03/12/13 – Kara Dansky – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
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And I love this headline.
Music to my ears.
ACLU launches nationwide investigation into police use of military technology and tactics.
On the line is Kara Dansky, senior counsel to the ACLU Center for Justice.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
I'm doing great.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
And so it looks like you guys are just getting started, but you already know a lot.
You've got a little bit of a press release here.
Towns don't need tanks.
And strange that that would even come up.
Towns have tanks.
But then again, I guess it's been like this for quite some time.
It really started with the drug war.
And then, of course, now we're a decade into the terror war.
And so we have now the advent of homeland security, et cetera, et cetera.
More reasons, supposed claimed reasons for these things to be distributed around to our local, state, county and city police agencies.
So I guess, can you just sort of give us an overview for starters here about the project itself?
And then maybe we can get into what you already know that made you want to investigate further here?
Absolutely.
So one of the areas, as you know, that the ACLU focuses on is the area of policing.
And as we've been doing our work in policing, we started to see, as you mentioned, these anecdotes or these incidents where we thought that there were circumstances where the police had become excessively militarized.
And so we started to look around and we saw more and more incidents of this.
And we started to ask the question, well, how pervasive is this issue?
And we realized that we really don't have much of a sense of exactly how pervasive it is.
And so we decided to launch this investigation.
And so we got together with a number of our affiliates.
We have 23 ACLU state affiliates who have filed over 255 public records requests with their local law enforcement agencies and National Guard offices.
And really, the point of the investigation is to get a sense of how large this problem is.
So then, in other words, at the end, you want to be able to tell us how many assault rifles, how many so-called assault weapons, how many armored personnel carriers, how many tanks, how many sound blasters, how many whatever they got, huh?
We'd love to be able to tell you that, at least in the jurisdictions where we filed public records requests.
We'd also love to be able to tell you where the funding for this weaponry has come from, how much of it came from DOD, how much of it came from DHS.
And we'd also like to give you a lot of information about SWAT deployments.
So we're asking, for example, local police departments to give us information about the standards that they require before deploying a SWAT team, the number of incidents in which use of force is used during a SWAT deployment, the number of incidents in which a person is hurt or property is damaged during a SWAT deployment.
So we'd love to be able to tell you all of that.
Oh, you know, I just can't wait to get my hands on this.
And, you know, especially there are already people who are doing a lot of great work along these lines, like Radley Balco and Will Grigg and a lot of others who I'm sure are going to, you know, make a lot of great journalism out of all the data that you guys are able to pull together.
And, you know, that one that you mentioned there really caught my attention, the standards for SWAT raids, because a lot of times it seems like, and I don't really know, we only see the SWAT raids.
So maybe there's like a confirmation bias kind of thing on TV that way or whatever.
But it doesn't seem like cops ever knock on anyone's door and say we have a search warrant, please open up anymore.
It seems like they always just err on the side of what they call officer safety, which means overwhelming force, military style SWAT raid, you know, forced entry and grenades, etc.
That's another issue that we don't know about and that we've asked.
So we've asked for the police departments where we filed record requests to give us the number of SWAT deployments that were deployed with a no-knock warrant, which is essentially a warrant, as you know, that a judge has issued that authorizes the SWAT team to go ahead and enter a person's home without knocking first.
Now, do you have any kind of ballpark on that yet?
Or we just have to be patient?
We really have no idea.
Yeah, we have to be patient.
We do know that when we launched this project and announced that we were doing it, we tapped into something really powerful that seems to be happening.
A lot of people went to Facebook and went to Twitter.
We got a lot of calls on our public line indicating a lot of people were really concerned about this issue, wanted to join the ACLU, wanted to give more money to the ACLU.
So we know that at least on some level, people are very concerned about this issue.
So when we've concluded our investigation, we're looking forward to, at a minimum, engaging in a tremendous amount of public education on this topic because we think that there's a lot of interest out there.
Yeah, there definitely is.
And I think a part of that is because of the changing media landscape where now local police killings that take place by, say, city police or county sheriff somewhere, that usually would only be local news, not even regional news.
They would only be on TV, if you're lucky, even just in that one city.
But now, thanks to Facebook and things like that, virtually every police shooting is national news, at least to a great many of us.
And that concern, that's a nice word for it.
We're scared to death of these people.
I mean, they really have militarized to a terrible degree.
And just this morning, there was one going around about a woman got into a dispute with the CPS over whether she ought to be giving these powerful psychiatric drugs to her daughter that she said were making her daughter violent.
So what they do, they send in virtually the cavalry to steal this woman's child away for six months.
And, you know, in this case, it turned out, of course, the judge agreed with her that they had no right to do any of this.
But this is kind of like, you know, it's like a if not a Waco style mask, or it's at least like an Elian Gonzalez raid a day or or some estimates, I think, say that there are 100 SWAT SWAT raids a day in this country.
So you can see how if it's if it's even a half of a percent of those have a wrongful shooting, that's a lot of dead people on a regular basis, you know, innocent people.
Well, and right.
And as I said, we really don't know the extent of this yet.
And that's why we wanted to launch the investigation.
But for us, fundamentally, we think that policing should be about protection, not combat.
And as you know, the police and the military operate according to fundamentally different authorities.
And so if, in fact, these lines are being blurred, you can imagine there could be a lot of confusion as to what the proper role of the police officers should be.
And we'd really like to get them back to proper traditional law enforcement policing tactics and not these more militarized tactics that we're concerned about.
Another major point that we're seeing is that, as you mentioned, this really started with the drug war.
And so we're very concerned that the military policing might be disproportionately affecting poor communities and communities of color, which, of course, for decades have been disproportionately targeted by the drug war.
And the third point is, as I've been saying, we just really don't know.
The public has, I think, been kept in the dark about the militarization of policing.
And the public really has a right to know how their police departments are spending their tax dollars and how they're policing their communities.
And I guess in the same world, Congress would have already done this investigation for you.
Their staffers would have put out a 6,000-page report on the whole thing.
But they're nowhere to be found, huh?
Well, you know, we'll see.
In addition to looking at local police department activity, as I mentioned, we're also looking at federal funding for some of these pieces of equipment and weaponry that the local police are getting.
And so, you know, we'll be considering down the road eventual policy goals and recommendations that we might make either to Congress or to the federal agencies or to our state and local police departments.
But again, we just don't know yet.
And now, in your press release, you guys talk about the use of a predator drone in a case of six cows.
And I think this was, what, last summer, we talked with Will Grigg about this at the time.
Can you remind us of this story?
This is the kind of thing, I guess, if there's a specific question I have about this story, it would be who said they could or who was the highest-level person who didn't think he had to ask anybody else?
Or how did that happen?
Didn't think he had to ask anybody else?
Or how did that work on the decision-making there?
Do you know?
Right.
Well, the actual predator drone used in that circumstance was owned by the DHS Office of Customs and Border Protection.
And so, DHS Customs and Border Protection does have a number of predator drones that it uses along the border.
And so, this was a local police department in North Dakota that was investigating an individual or a family who was accused of not giving back some cows that had wandered onto his property.
And there were allegations, as I understand it, that the individual or the family in question might have had some weapons on the property.
And so, the police were having some trouble conducting their investigation and evidently went to the Office of Customs and Border Protection and asked for permission to borrow the predator drone.
And Customs and Border Protection evidently said, sure, you can borrow our predator drone.
So, that's, as I understand it, what happened in that case.
Yeah.
And it was such an innocuous thing as far as, you know, the actual criminal case supposedly that they were working on, but then, oh, it was an anti-government extremist, which means, I guess, a right-wing political activist, right?
And so, therefore, this is some pseudo level of terrorism we have to, you know, use as some kind of bland.
They didn't really even invoke it as an excuse, but just sort of as the background context why it was a little bit more okay than if they did it to somebody else, right?
Well, it's a little bit puzzling because police are equipped and prepared to deal with circumstances in which individuals are resisting arrest.
And I don't know if this individual was.
That's what I understand to have been happening.
But I don't think it's in the regular course of local law enforcement to call out a predator drone to effectuate an arrest of a single individual and his family.
So, it certainly seems out of the ordinary.
Yeah.
And now, I really can't wait till y'all get to the part about the training materials because it certainly does seem like at some point in the 90s and then probably again after September 11th, there's sort of been a revolution in what the cops are taught from the get-go and how they're supposed to react to situations and that kind of thing.
It seems like you don't have to go to a SWAT team, right, to find a cop who in a situation that you would have never predicted it or something would go and escalate something into a real crisis that you would think, you know, Andy Griffith, you know, in Mayberry would have talked everybody down and calmed everything down.
But cops just seem to, they put officer safety, what they call officer safety above everything and that means citizen safety is way down below the dog safety, you know, the canine officer's safety.
And it seems like there's got to be entire textbooks like that, right, where they threw out the old textbook where you're supposed to have respect for people and they put in this new one where now you're sort of a paramilitary death squad leader.
You know, training is one of the areas that I think many of us are most in the dark about actually because we know a fair amount at least about the source of funding for some of this equipment that they're using.
And so we know, for example, that there are programs through the Defense Department whereby police departments can essentially file an application and request military equipment from the Defense Department and get it at no cost to the local police.
And so we know that's happening and we're looking for records to document where that's happening and how extensive it is, but we know that that is a program that's in place.
Similarly, we know that the Department of Homeland Security makes funding available for local and state law enforcement to conduct some of their hometown or homeland security programs.
And again, we're looking for documentation and records of exactly how extensive that is, but we know that that is in place.
And we also know, of course, a lot about SWAT deployments, and we're hoping to document some of those incidents and the frequency of the incidents.
And as I mentioned before, some of the standards surrounding them.
But the training piece is something that we really know very little about.
And so I'm very encouraged and excited to see what we find out through this investigation, specifically on that issue of how are local police departments being trained nowadays.
Yeah, particularly in regards to Muslims, but in a lot of different areas as well, I would guess.
Well, you know, some of the examples that we posted on our website, you know, everyone's free to go on the ACLU website, ACLU backslash militarization.
And we've got some examples of incidents where we've seen this happening.
And, you know, frankly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of discrimination here.
We had one tragic example in which a seven-year-old African American girl was killed during a SWAT raid.
There's another example in which a Latino male Iraq veteran was killed during a SWAT raid.
So, you know, we can't really say at this point whether it's targeted in any of those ways, except to the extent that, as I mentioned earlier, we are concerned that because the increase in SWAT deployment started initially with the drug war, that we might be seeing a disproportionate amount of SWAT deployments happening in poor communities and communities of color.
But we'll find out.
Well, and it seems like the economics of Capitol Hill mean that as the wars wind down, like in Afghanistan, supposedly soon, in Iraq a couple of years ago, that means that they have a lot of excess equipment and they really don't like just throwing it away or making artificial coral reefs out of them and stuff.
They'd rather give them to cops.
And this has really been going on, especially since, you know, at least Waco, that, you know, I mean, you can watch.
In fact, it's not even just cops anymore.
The TV show Cops, they actually have Kansas City SWAT and I think Miami, different city SWAT.
And they use armored personnel carriers to knock people's houses down on a regular basis.
At least, you know, if you let TV tell the story, they a lot of times they attach the chain and pull the front of the house right off right there on TV.
So you can see how, you know, not to be too cynical about it, but there's a lot of people involved in the manufacturing and distribution of armored personnel carriers and they have lobbyists and they have their favorite congressman and they have associations inside the government departments and there are a lot of different people, not just them, a lot of different people involved in, you know, benefiting themselves off of these kinds of things.
So it's not just a conversation where, you know, with the ACLU on one side and bad policy on the other saying, geez, should we keep doing this or not?
There's a bunch of incentives built into keeping doing the wrong thing.
And the ACLU has this giant hill to climb.
Well, it's definitely not a partisan issue, as you point out.
And, you know, just to that point, we came across one example in which a town, I think it was in New Hampshire, applied for funding for a tank, essentially, for their small town and in submitting its application said they needed it for domestic terrorism.
And when interviewed about that, the city council person said, oh, you know, we just put terrorism on the application because that's what we have to say to get the funding.
But really, let me see if I can get the exact quote.
Really, that's just something you put on a grant application to get the money.
What red blooded American cop isn't going to be excited about getting a toy like this?
So that's really what we're dealing with.
There you go.
And then eventually, hey, what are you going to do with this thing except pull the front off of somebody's house?
You're not just going to let it sit in the garage all day, year after year, you know, month after month.
You got to do something with it.
Not just train, you know, use it on somebody.
Well, you know, as we're conducting this investigation, as I mentioned, we've only been able to to go out to 23 states and the local police departments within those states.
So we're actually hoping that people will send us other examples of when they know things like this have happened.
And so if any of your listeners have additional examples of this kind of thing, I'd really encourage them to go ahead and send them into the ACLU.
They can use the ACLU's main contact page.
They can contact their state ACLU affiliate to see which police departments have received public records requests.
But really, I would encourage your listeners to share the information that they have about incidents like this happening.
Yeah.
Well, and I'd encourage them to support the ACLU, too, because who else is going to file this many lawsuits at the same time about something so important and get this work done?
It's got to be done.
And it's the lawyers that show up to work at the ACLU every day that do it.
So thank you very much for that.
Well, I appreciate it.
And for your time on the show as well.
OK, you're welcome.
All right, everybody.
That is Kara Dansky, senior counsel at the ACLU Center for Justice.
And that's some good work.
You should help them out, maybe.
What do you think about that?
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