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Hello, you're listening to Radio Free Flint.
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This is Arthur Bush, and today's episode is the militarization of the criminal justice system.
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Over roughly 35 years, the United States has lived through a series of wars at home on drugs, on crime, on terror, on the border, that they've all quietly rewritten a relationship between citizens and the state.
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Each was launched with the solemn promises of safety.
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Each left behind a larger apparatus of force.
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At the founding, the Bill of Rights was meant as a break on the very government the framers feared.
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People who felt persecuted by their own rulers wrote protections for speech, for counsel, for reasonable bail, and against unreasonable searches and seizures into the country's operating system.
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Those guarantees were supposed to endure whenever storms came after.
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In the late twentieth century, a new language entered American politics, largely coinciding with the presidency of Richard Millaus Nixon.
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Leaders began to speak of a war on crime, a war on drugs, a war on everything.
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In wartime they insisted ordinary rules could not apply.
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Wiretaps, warrantless arrests, denial of lawyers demonizing the ACLU and Defense Counsel, even the casual talk of the government's right to search your underwear drawer.
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That became part of an acceptable vocabulary of public life.
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Again and again, Americans were told that civil liberties were a luxury the country could no longer afford.
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In the name of safety, presidents and attorney generals asked the public to see the Bill of Rights not as a set of promises, but as a set of obstacles.
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So let's look at the numbers and the fear.
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By 1990s, something odd was happening beneath the rhetoric.
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Violent crime in the United States fell dramatically over the decade.
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Many categories of serious crime dropped off by half.
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The decline was even across neighborhoods and cities.
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But the trend was unmistakable.
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The images on the evening news told a different story.
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Night after night, viewers saw one more child abduction, one more body in the street, one more school shooting or armed robbery, and the local reporters would say if it bleeds, it bleeds.
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Night after night, viewers saw one more child abduction, one more body in the street, one more school shooting or armed robbery.
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Even after a sharp frightening spike in homicides during the pandemic years, serious violence fell back toward below its pre-COVID levels.
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Yet the political language of emergency survived the numbers that had once justified it.
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So how do we approach drug addicts during these periods?
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Or how do we approach the poor, better said?
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In the same era, national policy turned toward punishment rather than repair.
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Drug addiction was treated less as an illness to be treated than as a crime to be contained.
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The country knew that some European nations were experimenting with programs that emphasized treatment, harm reduction, and reintegration.
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The United States largely chose the cell, that is the jail cell.
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Eventually, that impulse reached people far from the stereotypical dealer.
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Welfare mothers, women without lobbyists, or campaign donations became the convenient targets.
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In many states, drug treatment and social support were replaced with mandatory drug testing regimes.
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No one pretended to have probable cause that each mother used drugs.
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Suspicion alone became enough.
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The same level of casual drug use in the corporate suites and white collar parts of our cities rarely produced such curiosity.
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This too was kind of militarization.
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That is the tools of surveillance and suspicion aimed downward at those least able to resist.
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Let's talk about federal power and the new domestic battlefield.
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As the 20th century closed and the 21st century began, the structure in law enforcement itself shifted.
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Some conservatives spoke the language of dual federalism, promising more power to states and localities.
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Yet in practice, federal authorities surged into local policing.
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As governor and then as president, George W.
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Bush supported expanding the reach of federal agents in everyday work of criminal justice.
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After the attacks of September 11, 2001, that expansion quickened.
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The war on terror gave federal agencies new mandates and new tools.
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Intelligence programs once aimed abroad were turned inward.
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The line between soldier and officer, between foreign battlefield and domestic street, that became harder to see.
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This was not only a matter of statutes and budgets, it was a matter of appearance and posture.
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Tactical gear, armored vehicles, and military surplus equipment became commonplace in city police departments.
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The visual vocabulary of war came home.
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Eventually we began to see police officers with military haircuts and masks on their face secreting their identity.
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Our constitution's under pressure.
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Even as this happened, a particular style of constitutional argument gained prominence.
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Some leaders called for a literal reading of the founding text.
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They warned against quote unquote activist judges who looked to history, purpose, or consequence.
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Yet the literalism was selective.
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The right to counsel, the guarantee of reasonable bail, the promise that no person would be deprived of liberty without due process.
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Yet the literalism was selective.
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The right to counsel, the guarantee of reasonable bail, the promise that no person would be deprived of liberty without due process were all written clearly.
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Nonetheless, new doctrines and practices carved out exceptions, especially for those labeled dangerous, foreign, or suspect.
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The document's words remained, each reach narrowed them.
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The same voices that insisted that the Second Amendment guaranteed expansive private rights to guns and other weapons were less certain that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments meant quite what they said.
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The Bill of Rights, once treated as a shield for the accused, became for many a symbol of indulgence towards criminals.
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The exclusionary rule and its enemies for more than a century the exclusionary rule has stood as one of the few direct consequences for unconstitutional police behavior.
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Evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, without a warrant, without probable cause, through egregious conduct could be suppressed.
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In the 1990s, as new conservative waves swept Congress and the state houses, some leaders proposed to end that rule.
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They called it a technicality.
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Others quietly understood what its abstinence meant, and if agents ever came searching their own drawers and desk, they might very well be the target.
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The rule survived, however, for the time being.
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The formal language of the Fourth Amendment still has practical remedies.
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Then came the war on terror and the Twilight Zone.
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The attacks of 2001 allowed longstanding tensions to surface.
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New laws and executing policies permitted the detention of citizens and non-citizens alike on broad suspicions.
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People could be held without charges, without lawyers, without bail, all in the name of security.
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Parallel justice systems emerged during this period.
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Military commissions, offshore detention centers in places like Cuba's Guantanamo Bay, and special regimes allowed cases to be handled outside the ordinary courts, namely military courts.
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The official explanation was that the existing system was too protective of rights, too slow, too fragile for the new age.
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What had been a set of external extraordinary tools for rare circumstances began to look more permanent.
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Each new exception to the Constitution justified the next.
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So now we have a new eternal internal enemy, and maybe eternal.
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Over time, the face of internal enemies changed.
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In the Cold War it had been the communists.
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In the war on drugs it was the dealer and the attic.
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In the Age of Terror, the suspect with a foreign name and a certain kind of beard.
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Gradually another figure joined them, the immigrant.
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Many of the people now caught up in this system arrived seeking work or refuge.
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Some had crossed a line on a map without authorization.
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Others had overstayed their visas or fallen out of the legal status through not having their paperwork turned in on time or renew it.
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They became the focus of new raids and new fears.
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Along the southern border and in a hundred mile belt around it, a kind of constitutional light zone took place.
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There, checkpoints, mass stops, and searches became part of daily life.
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Inside the country, immigration officers conducted early morning operations at apartment complexes, factories, and churches.
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Families watched as parents disappeared into detention centers marked by fences and wire.
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So what does all this amount to?
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Has this been a better system or a worse system?
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What are the numbers?
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And perhaps is there some theater involved?
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Let's talk about Obama and Trump and get the facts.
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In the first decades of the twenty first century, immigration enforcement split into two distinct eras that overlapped more than they differed.
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Under President Barack Obama, the system became vast, quiet and highly organized.
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Data flowed from local jails into federal databases, enforcement priorities focused on recent border crossers, and people with certain criminal records.
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Dockets were streamlined, paperwork moved quickly.
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Year after year the government removed record numbers of people, often without cameras or crowds.
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For many Americans, the machinery was almost invisible.
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For those inside it, it was relentless.
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Donald Trump inherited that system and chose to change not so much the law as the performance of it.
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The list of priorities widened until almost anyone without the right papers could be treated as fair game, where Obama's enforcement relied heavily on screens, fingerprints, and court calendars.
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Trump's version stepped out into the street and onto TV.
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Large workplace raids returned to the nightly news, helicopters circled above neighborhoods at dawn, tactical teams in camouflage and body armor and mass appeared at doors and loading docks.
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Federal agents and unmarked vehicles grabbed protesters off sidewalks in American cities.
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The president's language made the spectacle part of the policy.
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Paradoxically, the results on paper moved in the opposite direction.
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Court backlogs grew.
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More people arrived with families and asylum claims that could not be resolved quickly.
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Policy shifted.
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They were challenged, and were rewritten.
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The total number of deportations fell below the highs of the previous Obama administration.
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The system became louder, more chaotic, more openly militarized, and less effective by the simple measures of how many people it actually sent away.
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The methods had changed.
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The underlying logic, a country at war with an internal enemy, that had not changed.
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So now today we have a militarized normal.
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By the time Americans entered the 2020s, the sight of heavily armed officers in helmets and vests patrolling city streets no longer seemed unusual.
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Vehicles designed for foreign battlefields rolled through small towns.
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Drones and sophisticated surveillance tools once reserved for war zones monitored domestic spaces.
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The accumulation of decades had created a new normal.
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What began as a series of exceptional measures, temporary wars, emergency powers, special courts, specialized units, formed a continuous landscape.
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The distinction between war and peace is now blurred.
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So did the line between citizen and suspect.
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I think we need to look at what was promised in our country.
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Throughout this period, public understanding of the Constitution often grew thinner even as its language was invoked more loudly.
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Many Americans could not even name three of the rights in the Bill of Rights.
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In coffee shops and comment threads online, a familiar complaint surfaced.
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Criminals have all the rights.
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The question lingered, if not the accused, then who is supposed to have rights when the state uses its power?
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The founding generation had answered with unusual clarity.
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Rights were not rewards for the virtuous.
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They were protections for everyone, especially when the government believed it had found a dangerous enemy within.
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In every era, the country has faced real threats and genuine harms.
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Crime rose and fell.
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Terror attacks occurred, borders were crossed, but alongside those realities, the nation made choices about how much power to concentrate in the hands of the state, how visible to make its force, and how widely to apply its promises.
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Those choices accumulated over the past thirty-five years of domestic wars tell a second story, the story of a republic that repeatedly turned the tools of militarism inward.
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And also it tells a story of a constitution asked again and again to stand its ground.
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Thank you for listening.
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This podcast that you're listening to and its essays is a production of Radio Free Flint Media LLC.
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Thank you.
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We'll see you next time.
