As state and local authorities across the country continue to clamp down on citizens defying coronavirus-induced stay-at-home orders, many onlookers have found the heavy-handed tactics used in some cases quite jarring.
In one example, the police department in Ector County, Texas, sent in a SWAT team with guns drawn on Tuesday to arrest eight people, some armed, for reopening a bar.
Gabrielle Ellison, who owns Big Daddy Zane’s bar in West Odessa, announced she would be reopening her doors in violation of Texas’s coronavirus lockdown. Ellison called the police ahead of time to inform them of her decision. She told local affiliate KPEJ-TV, “The possibility of losing my license — heartbreaking. But they’ve already taken my income.”
The reopening never happened.
The Ector County Sheriff’s Department sent in military-style vehicles to help make their arrests, a video of which went viral. Many were alarmed by what they were seeing, as they never thought it would happen here in the United States.
Kelley Paul, the wife of Republican Sen. Rand Paul, shared the video and commented on Twitter, “Well [Rand Paul] has been sounding the alarm about the militarization of police and federal agencies like EPA deploying SWAT teams for years!”
Well @RandPaul has been sounding the alarm about the militarization of police and federal agencies like EPA deploying SWAT teams for years! https://t.co/HpkdiGErKE
— Kelley Paul (@KelleyAshbyPaul) May 6, 2020
Indeed. The libertarian-leaning senator has long warned about the dangers of a militarized police force responding to citizens in times of crisis.
During the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, that exploded after a police officer shot 18-year-old African American Michael Brown, Rand Paul observed in a Time magazine op-ed, “There is a legitimate role for the police to keep the peace, but there should be a difference between a police response and a military response.”
“Not surprisingly, big government has been at the heart of the problem,” Paul wrote, emphasizing the government-induced reasons behind why police militarization has escalated. “Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies — where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement.”
Whatever you think of the increasing number of people defying stay-at-home orders, more of the potential responses could look like military actions, similar to what went down in Ector County, Texas, rather than conventional policing.
Alongside libertarian Republicans such as Paul, the American Civil Liberties Union and even some in law enforcement have warned about the specter of police militarization haunting the foreseeable future.
This draconian enforcement is happening at the local level, but the federal government is still largely to blame.
Charles Koch Institute criminal justice reform expert Jeremiah Mosteller explains:
Over 8,000 law enforcement agencies have utilized the 1033 program to access more than $6 billion worth of military equipment such as night-vision goggles, machine guns, armored vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers, and military aircraft. The increased use of military equipment has coincided with an increased use of military tactics, such as SWAT teams and no-knock raids, by law enforcement agencies. In recent years, police departments from Ferguson, Charlotte, and Southampton have received criticism for their use of military tactics. One study found that use of paramilitary-style teams by law enforcement increased by more than 1,400 percent since 1980.
Will we see more military-style responses from local law enforcement against citizens who are ending or protesting the lockdown?
The federal government has made it more probable than not.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
