page_title: Militarization of police
section_title: 20th Century
hierarchical_section_title: Militarization of police / United States / 20th Century
caption_attribution_description: Front Cover of a brochure selling Thompsons in the 1920's
context_page_description: Militarization of police refers to the use of military equipment and tactics by law enforcement officers. This includes the use of armored personnel carriers, assault rifles, submachine guns, flashbang grenades, grenade launchers, sniper rifles, and Special Weapons and Tactics teams. The militarization of law enforcement is also associated with intelligence agency-style information gathering aimed at the public and political activists, and a more aggressive style of law enforcement. Criminal justice professor Peter Kraska has defined militarization of police as "the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model."
  Observers have noted the militarizing of the policing of protests. Since the 1970s, riot police have fired at protesters using guns with rubber bullets or plastic bullets. Tear gas, which was developed by the United States Army for riot control in 1919, is still widely used against protesters.
context_section_description: During the early 20th century, police departments in the United States adopted several military innovations such as centralized chains of command, professionalization (training and discipline), military operations and tactics (in particular, colonial counterinsurgency tactics), "open-order" units, and counterinsurgency information-gathering techniques. Many of these reforms were influenced by practices from the Philippine–American War and subsequent U.S. occupation of the Philippines. An influential advocate for these police reforms was August Vollmer, who has been described as the "father of modern policing." Vollmer devised syllabi which were used in police training courses.
  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as police departments in cities such as Kansas City, Missouri and Kenosha, Wisconsin, began deploying automatic weapons, including the Thompson submachine gun, and armored cars in the 1920s and 1930s.
  George Fletcher Chandler, a veteran of the Pancho Villa Expedition and the first Superintendent of the New York State Police, was an early advocate of law enforcement officers wearing their weapons exposed on the outside of their uniforms.
  Police militarization was escalated in the 1950s and 1960s, an era in which race riots and anti-war protests were common in many U.S. cities. Some believe the seeming success of officers armed with military-style weapons and deployed to curtail the 1965 Watts riots, a six-day race riot sparked by conflicts with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) that killed 34 people, gave way to the trend of arming and equipping law enforcement officers with battlefield weapons. Joy Rohde, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy, has published research indicating that "militarization is a mindset ... a tendency to see the world through the lens of national security, a tendency to exaggerate existing threats." Rohde traces "the origins of modern militarized policing" to the Cold War-era anti-communist paranoia, and the idea that domestic civil rights activists were similar to foreign enemies, as manifested in activities such as the CIA's Operation CHAOS.
  According to Harvard University professor Elizabeth Hinton, the 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act ushered in a new era where the federal government facilitated the militarization of police at the state and local level across the United States.
  Over the last hundred years, with the rise of acts of terrorism and the availability of high-powered weapons, special weapons and tactics teams have been implemented and are being utilized across the United States. The 1960s to the 1990s, encounters with the sophisticated weapons of narcotics trafficking groups such as the Medellín Cartel and street gangs such as the Gangster Disciples, with organized, left-wing protesters at such events as the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the 1999 WTO Conference in Seattle, with urban riots such as the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, the 1967 Detroit riot, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots led law enforcement to reconsider their standard side arms. Law enforcement agencies encountered groups such as Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and incidents such as the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald's massacre, the 1986 FBI Miami shootout between eight FBI agents and two serial bank robbers in (in which the agents were out-gunned by the robbers).
  Researchers David N. Falcone, Edward L. Wells, and Ralph A. Weisheit describe a historical separation of police models between small towns and larger cities, which tended to function differently with separate hierarchical systems supporting each. The militarization of both rural and urban law enforcement has been attributed to the United States' involvement in wars during the 20th century, and to increasingly frequent encounters with violent protesters and criminals with automatic weapons, explosives, and body armor, although some attribute the militarization to the more recent campaigns known as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Historian Charles A. Beard argues that cul
caption: The "Anti-Bandit Gun": a 1920s advertisement of the Thompson M1921 for United States law enforcement forces
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