Peacemaking and Community

Police militarization, it turns out, is largely swagger, and short on substance. What strikes me as I study the Facebook photo of the Uvalde SWAT team, standing in their tactical gear, is the theatricality of the whole thing. Any thoughtful observer of policing over the past 20 years has come to recognize the increasing childishness of the rhetoric about police militarization generally, and SWAT specifically. The journalist Radley Balko and others have documented police units’ use of military insignia and tough-guy mottos totally unsuited to civilian agencies (examples: “Hunter of men,” “We get up early, to BEAT the crowds,” “Baby Daddy Removal Team,” and “Narcotics: You huff and you puff and we’ll blow your door down”). Police education and training standards are abysmally low. In Texas, more training hours are required to be a hairdresser than a cop. National standards for SWAT training and tactics are essentially nonexistent.

So much of this turns out to be LARPing: half-trained, half-formed kids playing soldier in America’s streets and schools. Many of the thousands of SWAT-team members in this country don’t have the training and expertise to respond like they’re SEAL Team 6. It’s time to stop pretending that they do.

After this tragedy, some people will call for pumping more weapons, more training, and more money into the rotting edifice of police militarism. Resist that temptation. The New York Times has reported at length on the school-security drills that local Uvalde police conducted just months ago. The Uvalde SWAT team’s Facebook page shows that it was drilling in schools to learn their layout as recently as 2020. The materials reviewed by the Times suggest that local police were working with up-to-date training and tactics manuals. Everything necessary was in place for police militarism to fulfill its promise last month. Its failure stems not from a lack of training, but from a fundamental misapprehension of the purpose and goals of policing. The solution is not more militaristic training, but attention to police professionalism.