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More security may actually make us feel less secure

2018; National Academy of Sciences; Volume: 115; Issue: 39 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1073/pnas.1813014115

1091-6490

Vesla M. Weaver,

Crime Patterns and Interventions

Even as the federal government increasingly deposits its surplus military supplies with local police departments and as Americans are more exposed to militarized police forces, study of its historical political development (1) or examination of its effects for American communities has mostly escaped scholarly attention. No national data source across the nation’s 18,000 police agencies tracks the incorporation of tactics, personnel, or gear traditionally used in military operations abroad. Without such a repository, scholars can neither measure the prevalence of police militarization and how it varies across American communities, nor develop empirical insights about how these developments affect the security of Americans. In his PNAS article, Jonathan Mummolo expands scholarly understanding of the consequences of increasingly militarized police forces in the United States, its politics, and its racial geography (2). Compiling detailed administrative data in one state of one kind of militarization, “special weapons and tactics” (SWAT) deployments, a national panel of which states acquired a special tactics team, and an original survey experiment of different levels of militarization, Mummolo examines whether militarization contributes to the safety of police officers, local crime reduction, and confidence in police among Americans. Militarized policing does not result in the anticipated public safety gains nor does it abet officer safety; it does impair confidence in police and elevate perceived crime. The logics and capacity of American police institutions have undergone a dramatic shift over the past half century (3, 4) spurring debate about the consequences of policing for public safety, trust, and other aspects of well-being. A prominent through-line of this work is that police interactions cause several negative outcomes: involuntary encounters with police have been linked to an increase in posttraumatic stress disorder (5), declining grades and test scores among American youth (6), legal estrangement (7), strategic avoidance of people, places, and … [↵][1]1Email: vesla{at}jhu.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1