Thanks to Ed Crane and David Boaz at the Cato Institute, who published my white paper on SWAT teams, gave me my first full-time job as a writer, and provided a terrific platform from which to write about this issue. Doland for hosting my blog for ten years-where I first reported many of the incidents you’ll read about in this book. Other thanks go to Robin Wallace and Nick Schulz, the first two editors to publish me regularly. Thanks also to Samuel Walker, Norm Stamper, Tom Angell, Victoria Dunham, Killian Lapeyre, Jessica Greene, Drew Johnson, and Dan Wang, who contributed to this book with research, comments, referrals, and/or suggestions. Police militarization has largely been fueled by the drug war, so this book also owes a debt to Dan Baum, whose meticulously reported Smoke and Mirrors is the be-all, end-all history of the drug war through the 1990s. I should also acknowledge Peter Kraska, whose scholarly research on SWAT teams has provided the empirical data to document this trend. Thanks also to my agent, Howard Yoon, and my editor at PublicAffairs, Brandon Proia, for getting this specific book into print. So I owe a lot of thanks to the people who have helped make that happen.įirst, of course, thank you to my family and friends who have supported and encouraged me over the years.

I’ve always felt that I’d never officially feel like a writer until I could see a book I’d written sitting on my bookshelf. His fascinating, frightening narrative that spans from America’s earliest days through today shows how a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.

In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as enemies.

But over the last two centuries, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. Newly added material brings the story through 2020, including analysis of the Ferguson protests, the Obama and Trump administrations, and the George Floyd protests. This groundbreaking history of how American police forces have been militarized is now revised and updated.

Rise of the warrior cop by radley balko