All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Jessica Katzenstein from Brown University's Cost of War Project, and she is the author of this important new study, The Wars Are Here, How the United States Post-911 Wars Helped Militarize U.S. Police.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thanks so much.
Great.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Cool.
Well, I read the whole thing, and it's really important, and I hope people will take a very good look at it.
As Randolph Bourne said back 100 years ago, a little bit more than that, war is the health of the state, and that's bad.
And so this is what we have.
A more contemporary, but also important quote along these lines was the great Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic, and he said, you give up your empire or you live under it.
And he made comparisons to other world empires who had had the choice of whether they would go ahead and abandon their empire and try to shore up what was left of their home country, such as the British did after World War II, basically cutting it loose, versus other empires who hung on until the bitter end and destroyed themselves, enslaved themselves on the way to total destruction.
And so those are our choices, and it looks like we're going to go ahead and keep our empire and live under it too, huh?
Absolutely, absolutely.
Now, so there's a lot of backstory in here about the history of policing and the rise of militarization, but I guess it makes sense to at least start in the 90s, can't cover all of it, but the drug war really cranked up in the 1990s.
And that really set the prelude for, well in the 80s too, but I think the militarization, the rise of the constant SWAT raids, rather than just holding them for supposed hostage situations and that kind of thing, that all really broke through in the 1990s before George W. Bush ever even showed up to make it that much worse, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
So the 1033 program, which is what I think a lot of folks who know something about police militarization are the most familiar with, that was formalized in 1990, 1991, the fiscal year.
And of course, as you're saying, we also saw a rise in SWAT raids and no-knock raids.
Radley Balko has a really great history of this in his book.
And yeah, I think that's part of what my report tries to point to, the deep roots, the deep roots of this militarization that we're seeing today in these protests that we saw in the raid on Breonna Taylor's home.
So much of that is connected to the war on drugs.
And then as you say in here, so much of the war on drugs and militarization overall is caught up in issues of race and class, which oftentimes overlap with each other and that kind of thing.
And I noticed you had even mentioned the attack, the FBI supported bombing of MOVE by the Philadelphia police.
And I always forget if it was 84 or 86.
Do you remember?
Yeah, I also always, I'm really bad at this.
It's okay.
I always forget.
But yeah, no, it was a horrible thing.
Civilians killed and all that.
But I was actually surprised at your omission of the Waco massacre in here, because it was such a major watershed in terms of the militarization of the police and including even had the FBI's special operations team, the hostage rescue team in alliance with the actual army Delta force waging the final battle against the Branch Davidians there.
And I don't know if you know this, and I guess a lot of people don't, but there were dozens of blacks who were members of the Branch Davidians and they were portrayed as these right wing Trans Am driving rednecks and all this kind of thing.
But there were, you know, at least a dozen or two dozen blacks who live there.
And that was actually one of the motivations of the ATF to raid them was because it was the ATF who were the white supremacists and they were mad at David Koresh for his alleged miscegenation with these women who were there.
And that was a big part of what got them raided in the first place was what rednecks they weren't on that issue.
And then that was, I know for a fact from back then, that was the watershed.
That was when the gates of every military base in America basically flung open wide for every sheriff's department and police agency to come in and get trained by soldiers.
Yeah.
No, that's a great point.
And you're right.
That is a, that is an omission in the report.
And just to say the, the move bombing I just checked is a 1985, so see, I was wrong on both counts.
It's right in the middle.
Yeah.
Right.
But yeah, no, Waco is a big one.
And you know, I think because it was right at the beginning of Bill Clinton era and the end of Reagan and Bush, and the whole kind of liberal mood was so caught up with the, the first hundred days of Bill Clinton right then.
And they just didn't want to even think about the other side of the issue in this case.
So there were very few leftists like Alexander Coburn and Bill Hicks and just a couple of others who really, you know, stuck their neck out and said, I don't care, you know, exactly who these victims are, but the way in which they are victims is absolutely intolerable.
What's going on, you know, what the government has done to them.
And so it was kind of a weird partisan thing where it just never became really an issue among human rights groups and, and that kind of deal.
And then instead it became a cause of the right, which helps kind of reinforce that issues for you.
And this issue is for me, or, you know, these kinds of things.
But the real issue is that what G Gordon Liddy called them, the jack booted thugs back when they were attacking the Branch Davidians and to seize their guns is essentially, yeah, exactly the same jack booted thugs in every sheriff's department and every police department in this land and the way that they treat people as though the bill of rights was never written.
Yep, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I mean, you're clearly more familiar with that part of the history than I am.
I'll send you some great propaganda, but anyway, but yeah, and anyway, I'm sorry, I just, it's really important.
I like to highlight that, but I don't mean to take away from, from your great work in here because there's so much of it and it's really mind blowing stuff.
And the kind of statistics that I think at first glance, people shouldn't believe because it sounds just so out of proportion, but then they should let that disbelief turn to shock when they read that, no, it's not 50, it's 60,000 SWAT raids a year in this country.
And then as you did that long division, I'll trust you 165 per day, every day.
Well, and all of these are just estimates and in a lot of States SWAT teams are not required to keep records in the state where I did my own field work in Maryland.
There's actually fairly decent record keeping, but nationally these are, these are just estimates and the way that it has been normalized is, is part of the story that I'm trying to trace.
And you know, there's so much more here that, that, that we could talk about that couldn't fit into the history section, what you're talking about with, with Waco and all of these other nineties, early two thousands events just being one piece of it.
But yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
And, and that's almost all over drug prohibition, right?
These are not people who are wanted on murder warrants or do you have those stats?
It's just contraband mostly, right?
Yeah, no.
I mean, the ACLU did a report on this that is widely cited a war comes home in 2014 and they were necessarily limited by the data that are available, but they found that 79% of SWAT deployments in the sample they had were for warrants and most of those were for drug investigations.
And of course they found that the vast majority of people subject to those investigations And this is the same terror that the people of Afghanistan are subjected to when they send in the Navy SEALs or the Delta force to do their, what they're called night raids when it's the foreign war.
And it's just like this.
And in most cases the object is to capture, not kill, but boy, do they sure kill a lot, just like in these.
And essentially it's the same standard.
Yep.
Yep, exactly.
And it's, it's fascinating when you delve into the logics for for how SWAT raids are done the police logics for it.
And the idea that I was often told by police was that bursting in and, and, and jumping in a house, raiding a house before anyone has time to react is actually safer for everyone because people don't have time to grab their guns or to flush their drugs or whatever.
But then of course we see in, in our wars and also at home, and again, this is the connection I'm pointing to here that, you know, people like Breonna Taylor, people like Ayanna Stanley Jones are, are victimized by the, the kind of the kind of violence that these SWAT raids license.
Oh, and they're such liars.
I mean, would they even pretend that there's a study somewhere that pointed to all the times that whenever they would hide behind their cars with a megaphone and say, come out with your hands up, that they were always just treated with ambush and massacred.
And that's what drove them to have to do it this way, because that's not the history of what happened here at all.
And you know what?
That is part of the lie about Waco that again, Hey, it was a SWAT raid in the first place, but nevermind begging that question.
The lie was they were greeted with an ambush.
So it would have made no sense for them to just go and knock on the door when in fact they weren't the people, you know, the cops shot first and the people only shot back to defend themselves.
But that was part of the narrative.
And in fact, in the Waco hearings, one of the leaders of ATF says the days of a couple of detectives walking up to a door and knocking on the door to serve a warrant of any kind is over because that's where we stand between the David Koresh's of the world and all the legislators here, you know, as though David Koresh was going around attacking other people.
But anyway, so, but that would have been the standard, you know, like on TV, when I was a kid, come out with your hands up, we got you surrounded, there's nowhere to go.
And I noticed there, and I know it wasn't you, it was them conflating the danger of them having the time to pull out a gun to target the cops with the danger that they might flush a little bit of contraband down the toilet, which is dangerous to exactly nobody except a prosecutor trying to make a case for an offense.
Exactly.
And that's where we get back to the drug war.
And actually, one thing I was told in my research with SWAT teams is that SWAT team, the SWAT team members, of course, argued that they were safe for people to do drug raids because narcotics teams, which also can conduct these kinds of raids in some places, will be much more concerned with getting inside and getting the drugs.
Whereas they would argue that SWAT teams are more professional because they're more sort of objective and disconnected from that overarching goal of getting the drugs.
And of course, there's a lot to question and discuss there.
But it kind of shows the complexity of these issues.
And then, of course, as you're saying, one gets into the post facto justifications for botched raids, as again, we just saw in the Breonna Taylor case.
Right.
And actually, I want to give you a minute to talk a little bit more about that case if you'd like to, because, you know, I think people probably know some about it, but maybe they don't know really what happened there.
But I wanted to point out that, you know, I know that there are some really tough cities in this country with very high crime rates and that kind of thing.
But there are also a lot of cities and towns that aren't like that at all.
Austin, Texas, for example, has an almost non-existent crime rate.
And including in the poorest neighborhoods on the east side of town, in the southeast and wherever and off of Rundberg and the northwest, the worst crime rates are not very high.
And so to have cops in just about any situation dressed up as soldiers and driving around in armored personnel carriers and all these things, it's almost like it's live action roleplay.
You know, LARPing, they call it, whereas they're pretending to be at war.
It's that there are no enemies anywhere.
You're talking about poor people with no shoes standing around selling nickel bags or something or some kind of thing has got to stand in for the insurgent menace that they're fighting against.
But they don't have anybody to fight.
There's nobody to fight.
And whatever gun violence takes place is almost always a crimes of passion rather than important organized crime or systematic robberies and muggings in certain parts of town, something like that.
So it's the kind of stuff that you can't prevent anyway.
And just, but they don't, I think when this started, I remember in the late 90s when these guys started really dressing up like soldiers all the time and driving around their armored personnel carriers that they knew and we knew and they knew we knew.
And it was all kind of absurd that it's kind of funny.
And they felt a little funny dressing up that way.
But then that kind of went away.
And now they've sort of normalized that idea.
And then, like you say, with the post hoc, they have to rationalize that, well, you know, the people of Austin really are that bad or else how come we're so militarized against them?
If it wasn't for us, this city would tear itself apart, you know, whatever it is that they imagine.
Or else how come they're not wearing a blouse and carrying a 38?
Right.
No, it's it's an incredibly seductive, incredibly seductive logic, I think, and an incredibly seductive sense of power when, you know, you're you're driving around in those armored vehicles and carrying heavy weapons.
And it's often justified by pointing to the uncertainty, the possibility of what could happen.
And what could happen is that there could be a mass shooter and we could need this equipment to deal with them.
And of course, we have seen mass shootings happen in places that no one would expect.
But at the same time, as I point out in the report, the 1033 program, for instance, requires you to use all of the equipment that you get through the program within one year or you have to return it to the Department of Defense.
So even if you justify obtaining this equipment, this this surplus military equipment, you know, by pointing to the possibility of terrorism, quote unquote, or of a mass shooting, if that doesn't happen within your jurisdiction within a year, which is plausible, then, you know, then you have to find some other way to use it.
Right.
And boy, isn't that funny, the way that that kind of incentive system can be set up and nobody questions it that because it makes sense on the face of it that, hey, if you guys don't need this stuff, you got to give it back.
But come on.
The flip side of that, obviously, is you better come up with a use for it.
Which means what are we talking about?
Military equipment at the being used at the expense of the civilian population of the town you're supposedly protecting.
Right.
Right.
And this outrage, you know, that that we all justly feel, I think it's important to situate that.
Many of us and I'm talking particularly about middle, upper class folks, white folks, you know, only see this equipment on TV when it comes to protests, when it comes to major protests that are getting a lot of media coverage like like the George Floyd protests.
But we're not seeing how they're being used in these SWAT raids every day.
And again, you cited that figure that I had in my paper about 165 times per day, which is almost certainly an underestimate.
So it's also important to see exactly, as you're saying, how much how much the use of this equipment and just as importantly, militarized tactics has been normalized and accepted.
Yeah.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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Well, and so back to Breonna Taylor here and how this is so much at the root of racial problems in this country right now, because it makes sense that overall, you know, supposedly the, you know, quote unquote, the black minority community in America, that they would feel like the white majority doesn't care about them and doesn't care about their rights, that we let this go on mostly at their expense, certainly relatively speaking, in terms of numbers at their expense.
But they would be wrong to presume that most white Americans of that majority have any power whatsoever and that this is our decision and our policy that we've decided to deliberately inflict it all on them whatsoever.
There's nothing we can do about it.
It's the cops of all races.
It's the government, the state itself, that is their enemy.
And yet they're right to recognize that they don't control it, but they're just wrong to assume that the power does devolve, broadly speaking.
And maybe I'm wrong to presume how many of them presume that, but it just seems like that's the frame of the argument is that racism itself is the problem when it's the state itself having the power to enforce racial prejudice that makes it racism really in the first place.
That's what makes it a system is these people showing up to work every day and putting on their costume jewelry and going out with their guns to enforce all these edicts against people.
And of course, against the people who have the least juice to fight back with within the system.
Yeah.
I mean, I might push back a little bit and say that I think racism and state power and white supremacy are all inseparable.
And yes, ordinary non-cops are not the ones doing these raids, but we know from systemic historical analyses of policing that policing as an institution protects, of course, state power is state power, but also enforces white supremacy and elite dominance at the expense of black folks, brown, indigenous, poor people.
Well, white supremacy, how broadly defined?
Oh, great question.
I mean, like it used to be in Texas that they had an all white primary because, hey, it's a private organization, no blacks allowed, but it's a one party state.
And so you don't get to participate.
Now that's white supremacy, but that's been illegal since the 60s.
And so, you know, some of these things, I'll give you the counterexample coming from the other way.
George W. Bush wrote an essay saying, after George Floyd, saying, when a win will white Americans erase the blemish of racial hatred from their heart?
And he literally that individual man is the son of a bitch who gave a tank to 18,000 county and city police organizations around this country and told them, but you better use it or else you have to give it back.
But he wants to say it's every everybody who just shows up at church Sunday morning and never did anything to anybody.
It's their fault for presumably having some, you know, wrong emotion rather than, no, it's him and the people who work for him and carried out his orders and did the things he told them to do that led us directly to the crisis that we're in right now, him and, you know, all of the people like him, Joe Biden financing the whole thing all along, of course, from the right, right now, that piousness and the post facto rehabilitation of George W. Bush is a whole conversation.
But I mean, I'm talking about white supremacy, not not only in the sense or not primarily in the sense of ideological white supremacy in terms of ideological beliefs, but in the broader sense in which, you know, critical race theorists and many others talk about white supremacy as a as a system that keeps black folks and brown and indigenous folks in particular in a subordinate position from which wealth can be extracted.
Yeah.
Although they really treat poor white people the exact same way, don't they?
Well, I point to poverty also and class is, of course, an important axis here.
What we of course, there's no race and class are inseparable in many senses.
But that's not to say that class is not also an axis of victimization.
We see that when one looks at the statistics of white folks who are killed by by police also, as far as I can remember, and as would make sense, the vast majority of those folks are not middle class or wealthy.
Right.
Yeah.
I think what it's all what it really comes down to is juice.
Right.
That's what they call it.
You ever see that show The Wire where this is the currency inside government agencies.
Right.
It's not money.
It's well, it is money, too, but it's juice and who's got juice with who and how much.
And so if cops pick on a guy like me, they know that there's some greater chance on the margin that my uncle's a judge or something.
And then they might have to get yelled at by the boss or some kind of inconvenience to them.
Whereas if I'm a poor black guy, they know that they can get away with splitting my skull open.
And the chances that my uncle's a judge are there somewhere on this scale, but they're pretty slim.
And so it's easier to go.
That's what makes it systemic.
But that's what makes it sort of not really even about race anymore at that point.
You know, it's I mean, it's clearly tied up in race.
But to make it about white supremacy and and black victimization only, I think, obscures more than it clarifies a lot of the times, you know.
I mean, I think that I would certainly argue that it that the question of policing in the U.S. and militarization specifically, as I argue, is is absolutely inseparable from from anti-blackness and the long trajectory of anti-blackness in this in this country.
But that's nowhere to say that that's the only the only axis of concern.
And that's also where I point to the colonial history of of U.S. policing and its inheritances.
And again, no one is saying that police police violence is confined to confined only to certain communities.
I don't think anybody is making that argument.
Right.
But the point is to look at the disproportionate on whom most of the violence falls, on whom most of the exploitation and oppression falls.
And that's very clear.
Yeah, no, I totally agree with you.
And it is very important, as you say that, like, look, to a lot of people, this stuff only happens on TV and you might kind of think that it only happens on TV.
That's not really happening in real life at all.
But then you get a statistic like 60,000 of these things a year.
And then you count there's only 52 weeks and then 50 because of Thanksgiving and Christmas, you know.
So what how in the world could that even possibly be right?
And what in the world is the government up to doing this?
And, you know, also I wanted to point out that speaking of of how tied up this is in the persecution of racial minorities and and this is one of the huge ones is you talk about the influence of the Marine Corps on the LAPD in the 1980s there with Chief Gates.
And I'm not sure if this is the same footnote that you had or not, but we had talked about this on the show back years ago about how the Marines actually had learned counterinsurgency from the LAPD and the LAPD had originally gone to, I guess, the British or, you know, whatever stupid Malaysia model, whatever it is, kind of counterinsurgency theory.
And then the Marines came and learned it from them for use in Vietnam.
And then by the 80s, the LAPD had forgotten it.
And so they went back to the Marines to then relearn counterinsurgency from them.
And then this was what they used for what's, you know, known as the drug wars in South Central L.A. in the 1980s, where you see just just like, you know, Petraeus and them in Iraq doing sweeps of fighting age males.
Basically, anybody south of the 10 is fair game between the ages of 12 and 30 or whatever it is, and just grab them all and charge them with as much as you can, lock them all down and all of this stuff.
And that, of course, was all caught up.
That whole drug war was generated by while the the DEA and the LAPD and whatever state police forces and whatever were cracking down on these markets.
It was Ronald Reagan's CIA that was filling those markets to the rim with cocaine.
And and, you know, all through Freeway Ricky Ross and supplying the Crips and the Bloods and, you know, in creating, you know, creating essentially the crack epidemic.
And it wasn't because and Gary Webb never said either that it was because they were trying to destroy the black community with this conspiracy to flood them with cocaine.
That wasn't it.
It was just that they didn't give a damn about them at all.
And that was why they did it.
They were perfectly comfortable doing it to them because who cares?
And that was their attitude.
And so not only did they have their community absolutely flooded with this massive supply of cocaine to pay for the contra war in Nicaragua, but then they had the full clamp down of the war on drugs against them, too.
And the implementation of this coin where nobody even knows how many completely innocent people got caught up in that who never even saw a rock before who but who still went to prison as part of all of that, you know, and maybe never made it out.
Yeah, I mean, this is where these connections are are incredibly important and incredibly clear because and, you know, absolutely would be a whole other paper to talk about the ways that the military has, in fact, learned from the police.
But this is where, again, I think it's it's so important to kind of disentangle the American exceptionalism and American centrism that that one can find at the heart of even some progressive discourses on police militarization in the U.S. because it obscures these connections that you're talking about between counterinsurgency tactics and the ways that drug markets have been instrumentalized and built up.
Obscures these connections and make it seem like, you know, that that that kind of repression and military violence that you're talking about throughout throughout our recent history are simply to be expected, whereas what we need to challenge is what's happening here.
And I and many others have also pointed to the fact that that militarization of the police at home and the violence of the U.S. military abroad are completely inextricable.
Right.
And now, which, by the way, did I read this right, that you say that even though the 1033 program is more widely known that the Department of Homeland Security parallel program of militarization of local police departments is even vastly greater, right?
Correct.
Yeah.
DHS is a homeland security grant program is massive.
It's been channeling over a billion dollars per year to lower levels of government since I believe it was 2003.
And that can be used for it can't be used to buy weapons, but it can be used for equipment like helicopters, for preparedness training and even to pay the kind of subsidiary costs of the 1033 program.
So police receive this equipment for free, but they're required to pay to transport and store and repair it.
And Homeland Security grant program can be used for that also under the banner of counterterror preparedness.
Yeah.
And then you say in here that do I have it right in my notes?
Do I remember it right that this out of the one point six billion.
Oh, I guess it was two different notes here.
It's one point six billion was for the 1033 program.
But then you have another section where you talk about either percents or dollar figures on how much of this stuff is quite literally Iraq war to surplus equipment that was brought home after the war.
Right.
I mean, as far as I know, there's no way to to really publicly track precisely where it comes from.
As I learned in my own research, some of the equipment that comes through the 1033 program dates back to the 60s, 70s.
So it's hard to tell.
But what we do see when we trace when we trace equipment transfers is that major upsurges kind of begin around I think it's about 2010 or so as we see mine resistant vehicles, more helicopters and so on being transferred in the wake of the military demobilization, particularly the drawdown from Iraq in 2010.
So, yeah, we have seen a ramp up that is very clearly tied to the post 9-11 wars.
Yeah, well, saw that coming, you know, not to say I told you so, everybody, but yeah, me and a lot of other people did, too.
And here we are living deep in the future now, looking back on this gigantic folly and the consequences for our own society here.
And which, you know, the one thing about it, when it's this stark, when the bad news is this stark, then at least maybe it can provoke people to imagine what might have been had we thought a little bit more clearly about what we were doing, you know, rather than going through this kind of stuff over and over again.
Of course.
And, you know, this is only one piece of it.
And I know that you've covered this in many different contexts in your show.
Cost of War Project also covers different components of the toll of these wars.
Yeah, with no peers, you do, by the way, I'd like to say this is the very best work that the rest of us rely on, of course, at the Cost of War Project.
I'm happy to be a part of it.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show, Jessica.
It's been great.
I really hope that people will go and read this thing.
It's just 20 pages.
It's a nice, good study.
Lots of facts, but not too long.
You get through it.
The wars are here.
How the United States post 9-11 wars helped militarize U.S. police by Jessica Katzenstein.
Thank you again.
Thanks so much, Scott.
It's great to talk to you.
The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
