Last week, I found myself musing darkly, “Just wait till Ferguson’s cops get federally funded drones.” If you think paramilitary policing looks dystopian now, just wait till you see what’s being cooked up in defense contractors’ labs.
For decades now, as Radley Balko makes clear in his indispensable 2013 book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, federal subsidies have encouraged the proliferation of military ordnance on the home front — from M-16s to grenade launchers to 30-ton armored vehicles. Since 2002, the Department of Homeland Security has accelerated police paramilitarization with more than $7 billion in Urban Areas Security Initiative grants.
With Homeland Security funding, “Police departments are arming themselves with military assets often reserved for war zones,” Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., noted in a 2012 report on the UASI program. Among those assets are surveillance drones and the Long Range Acoustic Device — a sound cannon deployed last week in Ferguson that can disperse crowds with a 149-decibel assault (permanent hearing loss begins at 130).
