It only takes a few minutes of watching the national news before you will see a crime story with police dressed in battle gear. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Radley Balko traces the history of US law enforcement to see how we got to this.
Mr. Balko thinks the founding fathers, distrustful of a standing army, would be appalled by today’s approach to law enforcement. Of course, the United States has changed dramatically over the last 240 years. The City of Boston had 15,000 residents then and has grown to over 650,000 today. The colonial era approach to policing of constables and private justice would not work today.
Mr. Balko takes the position that the current approach of militarization of the police also does not work.
Mr. Balko keys the rise of militarization to one event: the Texas Bell Tower Sniper. Local police did not have the weapons or techniques to end that mass shooting.
The next advancement was the work of Daryl Gates in Los Angeles. 
He pushed for the creation of the first SWAT team. I remember that television show. But they were far from the battle-clad soldiers of today’s SWAT.
Next up was Nixon’s “war on crime” that pushed federal money to local police. That transformed into the “war on drugs” and the latest iteration, the “war on terror”. Each of those came with federal money for local police to buy weapons. Surplus military gear was made available to local police. Who would not want to have a tank for their police force.
All that money lead to this: Battle-clad, heavily armed police.
Mr. Balko proposition is that when they have these tools, they use them. Even if other police techniques would have been more effective. Rise of the Warrior Cop is full of stories of botched police raids using excessive force to invade people’s homes for non-violent offenses.
He further presents the theory that acting more like the military than civil protectors, police forces develop an “us versus them” mentality. It’s clear in the war who the enemy is. It’s not clear on the streets.
Many will dismiss Rise of the Warrior Cop as anti-police, libertarian propaganda. There is no doubt that Mr. Balko brings his viewpoint to the story and his Cato Institute philosophy.
This book was published in 2013 and predates the current Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter debates that are happening today. The book takes a harsh look at the development of policing that got us to this point. It’s not just the militarization of the police, but the erosion of Constitutional rights that I find troubling.
