Geographies of U.S. Police Militarization and the Role of the 1033 Program

Abstract

Concerns about police militarization have become an important public policy issue since the aggressive police response to the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where police officers used military-style equipment to confront protestors. This event was a stark visual reminder that many U.S. police departments have used federal programs to acquire surplus military equipment, including weapons, armored vehicles, and body armor. We explore the geographies and histories of one the most important programs, called 1033, which supplies police with military equipment under the rationale of prosecuting the War on Drugs. We show that the legal blurring of the police and the military has been ongoing for decades at the national scale but this has resulted in an uneven landscape of police militarization at the county scale. We also investigate one of the most common global arguments for why police become militarized, which is the presence of Special Weapons and Tactics-style paramilitary teams, finding little support for that claim. More geographic inquiry is needed to understand the trajectories, causes, and consequences of police militarization.