Rise of the Warrior Cop (13 page)

For years we tried to assure everyone that, yes, we are a civil police force. The people are the police, and the police are the people. And we hold to that.

Though at times,
assault
is not a dirty word.
⁴⁵

For the types of situations Gates had in mind—the Watts riots, the Surry Street barricade, the Texas clock tower massacre—he was right.
Assault
wasn’t a dirty word. It was an appropriately swift, forceful response to defuse a violent situation.

As the domestic strife dragged on, other police departments began to see things the way Gates did. In March 1968, the Associated Press conducted a national survey and found that, “in city after city across America, the police are stockpiling armored vehicles, helicopters, and high-powered rifles . . . they are preparing for summer and the riots they hope will not occur.” In Gates’s Los Angeles, the AP reported, police watched a demonstration in which a twenty-ton armored personnel carrier crushed a barricade of abandoned cars. Tampa police chief James G. Littleton told the news agency that his department had “taken off the kid gloves.” He had just purchased 162 shotguns, 150 bayonets, 5 sniper rifles, 25 carbines and M-1 rifles, and 200 gas masks. Florida state attorney Paul Antineri told the AP that he had instructed police officers to “shoot to kill” if they spotted anyone committing or about to commit a felony. A spokesman for the New Jersey State Police told the AP, “We’re following through on the military concept in attacking this problem.”
⁴⁶

This was an understandable response to the growing sense that American cities were spilling over with crime, violence, and rioting. And indeed, starting the month after the AP article was published,
1968 would unfold as one of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. But when the riots, strife, and unrest finally died down, when the threat of chaos and lawlessness eventually grew remote, the weapons, heavy-duty vehicles, and militaristic culture stuck around. Gates’s original intent for the SWAT concept may have been appropriate, but as SWAT teams swelled in number, mission, and frequency of use over the next forty years, Gates not only never spoke out against the trend but took pride in it, and actively encouraged it.

B
Y THE MID
-1960
S, THE PIECES WERE FALLING INTO PLACE TO
make disorder a national political issue. The crime rate was climbing. High-profile incidents like Whitman’s mass shooting had shocked the country. Riots had white America terrified of the cities. All that needed to happen was for a savvy politician to run with the issue.

In an April 1965 Gallup poll, more than half the country cited race relations as their number-one concern, the first time in eight months that a domestic issue topped the poll.
⁴⁷
Columnists and media outlets on the right were taking shots at the Supreme Court’s “criminal-friendly” decisions, as well as President Johnson’s failure to address crime with adequately tough measures.
⁴⁸
Johnson also watched the polls closely (the
New York Times
wrote in 1966 that “the President appears to retain an almost psychological need for public approval”
⁴⁹
) and was well aware that his approval ratings had started to sag—a long, slow decline starting in the spring of 1965.
⁵⁰

Johnson attempted to co-opt some of his critics’ momentum by adopting the crime issue himself. He first turned to a Washington, DC, perennial: the blue ribbon commission. He announced the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. His attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, would chair it. Its laughably lofty mission: to draw up “the blueprints that we need for effective action to banish crime.”
⁵¹
The resulting report,
The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society
, included over two hundred recommendations to fight crime, from establishing a national phone
number for emergencies—the precursor to 911—to decriminalizing drug abuse and public drunkenness. But Johnson’s critics seized on the more platitudinous and abstract recommendations: the commission asserted that ending poverty would be the single most important crime-fighting initiative and recommended minority outreach bureaus within major police departments, the establishment of multiple crime and justice research institutions, family planning assistance, recommitting to desegregation, funding for drug abuse treatment, and gun control.
⁵²

To Johnson’s critics, this was just more leftist, mealymouthed academese. There was lots of government spending (the commission didn’t bother to estimate a price tag for its recommendations), plenty of lofty talk about social uplift, and hand-wringing about the influence on crime of environmental factors—all of which rather conveniently aligned with Johnson’s other domestic policies. But there was precious little in the way of taking it hard to the bad guys. For a war on crime, there wasn’t nearly enough
fighting
.

Johnson responded by making the federal government more proactive in fighting the drug trade. He created the first major federal agency specifically tasked with enforcing the federal drug laws. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), which would later become the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), combined smaller agencies in the Treasury and the Health, Education, and Welfare Departments into one office that would operate within the Department of Justice. Johnson also expanded the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance into the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA),
⁵³
the first federal agency created to stream federal funding, equipment, and technology directly to state and local law enforcement agencies.
⁵⁴
The United States had long taken a federalist approach to law enforcement. Except for offenses involving the mail, bank robbers, and crossing those state borders, the power to make crime policy had been reserved to the states. Johnson’s successors would quickly discover that introducing a funding spigot like LEAA, then threatening to pull it away, was an effective way to persuade local police agencies to adopt their preferred policies.

Johnson’s efforts didn’t quell his critics. His attorney general, Ramsey Clark, was widely seen on the right as the walking embodiment of the root-causes, soft-on-criminals approach to criminal justice policy. In an interview for this book, Donald Santarelli, a young but influential aide to Nixon’s 1968 campaign, said that Nixon would often tell Republican supporters that his administration would “
have
an attorney general,” a bit of signaling that to law-and-order conservatives needed no further explanation.
⁵⁵

Before the 1968 presidential campaign kicked off, the thirty-one-year-old Santarelli had been the minority counsel on the House Judiciary Committee. In the summer of 1967, he and other House Republicans decided to put together a crime bill that would address (a critic might say
exploit
) public reaction to the rioting and high-profile shootings. “There was an increasing fear of crime,” Santarelli says. “And at the same time you had the rise of the civil rights movement, the riots, the Black Panthers, and this increase in drug use. I think the public started to pick up on the idea that these things were linked, because they were all happening simultaneously.” The Republicans put together a bill with a host of new anticrime, antidrug measures, including a provision to authorize wiretapping and another that weakened the
Miranda
warning. “Law enforcement is just like any other interest group,” Santarelli says. “They’re always after greater power. There was a sense that they needed to capitalize on these historic events. And I think there was a real willingness on the part of the public to give them whatever powers they sought.”
⁵⁶

There were two other controversial provisions in the original 1968 crime bill. The first would have dramatically changed the bail system—by effectively doing away with it completely. The burden would have been shifted to defendants to show that they didn’t pose a threat to the public or a flight risk. If they could do so, they’d be released. If they couldn’t, they’d be held until trial. Both supporters and detractors dubbed it “preventive detention,” a term that served both sides. For conservatives, it sounded like the sort of rigorous, lock-’em-up policy that would play well in the election. For liberals, “preventive detention” was the sort of term used in a police state.
Santarelli stands by the initiative to this day and insists that it was portrayed unfairly. “This was about equity,” he insists. “The risk of flight and the seriousness of the crime are factors in who gets held before trial today, but the primary factor is money. If you can’t make bail, you stay in jail. That’s incredibly unfair. We wanted to take wealth out of the equation.”
⁵⁷

The other provision was the no-knock raid. Despite the fact that the 1964 Rockefeller law was barely used in New York, other states had since passed similar measures. The law-and-order right had run with the concept as a litmus-test tough-on-crime measure. “The exigent circumstances exceptions to [knock-and-announce] had been pretty well established by that time,” Santarelli says. “I didn’t intend for [no-knock] to be a political weapon, but it became one.”

The Republican crime bill passed relatively easily in the summer of 1968, with little opposition from Democrats. The no-knock raid and preventive detention measures didn’t make the bill’s final draft, but both ideas would return, and soon.

A
T
6:01 PM
ON
A
PRIL
4, 1968,
JUST AS
M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING
J
R
. stepped out onto a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, James Earl Ray fired a single .30-caliber bullet from the Remington rifle he’d perched in the bathroom window of a boardinghouse across the street. King was dead. Within hours, more than one hundred American cities broke out in rioting.

The riots reinforced in white middle-class America the sense that American cities had become zones of lawlessness. And again, it was black people causing all the violence.

In fact, it came at a time when much of that same white, middle-class America began to sense that its values and traditions were under attack from all sides. In his drug war history
Smoke and Mirrors
, journalist Dan Baum points out that black homicide arrests doubled between 1960 and 1967. At the same time, heroin deaths and overdoses were also on the rise. The hippie, antiwar, and counterculture movements were in full swing. All of this also coincided with the rise
of the civil rights movement. Nixon’s Silent Majority began to see a link between drugs, crime, the counterculture, and race.

The movements had some common elements, but there was little evidence that drug use was causing the spike in violent crime. For example, while it was true that heroin junkies were more likely to commit crimes like burglary and theft to support their habit, it wasn’t true that drug use was causing the surge in violent crime. A 1971 study from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs—the government’s antidrug enforcement arm itself—found that illicit drug users were 35 percent
less
likely to be arrested and charged with homicide than non-drug-users, and less than half as likely to be charged with aggravated assault.
⁵⁸
The rise in pot-smoking among the counterculture was even less threatening, and less of a contributor to the crime rate.

But candidate Nixon and his politically savvy advisers seized on the growing assumption in middle America that all of these things were connected. When Robert Kennedy was assassinated in April 1968, the party used his death to push its crime bill, even though his assassination would prove to have been politically motivated, and Kennedy himself had been opposed to the more controversial parts of the law.
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