In the previous essay in this series, we discussed how the police have become increasingly militarized, aided and abetted by US government policies that promote the hiring of veterans as cops, under the Vets to Cops program, and the outfitting of local police departments with surplus military equipment, under the Department of Defense's 1033 program, ranging from night vision goggles to armored vehicles. The effects of militarization of our police forces has caused many citizens to become very alarmed at the prospect of military like forces occupying our cities and towns.

"We are in the midst of a historic transformation," wrote Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter B. Kraska in 2007 in regard to police militarization. "Attempting to control the crime problem by routinely conducting police special-operations raids on people’s private residences is strong evidence that the U.S. police, and crime-control efforts in general, have moved significantly down the militarization continuum."

The militarization of our police is actually far worse than what most citizens see on their public streets. One of the worst effects of militarized policing is the enormous use of SWAT teams for every day policing activities including the execution of search warrants. Aided by a June, 2006 decision by the Supreme Court to allow no knock searches, police are now regularly using SWAT teams simply to execute search warrants.

The June 15 decision, by a 5-4 vote, gives police a green light to break down doors at all hours of the day or night, terrorizing occupants and ransacking homes, without any meaningful legal consequences, even though the Constitution prohibits such actions.

The lead opinion, authored by Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, the ideological leader of the high court’s right wing, lays the groundwork for eliminating the “exclusionary rule” altogether, rendering the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures”—a key provision of the Bill of Rights—a dead letter.

Many poorer neighborhoods and people of color know far too well about SWAT teams due to the War on Drugs and its uneven emphasis upon people of color. What is not widely reported is how often these raid have been executed on the wrong homes and wrong people, often with traumatic and tragic consequences such as was the case with the wrong address SWAT raid on the home of the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland.

Cheye Calvo, mayor of the small town of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, was in his bedroom one night, changing clothes for a meeting. His mother-in-law was in the kitchen, cooking a tomato-artichoke sauce. Suddenly, Calvo heard an explosion and the sound of gunfire. Heavily-armed men clad in black burst into the house. He saw his mother-in-law lying face-down on the kitchen floor at gunpoint. His two beloved black Labradors lay dead in pools of blood. Clad only his boxer shorts, the mayor was bound and forced to kneel on the floor. This was it, he thought. He was about to be executed, but he knew not why.

In June of 2014, the ACLU compiled a 98 page report (pdf), titled War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing, which details the problems associated with the militarization of police and the overuse of SWAT teams. Far too often, SWAT team raids with the accompanying flash grenades have resulted in significant property damage, the killing of family pets, the injury to innocent victims and even the killing of innocent people.

"Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38?" asked one U.S. military officer who trained police SWAT teams in the 1990s. "With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun."

As this quote implies, SWAT raids—conducted hundreds of times per year in cities large and small—foster a masculine culture of violence and a worship of a "techno-warrior" image of policing. SWAT raids are the ultimate in power, an adrenaline rush that is quickly habit-forming. Recruitment videos that emphasize this culture may, in turn, be changing the type of individual who seeks to become a police officer.

In 2011, The Atlantic published a very insightful article in the effects of the militarization of policing and ties its precipitous rise to the War on Terror. One of the key points made in this article is that the militarization of the police has led to a dangerous change in the culture of policing. In other words, it is not just the military equipment and gear that has changed in local police departments of all sizes, but even more ominous is the mindset of those hired to ostensibly "serve and protect."

The most serious consequence of the rapid militarization of American police forces, however, is the subtle evolution in the mentality of the "men in blue" from "peace officer" to soldier. This development is absolutely critical and represents a fundamental change in the nature of law enforcement. The primary mission of a police officer traditionally has been to "keep the peace." Those whom an officer suspects to have committed a crime are treated as just that - suspects. Police officers are expected, under the rule of law, to protect the civil liberties of all citizens, even the "bad guys."

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Soldiers, by contrast, are trained to identify people they encounter as belonging to one of two groups -- the enemy and the non-enemy -- and they often reach this decision while surrounded by a population that considers the soldier an occupying force. Once this identification is made, a soldier's mission is stark and simple: kill the enemy, "try" not to kill the non-enemy.

To the average observer, local police departments' use of military equipment like they did in Ferguson, Missouri, has been the most disturbing aspect of the militarization of police. Even when the equipment is not being used in crowd control situations, often local police will proudly display their latest acquisition of a military vehicle in a local parade or other similar venue. And the amount of military equipment distributed to local police departments under the 1033 program is staggering. For example, in 2013 alone, the Pentagon distributed 165 MRAPs, or mine resistant ambush protected vehicles, to local police department and even to Ohio State University police with over 730 more requested by local police and sheriff's offices.

An Associated Press investigation of the Defense Department military surplus program this year found that a disproportionate share of the $4.2 billion worth of property distributed since 1990 — everything from blankets to bayonets and Humvees — has been obtained by police and sheriff's departments in rural areas with few officers and little crime.

But as disturbing as it is to see military equipment on the streets of our cities and towns, if only in a parade or public display, the mindset behind the acquisition of such military equipment, including personal body armor and other non-vehicular equipment is far more dangerous.

While there have been no empirical studies done on the psychological effect upon the officers themselves as a result of using military grade equipment in local policing, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the militarization of policing has changed the way the officers view themselves in relation to the public which they are charged to serve and protect. The old saying that "if you have a hammer, everything appears to be a nail" seems to be applicable based upon anecdotal reports involving highly militarized police.

At the most specific level, these questions haven’t been studied empirically. But a great deal of social-psychological research, as well as important anecdotal evidence from law-enforcement specialists themselves, suggests that militarized policing can greatly inflame situations that might otherwise end peacefully.

The so-called “weapons effect” can partly explain what’s going on in Ferguson and elsewhere. The mere presence of weapons, in short, appears to prime more aggressive behavior. This has been shown in a variety of experiments in different lab and real-world settings.

In September 2014 shortly after the Michael Brown shooting and the resultant Ferguson police patrolling the streets with officers dressed in military camo with military grade weaponry and the police perched upon a military vehicle aiming assault weapons at unarmed civilians, Salon published an article referencing a Northwestern University study (note: pdf file) on how clothing can created a psychological change in the wearer. While this study was not related specifically to police officers dressed in military gear, there are many conclusions about psychological effects militarization upon the police themselves that can be inferred from the results of this study.

There are at least two ways in which the clothes people wear can affect how they act. The first is the symbolism that the wearer associates with the clothing. The second is the extent to which the clothing masks the person’s identity. Both potentially help us to understand the behavior of police in Ferguson, and the behavior of police at protests more generally.

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When we dress our police officers in camouflage before deploying them to a peaceful protest, the result will be police who think more like soldiers. This likely includes heightening their perception of physical threats, and increasing the likelihood that they react to those threats with violence. Simply put, dressing police up like soldiers potentially changes how they see a situation, changing protesters into enemy combatants, rather than what they are: civilians exercising their democratic rights.

The second aspect of dressing police officers in military wear is that is more easily conceals the individual identity of each officer to civilians through the use of full face visors, goggles, and/or gas masks that conceal the officers' faces and other gear such as flak jackets that conceal the officers name badges. This allows the police officers to act with anonymity and to hide their actions as individuals. All of this adds up to a police force that is no longer part of the community that they are supposed to be serving, but rather transforms them into an occupying military force.

What we are now seeing regularly are police reacting to citizens in a way that betrays many of our Constitutionally guaranteed rights and often in reaction to non-crimes, such as political protests. This was clearly seen in the violent reaction of local police to Occupy protesters.

Some of the police officers are so obsessed with the use of the deadly weapons that they overreact during protest crackdowns. This overeating ignites the protests to escalate resulting to more casualties and destruction of private property.

Aided by US government programs and policies, militarized policing has become a major problem that seems to be one that may be difficult to turn around. The genii is out of the bottle and the military mindset has become deeply engrained in far too many police departments. So where do we go from here?