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona recently gave back some of his equipment to the military, and he made this big show of it, and he... what he did was he displayed all of his new stuff, which he had bought from these companies, and was like, this stuff is way better.
We don't need this old military stuff anymore.
Yeah, well, yeah, what fun if you're a sheriff, right?
Yeah.
This is perfect.
Yeah, and, you know...
And with a bottomless bucket.
These guys have grenade launchers now.
So, now, I guess, describe for people, in case, you know, Joey's got his mom listening to the show for the first time.
Scare the hell out of her.
What kind of...
I mean, obviously, okay, armored personnel carriers and M4 rifles.
They've got lots of those.
What else?
Yeah, so this convention was, you know, there were two days of this kind of exhibit hall, and some of the stuff that I saw there was... one thing was a device that you attach to a gun, and it shoots a radio frequency that blinds people for 10 minutes.
And the guy...
I asked the guy, what's the kind of technology behind this?
And he said, it scrambles your ocular fluid.
And he, you know, insisted it doesn't cause any damage.
There were drones, there were robots, Homeland Security was displaying a little kind of robot that you can print out in a 3D printer that has a camera on it.
So, you could throw it, like, into the ventilation system of a building, something like that, to kind of go in and get video of the inside.
You know, the kind of stuff you expect, like you said, guns, sniper rifles, that kind of thing.
There's a... you know, one table was displaying a semi-automatic 308, and was, you know, telling me that the fishing game uses this now, you know, to go on patrols, not only to shoot bears, but to raid pot farms, that kind of stuff.
And then, you know, then the other part of the convention was this 48-hour competition, or 35 SWAT teams.
Oh, wait, no, hold that thought for a second.
Let's talk about the equipment.
Because when it comes to the sniper rifles and stuff like that, I mean, you know, I don't know, never mind my extreme libertarian political positions or whatever, but just, I think a typical American might go, eh, I don't know.
The Sheriff's Department has a couple of, you know, high-powered rifles for absolute emergency, you know.
It doesn't sound necessarily that bad.
I think what really has to be taken into account is the quantity of this stuff and the frequency with which it's used.
There's not a hostage-taking bank robbery every day, but there is a SWAT team raid a day anyway.
Right.
Yeah, and it's like half of the towns that, you know, are 50,000 people, or sorry, 80% of the towns that are less than 50,000 people have SWAT teams now, you know.
It's been a huge ramping up in the last, you know, 10, 20 years of who has SWAT teams.
I saw the University of California, Berkeley had a SWAT team there.
There was a prison SWAT team that was competing, you know, in all these kind of small towns.
You know, so you have these small towns with these big armored vehicles, guys coming out, you know, we saw in Ferguson with these kind of high-powered rifles at protest situations.
And then, you know, there's also changes that have happened in the last 10, 20 years as far as just weaponry is, you know, it used to be a police department had a couple of assault rifles, but now it's, you know, in most cities, the police cars have these now.
So there's kind of a general, you know, amping up, not just in SWAT teams, but across the board with policing in the kind of, you know, gear that police have.
And I think something that's important to understand is, you know, the police will say, well, we need this to protect ourselves, you know, it's dangerous out there, it's dangerous work.
But, you know, deaths of police have gone down, actual assaults on the police have gone down about 45% since their peak in 1971.
Violent crime across the board in the US is going down.
So we're kind of seeing these, you know, if you charted this out, you're seeing lines going opposite direction with, you know, how violent the country is versus, you know, how kind of militarized our police are.
Well, and it is not to beat anybody over the head with libertarianism or whatever, but it's sort of the basic, I think even some liberals agree about this, kind of the economics of bureaucracy where, you know, things like need have nothing to do with it at all.
It's just how much do the cops want them and how much is available and how much money can we get spent?
You know, which is not the way that people with a private fortune operate.
How much of my money can get blown here?
They only spend what they need to.
But for the government, like that movie Falling Down, you know, they got to spend enough to justify spending more next year.
And that goes for your local sheriff's M-16 budget, too.
Yeah.
And if, you know, if you're a local police force, isn't your money you're spending, you're applying for grants from Homeland Security, you know, and to get these grants, you just kind of, you know, they have to be terrorism related.
All right.
Now we got to stop and take this break, Shane.
I'm sorry.
I talked us all the way to the break.
I always do that.
I'm pretty bad at being a radio show host, really.
But I try.
It's Shane Bauer.
He's written The Making of the Warrior Cop at Mother Jones dot com today.
We'll be right back.
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All right.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott.
It's my show.
Scott Horton Show.
Telling about the soldiers quartered among us, you know, known as your local police department was Shane Bauer from Mother Jones dot com.
And, you know, Shane, they've actually skipped the armored up Humvee altogether and gone straight to the MRAP.
They've got these cops, as you document here, so armored up.
I was trying to daydream during the break there about what would it take for the state legislatures of America to not only stop this, but turn it around and make it, you know, less worse like it used to be back before it got all so militarized.
This is so far beyond what they could even need for all the drug raids in America that they could possibly try to justify it with.
I mean, such overkill.
It's like they're preparing for a war against us all, which I think we already agreed.
Now, they're just government bureaucrats spending money and doing good for themselves and whatever.
I don't see a big plot behind it or whatever is other than political corruption, you know, but they're they're so armed up.
What would it take?
I mean, it would take I dream a genie to make this go away somehow.
I mean, I don't have a genie, so I guess I'm wondering.
I guess I wonder whether you think they're like, yeah, no.
How far down are the slippery slope are we?
I guess is what I'm trying to ask you.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think, you know, one indicator is just kind of if you look at, you know, the kind of trajectory of SWAT teams, it was like started in the 70s for kind of, you know, these these kind of high risk scenarios like active shooters or hostage situations.
And now most SWAT raids are for drugs, you know, drug raids.
Most of them, 71 percent target people of color, even though these kind of, you know, situations where you have the active shooters, the hostage scenarios, the majority of those situations are involving white people.
So, you know, you have people, this kind of disproportionate targeting.
And, you know, it's there's there's situations that I talked to, for example, the University of California SWAT team.
I asked them, what do they do?
You know, they were doing this kind of scenario.
They were, you know, training for this terrorist situation.
And but what they do most of the time, the guy told me, is respond to muggings of students.
And this is, you know, this is kind of, to me, it seems like normal police work.
You know, you someone gets mugged, you go, if you know who it is, you go to the house and deal with it.
But now we have these kind of police that look like soldiers that are dealing with this kind of stuff, you know, coming up in the in the kind of APC looking vehicle.
Actually, the guy that was selling that vehicle told me some situations you might use that for.
He said, you know, use it for high risk situations.
And some examples he gave me was responding to a suicide threat.
You know, imagine you're suicidal.
You call the police or somebody called the police and you're suicidal.
And these guys SWAT team bust in the door, you know.
Right.
I got one of those right in front of me right now.
In fact, Will Gregg on Lew Rockwell's blog.
This happened to a guy just the other guy just the other day in Roy, Utah.
The guy called the Suicide Prevention Hotline and they sent the SWAT team and the SWAT team killed him.
And here's the quote from the cops.
At some point, those negotiations failed.
And unfortunately, the SWAT team was involved in a shooting and the subject is now deceased.
They killed him.
The guy that called the Suicide Prevention Hotline.
Shane, sorry, but, you know, you said and I got it right here from this week in the news.
Yeah, it's absolutely out of control.
So, yeah, now.
All right.
So let me give you a chance to talk about all the practice.
There's some pretty outrageous stuff in your reporting here at Mother Jones about what they imagine their role could be soon if they're lucky, I guess.
Yeah, there's, you know, so they're part of this convention was a 48 hour exercise where 35 SWAT teams are going for 48 hours straight.
I mean, straight, they're barely sleeping.
And they're going around the San Francisco Bay Area to these different scenarios.
You know, there's kind of active shooter type situations, vehicle takedowns.
There was one scenario that was a militant atheist group that was taking taking over a church.
There was they were going there's one in the bay on a boat where the story was that, you know, a terrorist there was an earthquake and a terrorist group had taken over this boat in the wake of an earthquake.
There was one that I that I watched was this kind of the scenario was that a Muslim man had kind of taken a Jewish man hostage.
And, and, you know, he had a bucket of chemicals that he was about to use.
And they kind of had to bust in and disarm him.
You know, so there were these kind of really, really high stakes scenarios.
And, you know, what was interesting to me about it, it was, you know, to me, it's like, if, if I was in one of those situations, yeah, I would want somebody to get me out, obviously.
But when I would ask these guys what they're doing, you know, it's this kind of drug raids, responding to muggings, mostly.
And then, you know, something else that was interesting was that one of the teams competing with the police was the US Marines.
And I talked to them after after one of their exercises and asked, you know, why are the Marines kind of competing with police?
And they said, you know, we learn a lot from, from the police, we, we go to these things, we learn tactics, and we bring them back to the military.
And the actual, actually, the, the spokesperson for Urban Shield was saying, you know, instead of talking about the militarization of the police, you should be talking about the policization of the military.
He was like, you know, the military is learning a lot from us.
They're taking things back to the military in the other direction.
That's funny.
Yeah, because, you know, Michael Hastings reported that the military hated being cops doing counterinsurgency theory under Petraeus is completely ridiculous.
They're supposed to stand around like Officer Smalley from The Neighborhood when they're not while Delta Force is killing people all night long in their, in their night raids and terrorizing the crap out of the entire population.
Whole thing's a farce.
But yeah, as far as the, the, the Marines and the Army and their counterinsurgency doctrine going back and forth with the cops, we've seen that.
We saw in, in 2007 in Iraq, where the Marines said to the LAPD, remember how we taught you counterinsurgency for dealing with the gang problem in the 1980s?
Well, we need you to teach it back to us because we kind of forgot how to do it.
And so the LAPD gave the Marines training outright and sent them back to Iraq.
Yep, that's us.
We're the Iraqis.
We're all Iraqis now.
The world's a battlefield and it's us and them, the state, the U.S. state and everybody else, it looks like to me, I think.
Yeah.
And we, you know, ultimately me and my colleague who is filming, we got kicked out.
You know, we were there for three days and one day we were at a, at a scenario near the Bay Bridge and kind of wanted to go along and they, you know, told us we couldn't film.
So we thought, okay, we'll go to the next one.
They said we could go, but not film.
So it wasn't worth it to us.
And we interviewed a drone vendor before that, who was there, all these exercises had different kind of companies that were selling their stuff right there at the exercise.
And, um, after the interview, the guy kind of said, I don't know about you guys.
I don't get a good feeling from you.
And, uh, we left and right after we left, this police officer came out and asked us for our media badges and, you know, said that we, uh, he got an order from his commander who called him and said, you know, these guys were filming in an unauthorized location and take it.
And, you know, we never got an understanding of what, I still have no idea what we were allegedly filming.
Um, but they can draw a free speech zone.
They can draw a free press zone wherever they want.
I guess we'll have to leave it there.
Thanks very much.
Great work here.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
That's Shane Bauer.
Everybody.
He's at mother Jones magazine.
Uh, oh, he's got quite a few here about the SWAT teams, but also here, the making of the warrior cop mother jones.com.
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