Year: 2013

Yesterday evening I drove downtown to visit Roosevelt University to catch the Chicago stop of Radley Balko’s tour for his book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Radley’s presentation is pretty interesting, although not of course as in-depth as the book itself. He starts with a clip from the Columbia… Read more

I’ve been writing a series of posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) that outline some of the themes that Radley Balko explores in Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. The book itself is far more detailed, with discussions of the political forces that created some of these policies, and… Read more

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked 1935. I’ve been doing a close reading of Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, and I’m trying… Read more

The public in the past have naively avoided consideration of the fact that the principle difference between a democracy and an totalitarian form of government is not so much in the laws under which they operate as it is in the manner by which the laws are applied. — Don L. Kooken, Ethics in Police… Read more

Since its inception, the police establishment has conducted itself more as the agent of the power structure than the servant of a pluralistic society. — Former FBI Special Agent William W. Turner. The Police Establishment. 1968. I’ve been waiting a long time for Radley Balko to write a book, and now he finally has. Rise… Read more