Radley Balko > Quotes

“No one made a decision to militarize the police in America. The change has come slowly, the result of a generation of politicians and public officials fanning and exploiting public fears by declaring war on abstractions like crime, drug use, and terrorism. The resulting policies have made those war metaphors increasingly real.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“Turner [Reagan's "drug czar'] was especially determined to purge psychiatrists from federal drug agencies. "They're trained to treat," he said, "and treatment isn't what we do." Methadone was out, so Turner blocked advocates of the treatment who were still in the federal government from speaking about it publicly.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“have my own army in the NYPD—the seventh largest army in the world. —NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“In the summer of 2002, Biden was pushing his RAVE Act, an absurdly broad law that would have made venue and club owners liable for running a drug operation if they merely sold the “paraphernalia” common to parties where people took Ecstasy—accessories like bottled water and glow sticks. After attempting to sneak the bill through Congress with various parliamentary maneuvers, Biden was finally able to get a slightly modified version folded into the bill that created the Amber Alert for missing children.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will watch the watchers?)”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“As I've written and spoken on this issue over the years, I've even had current and former members of the military tell me they object to the word militarization--not because they disagree with the basic premise of what's happened to police departments in recent years, but because from their own experience, the military is more accountable and disciplined than many police departments today. Several have even told me that military raids on residences where they suspected insurgents may be hiding are done more carefully and with more deference to the rights of potential innocents than some of the SWAT raids they see and read about today. The police today may be more militarized than the military.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“Maryland cop Neill Franklin. “Number one, you’ve signed on to a dangerous job. That means that you’ve agreed to a certain amount of risk. You don’t get to start stepping on others’ rights to minimize that risk you agreed to take on. And number two, your first priority is not to protect yourself, it’s to protect those you’ve sworn to protect”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“He started America’s first SWAT team.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“Bad cops are the product of bad policy. And policy is ultimately made by politicians. A bad system loaded with bad incentives will unfailingly produce bad cops.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“I am an invisible man… I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man”
― Radley Balko, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South

“Changing a culture sounds like a tall order. And it probably is. “I think there are two critical components to policing that cops today have forgotten,” says the former Maryland cop Neill Franklin. “Number one, you’ve signed on to a dangerous job. That means that you’ve agreed to a certain amount of risk. You don’t get to start stepping on others’ rights to minimize that risk you agreed to take on. And number two, your first priority is not to protect yourself, it’s to protect those you’ve sworn to protect. But I don’t know how you get police officers today to value those principles again. The ‘us and everybody else’ sentiment is strong today. It’s very, very difficult to change a culture.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“The Numbers         Value of the property that Nixon claimed in 1972 was stolen each year by heroin addicts: $2 billion                    . . . claimed by South Dakota senator George McGovern: $4.4 billion                    . . . claimed by Nixon administration drug treatment expert Robert DuPont: $6.3 billion                    . . . claimed by Illinois senator Charles Percy: $10 billion–$15 billion                    . . . claimed by a White House briefing book on drug abuse distributed to the press: $18 billion         Total value of all reported stolen property in the United States in 1972: $1.2 billion         Number of burglaries committed by heroin addicts each year, per Nixon administration claims: 365 million         Total number of burglaries committed in the United States in 1971: 1.8 million”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“says the thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less volatile means of serving search warrants. “The thing is, it’s so much safer to wait the suspect out,” he says. “Waiting people out is just so much better. You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine. So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a routine traffic stop and you arrest him. That’s the safest way to do it. But you have to understand that a lot of these cops are meatheads. They think this stuff is cool. And they get hooked on that jolt of energy they get during a raid.”54”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38? With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun. —US MILITARY OFFICER WHO CONDUCTED TRAINING SEMINARS FOR CIVILIAN SWAT TEAMS IN THE 1990S”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“A study of Mississippi death investigations from 1981 through 1984 showed staggeringly high rates of deaths classified as “undetermined causes.” In DeSoto County, for example, the rate was 53 percent. In Benton County, it was 70 percent. The average across the country is around 3 percent.”
― Radley Balko, Dr. Death and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Corruption and Injustice in the American South

“The wisdom of limiting SWAT assaults to genuine emergencies was long gone. Across the country, the tactics Gates had conceived to stop snipers and rioters—people already committing violent crimes—had come to be used primarily to serve warrants on people suspected of nonviolent crimes.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“But the effort sent a signal to federal, state, and local law enforcement, in Customs and elsewhere, that marijuana was as serious a threat to US interests as spies, revolutionary infiltrators, and enemy combatants—the sorts of threats that would normally move the government to such an extreme crackdown at the border.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“This is simply false. It’s either a lie or a false statement arising from stunning inattention to the facts.”
― Radley Balko, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South

“When guarding buildings, mark a ‘DEAD’ line and announce clearly that those who cross it will be killed. Be sure to kill the first one who tries to cross it and to LEAVE HIM THERE to encourage the others.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“FIVE YEARS OF UNREST AND INCREASINGLY MILITARIZED police actions culminated with America’s very first SWAT raid in the final months of the 1960s. The December 1969 raid on the Los Angeles headquarters of the Black Panthers was also about as high-profile a debut for Daryl Gates’s pet project as he could possibly have imagined. Practically, logistically, and tactically, the raid was an utter disaster.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“About twenty years later, the Pentagon would begin giving away millions of pieces of military equipment to police departments across the country for everyday use—including plenty of grenade launchers.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“So long as partisans are only willing to speak out against aggressive, militarized police tactics when they’re used against their own and are dismissive or even supportive of such tactics when used against those whose politics they dislike, it seems unlikely that the country will achieve enough of a political consensus to begin to slow down the trend.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“THERE ARE TWO FORMS OF POLICE MILITARIZATION: DIRECT and indirect. Direct militarization is the use of the standing military for domestic policing. Indirect militarization happens when police agencies and police officers take on more and more characteristics of an army.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“Police need not announce themselves if doing so would jeopardize their safety, if they are in the midst of an emergency,”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“Using general warrants, British soldiers were allowed to enter private homes, confiscate what they found, and often keep the bounty for themselves. The policy was reminiscent of today’s civil asset forfeiture laws,”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), which would later become the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA),”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“What we might call the “Symbolic Third Amendment” wasn’t just a prohibition on peacetime quartering, but a more robust expression of the threat that standing armies pose to free societies.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

“The core problem with the medicolegal system in Mississippi is that it’s easily manipulated—it serves those in power. Historically, it has served as a means of preserving the state’s white power structure. But that’s only because those in power wanted it that way.”
― Radley Balko, Dr. Death and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Corruption and Injustice in the American South

“It was the deployment of British soldiers to colonial cities strictly for the purpose of enforcing the law that set long-smoldering hostilities aflame. Using general warrants, British soldiers were allowed to enter private homes, confiscate what they found, and often keep the bounty for themselves. The policy was reminiscent of today’s civil asset forfeiture laws, which allow police to seize and keep for their departments cash, cars, luxury goods, and even homes, often under only the thinnest allegation of criminality.”
― Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces