The Road to Ferguson: Geographies of Police Militarization and the Role of the 1033 Program

• In Event: Police Use of Force and the Media

Abstract

Concerns about police militarization have become an important public policy issue since the aggressive police response to the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri. The use of military-style equipment to confront protestors was a stark visual reminder that many police departments in the U.S. have used federal programs to acquire surplus military equipment, including weapons, armored vehicles, and body armor. We explore the geographies and histories of one the most important programs, called 1033, which supplies police with military equipment under the rationale of prosecuting the War on Drugs. The legal blurring of the police and the military has been ongoing for decades at the national scale but this has resulted in an uneven landscape of police militarization at the county scale. We also investigate one of the most common global arguments for why police become militarized, which is the presence of SWAT-style paramilitary teams in urban settings, finding little support for that claim. Ruling out such simple explanations provides a foundation upon which more sustained inquiry can rest and illustrates that geographic perspectives are important in moving toward a more nuanced understanding of the trajectories, causes, and consequences of police militarization.

Authors

• Steven Radil, University of Idaho

• Lanny Dean McAden, University of Idaho