Opinion: California’s crime rate may be falling, but my dystopian nightmares are rising

Crime is falling in California. Yet the state’s police agencies have one of the highest concentrations of surplus military hardware in the United States. People started paying more attention to a post-9/11 Defense Department program to transfer military gear used against Afghanistan and Iraq to civilian police departments here in the United States in the wake of racially charged clashes between demonstrators and heavily armed police in Ferguson, Mo.

California law enforcement agencies began seriously taking an interest in military-style hardware after a February 1997 shootout between bank robbers and overwhelmed cops in North Hollywood. In most places at most times, however, police rarely confront criminals with that much high-powered weaponry. That’s why California Police Chiefs Assn. President Christopher Boyd’s claim that “all of this equipment is needed…. Most police departments cannot afford to buy them” seems a bit, well, over the top.

When you have to go back nearly two decades to justify the need, it looks more like a reaction to a quantum singularity than a genuine necessity, and given what happened in Ferguson, there is a real concern that police militarization widens the chasm of trust between law enforcement and the communities they are supposed to serve.

You can’t blame police for wanting the most powerful weapons and the strongest defensive capabilities to protect officers. But policing is at least as much about politics as it is about protection. Not politics as in Democrat or Republican but the politics of a tense relationship between free citizens, most of whom are law-abiding and pay the salaries of the cops, and municipal employees who were supposed to be more concerned about protecting the public than themselves.

After Ferguson, many of my white friends defended the police’s use of military-style hardware as just good sense given the dangers of the streets in that St. Louis suburb. I asked them: If you trust the police, if you’re not afraid of them, if you feel that the ultimate defense is that you have done nothing wrong, then how do you feel when you see the flashing lights in your rear-view mirror? Happy? Completely unafraid? None could honestly answer yes.

It seems counterintuitive, but this is one of those cases in which civilian oversight necessitates protecting the police from themselves by prohibiting them from protecting themselves too much.

For today’s cartoon, I push the “what if this trend continues?” envelope, but really, truly, I don’t think that we are all that far from the dystopian nightmares portrayed by countless science-fiction novels and films. I’m 51 years old. If you’d told me, when I was 21, that the United States would become a country whose government and law enforcement officials were terrified of their own citizens, that they would treat us like surly victims of a foreign occupation army, I would have rolled my eyes. I was a cynical punk rocker back then, but things have gotten worse than I ever imagined.

Follow Ted Rall on Twitter @tedrall