"A WAR AGAINST THE ENEMIES OF SOCIETY": FOUNDATIONS OF POLICE MILITARIZATION IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

Militarization in American policing is a hotly contested topic. Often, the blame for the current state of policing is placed on legislative measures and cultural factors of the last sixty years, which have fueled police practices and provided billions in military equipment to police departments. However, militarization was in fact core to American policing from its roots in the Progressive Era (1896-1917), when policing as we understand it first took shape. At the turn of the twentieth century, America was embroiled in the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, which transformed the nation into a colonial power. At the same time, the Progressive movement fomented a desire for efficiency and accountability from government services and protection of white middle-class values. At the confluence of these two factors, modern professionalized policing was born. August Vollmer (1876-1955) was a Spanish-American and Philippine-American war veteran who returned home to Berkeley, California and assumed the role of Chief of Police, where he, like other police reformers of his time, shaped his department in the image of a military body. Vollmer, remembered by history as “the father of modern police,” has a complicated legacy. While he worked to eliminate police inefficiencies and corruption, he was also a eugenicist who set policing down a militarized path leading to police brutality and oppression of Black and Brown Americans.