Blurring the Thin Blue Line: The Rise of the Military Model in U.S. Policin

The controversial police response to the August 2014 uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, drew national attention to the growing use of military strategies and equipment, such as SWAT teams and armored vehicles, by law enforcement agencies across the United States. Despite increasing attention to the "militarization" of American police forces, however, current research has remained limited in its ability to connect the historical evolution of the military model in policing to its present form. Moreover, we know little about both historical and contemporary predictors of militarization, as well as how law enforcement outcomes among militarized police have been affected amid greater scrutiny after Ferguson.;In order to address each of these limitations, Chapter 1 begins by chronicling the persistent influence of the military in American policing, from the development of early U.S. law enforcement agencies -- modeled after paramilitary colonial police in British-occupied Ireland -- to their adoption of counterinsurgency tactics in the 1960s and their increasing acquisition of combat gear after 9/11. This section describes how U.S. police agencies not only originated as quasi-military institutions but have continued to implement militaristic reforms through the present day.;Drawing on this chronology, Chapter 2 advances a new definition and alternative theoretical framework of police militarization, identifying seven distinct dimensions of military influence in policing over time. Based on this typology, it then uses factor analysis to create an alternative measure of contemporary police militarization employed in the following chapters.;Chapter 3 provides empirical evidence that both historical and contemporary measures of race-based marginalization and violence are correlated with police militarization today. Consistent with sociological theories of "racial threat," multivariate regression models show that police agencies are more militarized in jurisdictions with a higher proportion of Black residents. In former slave-holding states, the number of historical incidents of lynching in an area positively predicts the level of militarization of local police.;Chapter 4 reveals important variations in arrest rates after the Ferguson uprisings, challenging the narrative of a nationwide "Ferguson effect" in which police conducted fewer arrests net of crime, due to enhanced public scrutiny. Interrupted time-series models indicate that only property-related arrests exhibited a statistically significant change, increasing immediately after the protests and then gradually declining. However, despite controversy surrounding militaristic policing tactics, more militarized police departments did not carry out lower arrest rates after Ferguson than their less militarized counterparts.;Finally, to conclude the manuscript, Chapter 5 engages several conceptual issues to consider for continued research and policy-making around police militarization.