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ACLU Law Enforcement Initiative

The American Civil Liberties Union reported yesterday that almost half of its state chapters have filed requests under the Open Records laws of their respective states for information concerning the increased militarization of local law enforcement agencies in their states. Reports of these requests have begun surfacing in the media. See here

The ACLU seems particularly interested in the role of the federal government and the US military departments, including their active duty, Reserve and National Guard forces in providing assistance, training and equipment, including GPS tracking systems, drones and other weapons systems to the local law enforcement units. “Equipping state and local law enforcement with military weapons and vehicles, military tactical training, and actual military assistance to conduct traditional law enforcement erodes civil liberties and encourages increasingly aggressive policing, particularly in poor neighborhoods and communities of color,” ACLU Center for Justice attorney Kara Dansky added. “We’ve seen examples of this in several localities, but we don’t know the dimensions of the problem.”

Read more: here.

What do you think? What is the role of the military services, including its active duty, Reserve and National Guard forces in providing assistance, training and equipment to local law enforcement agencies?

Gordon O. Tanner
Principal Deputy General Counsel
United States Air Force

Posted in Domestic Policy.

Tagged with , , , .

3 comments

By afgeneralcounsel – March 8, 2013

  • http://twitter.com/bdbreedlove Ben Breedlove

    Are you kidding me? Your role is to stay uninvolved. Military and police forces have very different operating procedures, very different equipment needs, and very different goals. When military forces get involved in civilian police actions, we get incidents like the National Guard at Kent State.

  • M. Alan Thomas II

    Training I don’t mind, at least in the abstract. Obviously what is appropriate for a military operation and what is appropriate for a police operation are going to be different in some ways, so what is being taught might or might not raise issues.

    Equipment is more serious. Obviously there are situations where the police will need to deploy a paramilitary response, but these are few and far between relative to day-to-day operations. Over-equipping can lead to overuse in order to justify the initial equipping and the overhead of storing and maintaining the equipment.

    In both these cases, I believe that the military has a duty to ensure that resources it supplies are not being used in a manner inconsistent with the military’s basic ethics and sworn duty to uphold the Constitution, including civil rights &c. I would hope that this duty is seen as a positive one requiring active oversight rather than a negative one only triggered by a complaint after-the-fact.

    Direct assistance by the military is another matter entirely and not really covered by the initial report, as there have been few incidents of concern. While the National Guard certainly has a role to play in the most extreme of emergencies, it is longstanding national policy to not use the military for law enforcement purposes any more than our foreign surveillance powers can be used domestically. When it comes to providing resources in response to a direct request for aid in an operation, it should be remembered that the differences between law enforcement and military operational capabilities are the result of separate policy debates that may not contemplate such cooperation and may reflect a desire to deliberately limit law enforcement. While this does not rule out every possibility of assistance, the military has an obvious positive duty to ensure that it does not engage in any action inconsistent with its ethics, its sworn duty, or public policy.

  • Christopher Finta

    In a free society, there is no role for the military in civilian law enforcement in ANY capacity … assistance, training, equipment or anything else.  ZERO.  

    In a dictatorship, there a close relationship.

    A nation moves from a free society to a dictatorship gradually, in small increments, none of which at the time are incredibly obvious or controversial.

    Lets not take another step in that direction guys and gals.  Thanks.

    – A 20 year Air Force veteran.

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