Rise of the Warrior Cop

Radley Balko opens with a provocative question posed by legal scholar Roger Roots in a 2001 law journal article: Are cops constitutional? In colonial America, professional police forces did not exist. Law enforcement was largely private and community-based: Crime victims initiated charges, sheriffs and constables performed mostly administrative tasks, and every male citizen had a civic duty to serve on watches or posses. As American towns grew more diverse and social cohesion weakened, centralized police forces became necessary, but Balko contends the Founders would have viewed even early 19th-century police departments as a dangerous standing army. Today, police Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams violently enter private homes more than 100 times per day. The book traces how the United States evolved from a nation founded on wariness of armed government agents to one where heavily armed police routinely storm homes to enforce laws against nonviolent, consensual activities. Balko clarifies that the book is not anti-cop but anti-politician, arguing that bad policy and bad incentives produce bad outcomes.

Balko begins his historical narrative in ancient Rome, where Emperor Augustus established the first organized police forces, including the Praetorian Guard, which grew powerful enough to interfere with imperial succession, illustrating the dangers of entangling military and policing functions. He contrasts this with the English common-law tradition, which emphasized local policing, individual rights, and a concept central to the book: the Castle Doctrine. Rooted in English law since at least Semayne's Case in 1572, the doctrine required government agents to knock, announce themselves, and give occupants time to grant peaceful entry. When Britain violated this principle in the American colonies through writs of assistance, a form of general warrant allowing customs officials to search homes for smuggled goods, colonists were moved to revolution. The Fourth Amendment, ratified in 1791, enshrined the Castle Doctrine by prohibiting general warrants and requiring probable cause.

Balko argues that the Third Amendment's prohibition on quartering soldiers served as "a placeholder for the broader aversion to an internal standing army" (12). He traces how the republic gradually expanded the conditions under which federal force could be used domestically, culminating in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which led to soldiers imposing martial law on Boston to return an escaped enslaved person to bondage. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 reestablished the barrier between military and civilian policing, but Balko argues that while the nation mostly prevented direct militarization, it failed to guard against turning cops into soldiers.

The book provides a concise history of American policing, from colonial-era slave patrols and night watches through the adoption of London's professional policing model in American cities starting with New York in 1845. The professionalism movement of the early 20th century introduced formal standards but also created military-style bureaucracies that isolated officers from the communities they served. Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) chief William Parker, who ran the department from 1950 to 1966, embodied this double-edged legacy: He reduced corruption but cultivated an us-versus-them mentality, particularly toward Black and Latino residents. Parker's protégé, Daryl Gates, would become the most influential figure in the militarization of American policing.

Balko argues that the 1960s marked the beginning of modern police militarization. The Supreme Court's 1963 decision in Ker v. California approved a warrantless, unannounced home entry based on the theory that a drug suspect might destroy evidence. The 1965 Watts riots terrified white middle-class America into supporting aggressive crime policies and directly inspired Gates to create the first SWAT team, training his unit secretly with Marines at Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base.

Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign exploited public fears of crime, race, and drugs. His administration pushed through no-knock raid provisions for both Washington, DC, and federal drug agents, over the objections of Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a conservative Southern Democrat who declared the tactic "incompatible with the essence of liberty" (88). Nixon then created the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), which deployed narcotics strike forces nationwide. Balko documents the resulting abuses, including the killing of unarmed 24-year-old Dirk Dickenson during a helicopter-assisted raid in Humboldt County, California, and warrantless raids on innocent families in Collinsville, Illinois. The backlash produced temporary reform: In July 1974, the Senate voted to repeal the no-knock law. Meanwhile, Gates's SWAT concept gained momentum through incidents like a 1974 televised shoot-out with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a radical armed group, in Los Angeles. By 1975, approximately 500 SWAT teams existed, up from one in 1970, and criminologists were already warning about mission creep.

The Reagan era, Balko argues, permanently merged the drug war with police militarization. The 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act allowed the Pentagon to share equipment, intelligence, and training with civilian police. Reagan-era laws expanded civil asset forfeiture, allowing agencies to keep proceeds from drug investigations and creating powerful incentives to prioritize drug raids. The Supreme Court simultaneously eroded Fourth Amendment protections, relaxing standards for evaluating informant reliability in Illinois v. Gates (1983) and creating a good-faith exception to the Exclusionary Rule, the principle that illegally obtained evidence cannot be used at trial, in US v. Leon (1984). George H. W. Bush's drug czar, William Bennett, declared drug use fundamentally immoral and floated suspending habeas corpus for drug offenders, and a September 1989 poll found 62 percent of Americans willing to surrender freedoms to reduce illegal drug use.

Balko presents the 1990s and 2000s as the period in which SWAT proliferation accelerated beyond control. Criminologist Peter Kraska's surveys found that by 1995, 89 percent of cities over 50,000 had a SWAT team, annual deployments had jumped from about 3,000 in the early 1980s to nearly 30,000, and over 75 percent were to serve drug warrants. The 1033 program, established in 1997, created a Pentagon office to distribute surplus military equipment to police. After the September 11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security distributed at least $34 billion in anti-terrorism grants, enabling towns with virtually no violent crime to acquire military-grade equipment. In Hudson v. Michigan (2006), the Supreme Court ruled that evidence seized during an illegal no-knock raid could still be used at trial, removing the last major disincentive for violating the knock-and-announce requirement. Balko documents the toll of such raids: 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda, shot dead during a raid in Modesto, California, that found no drugs; 57-year-old Alberta Spruill, killed by a flash-bang grenade, a military stun device, during a mistaken raid in New York; and optometrist Sal Culosi, shot dead in his front yard during a gambling investigation. SWAT teams were now deployed for barbershop licensing checks, poker games, and regulatory inspections.

Balko uses the July 2008 SWAT raid on the home of Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, as a culminating case study. Prince George's County police broke down Calvo's door, shot and killed both of his dogs, and handcuffed the mayor, all over a package of marijuana sent to his address as part of a drug shipping scheme police already knew about. Officials insisted no one had done anything wrong. Calvo became an advocate for transparency, pushing Maryland to pass the first law requiring SWAT teams to report deployment statistics. The data confirmed what critics suspected: 94 percent of deployments were to serve warrants, not respond to emergencies.

Balko closes with proposed reforms: ending federal drug war incentives such as Byrne grants, which fund anti-drug task forces, and the 1033 equipment program; restricting SWAT deployments to genuine emergencies; requiring video recording of all forced-entry raids; embracing community policing; and imposing accountability through civilian review boards with subpoena power. He acknowledges skepticism, quoting Donald Santarelli, the architect of the federal no-knock raid: "I don't think it's possible to roll any of this back now" (320). America is not a police state, Balko concludes, but its police now "embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn't have anticipated" (335).