Radley Balko's The Rise of the Warrior Cop

            I adore Radley Balko. The libertarian journalist has spent years writing excellent pieces on government abuses in the criminal justice system, tackling subject matter from junk science to no-knock police raids. His blistering contempt for both major parties seems roughly appropriate, and he is likely the first writer to save a man’s life with blog posts. He has had the sort of career that makes economist Tyler Cowen look at an underexamined civil liberties issue and proclaim, “It needs its Radley Balko.”

            Balko’s first book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, is nonetheless a bit of a disappointment. The book chronicles how over the last fifty years, American police departments have become increasingly militarized in their equipment, tactics, and attitudes. Increased militarization was purportedly in response to incidents involving riots or gunmen, but militarized police units have spread to small towns, which use them primarily to serve drug warrants, a dangerous and pointless practice. The consequences, Balko writes, are dire—a gutted Fourth Amendment, police with us-against-them attitudes, and a flood of mistaken raids and gratuitous losses of life.

            Balko has researched and written on police militarization for years, but in a peculiar choice he begins not with his arsenal of research but instead in ancient Rome. He spends the first several chapters of the book on Rome, the Founding, and early American history before arriving at the real birth of police militarization in the 1960’s. The diversion is troublesome for two reasons. First, Balko a brilliant investigative journalist, is not a reliable guide through the massive historical literature on Rome and the Founding. While he does find evidence to support his claim (basically ‘smart people have been wary of domestic militarism for quite some time now’) in Rome and Philadelphia, I feel wary in trusting the broad conclusions of a non-expert when they happen to align so perfectly with the arguments he’s been making for years.

            At one point he notes off-handedly, without a citation, that rape was “almost non-existent” in colonial American towns (p. 27). Assuming that Balko is giving “rape” its modern meaning, as he should, this seems unbelievable. Marital rape was not criminalized in the United States until the 1970’s. Some colonial towns, of course, permitted slavery, and the rape of slaves by their masters was infamously common. At the very least, these forms of rape were not “non-existent.” What Balko must mean is that a certain kind of stranger rape was almost non-existent given the small and tight-knit communities. His sloppiness here is likely due not to some antiquated view of what constitutes sexual assault but instead because he is not used to writing about this era and forgot the necessary caveats. This criticism is nitpicking to be sure, but the inattention to detail makes Balko an unreliable narrator through the first several chapters of his book.

Second, the Romans and the Founders may have disapproved of the domestic use of the military and military-like institutions, but what exactly the reader is supposed to draw from that is unclear. Is it simply that the Romans and Founders were really smart, and the fact that they were worried should give us worry too? Or is the description of the Founding supposed to imply that the domestic use of military equipment and tactics is actually unconstitutional, and that courts should be intervening?

Balko’s description of what he calls “The Symbolic Third Amendment” reveals the fuzziness in his answer to the latter question. The Third Amendment, a ban on quartering soldiers, has not been the subject of controversy for the last couple of centuries. (Headline from The Onion: “Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year.”) But Balko writes that the Third Amendment went beyond a literal ban of quartering soldiers, that it was “a more robust expression of the threat that standing armies pose to free societies” (p. 13). He peppers the rest of the book with phrases like “the policies that Clinton implemented showed little understanding or appreciation of the Symbolic Third Amendment” (p. 193). Does a Symbolic Third Amendment mean that the Founders intended to prohibit domestic militarism? After all, constitutional amendments are there to ban stuff, not to express displeasure at them. Or does the Symbolic Third Amendment only mean that the Founders were concerned about domestic militarism (see e.g., The Third Amendment) and we should care not because they inserted a prohibition into the constitution but because they were really bright guys?

             The meat of the book is full of excellent reporting, but much of it reads less like a book on a social phenomenon and more like a series of magazine articles on individual incidents strung together. Balko also often goes beyond the narrower subject of police militarism to trace a broader history of the drug war, a history that can be found on other books on the subject like Dan Baum’s Smoke and Mirrors. Balko spends some time digging through the fine print of the legislative acts and policies that caused the growth in police militarization; given that these details are the truly novel analysis in the book, an even more in-depth treatment would have been welcome.

            Balko’s skillful retracing of the drug war, while not particularly novel, does provide some helpful reminders. Here are three: First, the men who developed our drug policies did so without a drop of serious balancing of costs and benefits, with a bellicosity that now seems unimaginable. William Bennett, George H. W. Bush’s drug czar said of drug users in 1990, “It’s a funny war when the ‘enemy’ is entitled to due process of law and a fair trial” and argued that he’d be interested in beheading drug dealers if it weren’t “legally difficult.” Second, Joe Biden is not the lovable rascal of The Onion’s imagination, but instead one of his generation’s most prolific trampers of civil liberties. For one example, and there are many, in 2002 he pushed the RAVE Act, a law that would have made club owners liable for running a drug operation if they sold Ecstasy paraphernalia like bottled water and glow sticks. Third, President Obama is not merely a disappointment by failing to curtail civil liberties violations; he is actively making them worse. He has made no attempt to roll back programs that deliver military equipment to police department and in some cases has expanded them.

            But maybe I’ll have to take all of this back. Three years ago, Michelle Alexander wrote The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I found the book full of interesting information but quite flawed. I doubted the helpfulness of its central analogy, and felt that its attempt to reach a mass audience while still being scholarly led to some sloppy errors and generalizations. By March 2012, the book had sold 175,000 copies. Last month, in a small bookstore in the airport of Lima, Peru, I browsed the small English section and there—sitting next to Tina Fey’s Bossypants—was The New Jim Crow. I could not have imagined that a polemic against mass incarceration would appeal to such a wide audience, and the thrill of seeing it gain mainstream traction far outweighed any gripes I had with its contents. Perhaps Rise of the Warrior Cop’s flaws—the redundant retracing of the drug war, the placement of police militarization at odds with Rome and the Founders, the endless string of anecdotes—are just sensible calculations to persuade a mass audience that police militarization is a problem. If he succeeds and that message reaches kitchen tables, jury deliberation rooms, and city counsel meetings across America, I take back all of these objections too.