The Martinican critic Aimé Césaire once described Adolf Hitler’s regime as a form of imperial feedback called “the boomerang effect,” whereby the racist violence and military force Europe had used to rule colonial Asia and Africa began to be used at home. The adoption of colonialist methods by police forces in the United States can be thought of similarly. The tactics devised by the U.S. Army in the Philippines were expressly meant for targeting and monitoring Filipino insurgents, whom soldiers thought of as racially inferior, intrinsically violent, and criminal. Under the army’s logic, keeping the racially inferior in line required new military tactics such as pin mapping and mounted units. By using those methods on minorities at home, reformers inscribed the same colonial mindset on race into the very core of policing.
Imperial feedback in the United States was driven by the belief that the techniques developed abroad to conquer the dangerous “inferior races” were perfectly appropriate for use on similarly criminal “inferior races” at home. Vollmer, for example, had been elected as Berkeley’s police chief because leading citizens worried that Chinese gangsters were bringing prostitution, opium use, and gambling dens to town. Because Vollmer had fought the Filipino guerrillas, his supporters argued, he would be the best man to get rid of Chinese rogues. Fittingly, his very first campaigns in Berkeley included raids on Chinese gambling houses and arrests of foreigners at higher rates than native-born residents. Similarly, after James Robinson militarized the Philadelphia police force, he began arresting African Americans and raiding their communities at disproportionate rates.
Policing consequently became a form of domestic counterinsurgency. Pin mapping and mounted forces invited the police to imagine U.S. cities as zones of colonial conquest. In fact, when Vollmer told his forces that they needed to use “military science” for policing, he later said that the task at hand was war against “the enemies of society.” It is not surprising, then, that police officials and politicians first began speaking of policing in the early twentieth century as a “war on crime.”
THE ENEMY IS HERE
As the twentieth century wore on, the process of police militarization through imperial feedback proceeded unabated. As the historian Stuart Schrader shows in his groundbreaking book, Badges Without Borders, from the 1950s to the 1970s, American police often used the same counterinsurgency techniques and technologies that were used by U.S. and British counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam, Malaya, and Venezuela, such as “stop and frisk” and two-way radios and receivers. And in 1967, John Nelson, a veteran of the Vietnam War, helped create the United States’ first special weapons and tactics unit within the Los Angeles Police Department. Nelson came to the idea for SWAT units after comparing the ghetto riots of Watts, Detroit, and Newark with anticolonial insurgencies in Vietnam and British Africa and realizing that the force reconnaissance units of the army would be useful in repressing riots at home.