A little more than 28 years ago, a convoy of Marines drove north on Interstate 5 toward Los Angeles. I was in the convoy, a young Marine company commander, riding with misgivings.
The city was smoldering after two nights of violence and arson following the acquittal of police officers who had brutally beaten Rodney King, an unarmed black man. President George H.W. Bush had federalized active-duty troops overnight under the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that grants a president powers to deploy military forces against domestic rebellion or disorder.
Before departing our base at Camp Pendleton, my company gunnery sergeant, a reasonable and world-weary grunt in his 30s who was wounded in Kuwait the year before, came to see me in my office. He thought Bush’s decision was a bad call. Our unit was packed with veterans from Desert Storm who were experienced and well trained, but we knew little about countering civil disturbance, much less the complexities of operating as agents of domestic law enforcement. And now, on essentially no notice, we were to be issued shields and batons and turned loose?
After the gunny and I conferred, I met one of our bosses and suggested we leave our unit’s machine guns and other heavy weapons in the armory and go north only with riot-control equipment, Beretta pistols and M16s. It seemed clear enough that machine guns would almost certainly be disproportionate to the situation in Los Angeles, and that a mishap could be catastrophic. Our colonels agreed. As our company drove north, the machine-gun turrets of our Humvees were empty.
Along the interstate between Camp Pendleton and our first stop, the now-closed Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin southeast of Los Angeles, people turned out at guardrails and overpasses to cheer the Humvees and troop-carrying trucks. I remember their pumping fists and applause. I remember ebullient faces shouting words we could not hear over the diesel engines’ low rumble. And I remember that most of the faces along the highway were white. Riding shotgun in the lead Humvee, I felt shame.
How a government prepares for and uses violence — including when, why and against whom — contains on some level a declaration about what kind of government that government is. At Tustin, we passed out ammunition, quickly practiced riot-control formations in front of television-news crews and then headed into Los Angeles and cities nearby. As my company arrived in Compton, I’d like to say we understood the context of the role we were given: that even a limited Marine deployment in a genuinely extreme situation would run inevitably into the ugly history of state force in the United States, and who receives the brunt of it. But domestic crowd control had never been our specialty, and because this was 1992, a time before Google and smartphones, we could not readily call anyone or look anything up. We didn’t know, as we met our new police partners, that the Insurrection Act was a tool American presidents repeatedly relied on to reinforce the police or impose law when the inequities and brutalities of slavery and its enduring legacy became especially combustible: to crush Nat Turner’s rebellion, to suppress the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, to enforce desegregation in Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama and to patrol streets and enforce curfews in the wake of riots following the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our particulars were smaller and immediate. We were to help restore order after arson, mayhem and murder. Peacekeeping, we called it, whatever that meant.
We did learn one thing fast. The Marines’ presence in greater Los Angeles during roughly the next week — part of an operation that included soldiers from the Army’s Seventh Light Infantry Division as well — felt unnecessary. By the time we arrived, the fires had burned down and the violence that killed dozens of people had subsided. California’s National Guard was already on the ground. My unit met tense cops but generally quiet streets. Troops settled into work conditions we knew well: boredom, and wondering what the bosses were thinking.
Nonetheless, our presence soon followed the rules of Chekhov’s gun, the principle that a firearm shown onstage in one scene will be discharged at some later moment. A few nights after the city had calmed, the gunny and I were atop a parking garage in Compton when we heard an eruption of M16 fire a few blocks away. The sound of multiple rifles firing at once, some rapidly, resembled the immediate-action tactic of ambushed Marines. The gunny and I rushed toward the noise and found a scrum of police officers and patrol cars outside an apartment complex and expended rifle cartridges on the sidewalk and lawn.
Several Marines had shot M16s into the building, we were told, at the request of police officers who were fired upon by a man with a shotgun while answering a domestic-violence call. A detective informed us that after facing rifle fire, the suspect inside dialed 911 and surrendered to a dispatcher. No one in the apartment was seriously hurt, the detective said, but a small boy suffered cut feet while dashing over the window glass shattered as bullets flew through his home.
We had unwittingly drifted into a dilemma inherent in missions like ours: How are combat troops to mix with civilian police without blurring, or erasing, lines between the two?
After the mass demonstrations following a white Minneapolis police officer’s killing of George Floyd while his fellow officers looked on, officials in the United States deliberated once again over whether to send American combat troops into cities. The discussion was driven by threats or calls for military action from both President Trump and Senator Tom Cotton, who urged “no quarter” against “insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters and looters” — a proposal for merciless violence against American citizens, including in ill-defined categories, that sounded both reckless and illegal. Official threats of state violence can be little more than performance, a kind of law-and-order signaling, and it was not clear how seriously Trump considered following through. But it was impossible, upon hearing Trump’s and Cotton’s bellicosity, not to remember how close my Marines came, in the confusion of a job they were not trained to do, to killing a child.
The Pentagon did get involved. As protests swelled and thieves ransacked stores in multiple cities, Army officials shifted paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division from barracks in North Carolina to a base outside Washington and summoned National Guard soldiers or aircraft from 13 states to the District of Columbia. A politically and demographically diverse part-time force was posted around the White House on duties that gave it the appearance of a palace guard. (That perception was furthered by the fact that 11 of the 13 state governors who provided National Guard soldiers or equipment are Republican.) Guard soldiers also supported police officers in the violent removal of peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square, and Guard helicopters descended low over Washington’s streets, driving pedestrians before them with stinging grit and rotor wash.
The president did not invoke the Insurrection Act, having put boots around the seat of power by other means. He didn’t have to. In a time when American police departments possess protective equipment and weapons more sturdy and sophisticated than anything my Marine company carried in Compton in 1992, state and municipal governments needed no help from paratroopers or Marines as they cleared streets and punished crowds collectively with militarized force. And the local and state rollouts, like the Marines’ drive to Los Angeles almost three decades ago, only boldfaced one question driving the protests: What did all this government violence, and the muscular display of paramilitarized police officers wearing the patches of cities throughout the land, say about how the United States chooses to relate to its own people?
Not long after my company’s mission in Compton, I resigned from the corps to begin a journalism career, much of it spent covering organized violence and war, including crackdowns on civil society and political opponents by repressive states, often via military and police units with equipment and weapons so similar it could be difficult to tell the forces apart.
In late 2005, I found myself in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, covering a demonstration in which aggrieved Azeris sought to have the results of a rigged parliamentary election annulled. Such demonstrations were part of the routine at the time for correspondents across the former Soviet Union, where citizens in many countries were rising up in mostly peaceful demonstrations against corrupt post-Soviet governments. In some countries (Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine), the protesters drove their rulers from power. In others (Russia, Uzbekistan, Belarus), they ran into firmly entrenched regimes that quelled dissent with farcically rigged elections, strict limits on rights and force. Azerbaijan, wedged between the Caucasus Mountains and Iran on the Caspian Sea, fell in the second group. The government had issued the protesters a permit to gather in a large square until evening. Around them, formations of riot police waited, disciplined and blank-faced. They remained impassive as the crowds chanted “Freedom!” and railed against President Ilham Aliyev, who had ascended to the presidency just before the death his father, Heydar, a former senior Soviet official and K.G.B. officer who consolidated control over independent Azerbaijan in 1993. After years of Aliyev rule, no citizen could recall an honest election result. The Aliyevs, atop an oil-producing state, had become fabulously rich.
Throughout the demonstration, the troops were essentially leashed. Protesters denounced the falsified vote while the state formations let them vent in the November chill. Having once been on crowd-control duty myself, I watched the police with a small pair of binoculars from among the protesters as the deadline approached.
No sooner had the permit expired than the supervisors standing outside each formation lifted their tactical radios to their ears. Some nodded. Others turned and faced their troops. All gave their orders, almost at once. Everyone knew what it meant: Time’s up.
Inside the demonstration, people braced.
The crackdown proceeded swiftly. The troops advanced on the crowd with batons and began chopping their way through, smacking anyone within reach. Tear gas drifted across the square. Trucks with water cannons followed. Demonstrators gave way as the police closed in, running pell-mell, screaming, dropping bags, flags, banners, signs and anything else that was in their hands as they sought escape. The air filled with the whacks and thuds of truncheons on jackets, flesh and bone.
Within minutes, it was over. Two women sprawled near me on the ground, unconscious amid acres of dropped flags and lost shoes. During it all the police had taken pains not to strike journalists. Troops ran up beside photographers and reporters to beat people beside us, then looked for the next victim and moved on while the cameras clicked.
The degree of control was chilling, reflecting the unstated but perfectly clear logic of a confident, contemptuous power. It was not just that in any contest for the street, the government and its forces enjoyed a lopsided advantage and would use it — a position hardly unique to authoritarian rule. It was that the kleptocracy wanted this crackdown seen and transmitted, so any would-be Azeri activists would know what to expect if they challenged the state’s central tenet, which was that the Aliyevs would never willingly yield what they saw as theirs. Brute force and the ability to command it — not elections — determined who got to hold power and run the national rackets. State violence did more than clear the streets. It served as lesson and show. Almost 15 years later, Ilham Aliyev is still president.
For all Trump’s tilts toward authoritarianism and his intolerance of dissent, the United States has not yet descended to anything like this. But the tools at hand for confronting public outrage and civil disobedience have changed, with political consequences of their own. Police departments have undergone decades of arming up and mission creep, putting officers in intimidating kit and giving governing officials, in moments of tension, command of organizations that in some cases resemble the crackdown squads of countries like Azerbaijan.
It is easy to trace the lines from Pentagon failures in Iraq and Afghanistan to the distribution of military weapons and equipment, and sometimes the attitudes that accompany them, to police departments at home. After the invasion of Iraq, small-arms ambushes and improvised bombs began killing and gravely wounding American troops in Humvees at a startling pace, exposing the Pentagon’s unpreparedness for occupation at the expense of its volunteers’ lives. Military contractors responded by rushing into production a new family of heavier armored vehicles, known as MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected), and smaller, more maneuverable armored military trucks called M-ATVs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All-Terrain Vehicles). Within a few years of these vehicles’ becoming ground-force mainstays for American troops fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, tactical vehicles from both families were on offer for civilian police agencies, at times with Department of Defense assistance or encouragement. So was other equipment developed for combat forces: sniper rifles, holographic sights, bomb-disabling robots, night-vision devices, upgraded ballistic helmets, body armor and more.
The up-the-arsenal mentality was in part a function of the enduring post-Sept. 11 mind-set that in an age of global terrorism, even small municipalities had to be ready for anything. But the momentum toward militarization dates back further.
One root reaches to the mass shooting in Stockton, Calif., in 1989, in which a white racist opened fire with a semiautomatic Kalashnikov rifle on an elementary-school playground, killing five children and wounding at least 30 other people. The attack became an impetus for restrictions on military-style weapons, including the federal assault-weapons ban, which prohibited the manufacture and purchase of several types of rifles and certain magazines from 1994 to 2004. Another root extends to North Hollywood in 1997, when two bank robbers wearing body armor and carrying rifles modified to fire automatically fought an extended gun battle with officers from the Los Angeles Police Department. Images of officers pinned down behind cars, and reports that officers rushed to a gun store to get more weapons for the fight, helped spur police agencies to arm themselves more heavily.
Justifications kept coming. When the assault-weapons ban tolled in 2004, pent-up demand among firearms enthusiasts for AR-15s and similar weapons caused consumer sales of military-style rifles to soar, creating another incentive for police departments to stock up. American police officers and American citizens were in a veritable arms race. Then came more mass shootings.
Recent Changes Sparked by the Protests
Updated June 22, 2020
Police agencies faced contradictory calls. Departments were supposed to be close to their communities and capable of a light touch but also organized to stop mass murderers who could pop up at any public gathering anywhere. One was grounds for cops on bikes, the other for expanding procurement of tools designed for war, including the M4, the carbine version of the M16. The police also bought an array of dangerous but euphemistically named “less-lethal” weapons designed for putting down civil disturbances: firearms that discharge hard foam, plastic or beanbag projectiles instead of standard metal-jacketed lead; hand grenades or small-arms cartridges that release irritating or incapacitating powders or gases; and flash-bang munitions that startle and drive off people with bright light and concussive sound.
The manufacturer of one such weapon, a sting-ball grenade, advertises its product’s crowd-clearing cocktail of “four stimuli for psychological and physiological effects: rubber pellets, light, sound and CS,” commonly called a tear gas. Police agencies also procured spray cans of riot-control agents, larger versions of the small canisters mail carriers use to drive off unruly dogs. Many of these weapons would have been exotic to my Marines in 1992. They are common in civilian police agencies now.
What happened next should not have been surprising. Call it Chekhov’s tear gas. Once police departments around the country had armor and armories filled with the latest generation of novel crowd-control weapons and were faced with widespread disorder, heavily equipped officers were going to put their new weapons to the kinds of uses seen in late May and early June. Video footage and photographs from many cities in the United States showed police officers in helmets and armor using dangerous weapons repeatedly against unarmed demonstrators, including at short range against people with their arms raised overhead and hands empty of objects that could be mistaken for weapons — people in postures indicating submission, compliance or an absence of any physical threat at the moment they were shot, blasted or sprayed. These weapons were in addition to the authorities’ hard plastic shields, at times wielded offensively, and the almost-ubiquitous batons.
Many of these actions looked more than excessive; they looked unlawful, punitive and disdainful. The violence had its effects. People collapsed. Crowds scattered and gave way. Individual protesters were rendered immobile or defenseless, easier to detain and cart off.
But a resounding lesson of the past month is that Seattle, New York and Washington are not Baku. Americans had quietly tolerated the shift to police officers bedecked in Kevlar vests, tactical pouches and equipment belts, as well as the presence of officers with M4s and helmets in public spaces and events. But the attacks on unarmed crowds, coupled with the roll call of black Americans killed by the police, one after another, produced a collective shock. The impacts of crowd-control projectiles on the heads or faces of several protesters, and at least one journalist, left the victims blind in one eye or in intensive care. Imagery of fresh cases of “less-lethal” police violence compelled more people, enlivened by outrage or surprise upon seeing police brutality as a repeated police reaction to people protesting police brutality, to join the demonstrations’ swelling ranks.
Arming up had backfired. In a nation in which rights of dissent and assembly are constitutionally codified, the extensive use of crowd-control weapons served to summon larger crowds. In places, the crowds felt oceanic.
A few days after the police cleared a path for President Trump to Lafayette Square in early June, I drove to Providence, R.I., the capital of my home state, for a Black Lives Matter rally in the late afternoon. The city had a 9 p.m. curfew in effect and roadblocks on the street. The crowd in the country’s smallest state was still enormous and diverse; police officials said it was the largest demonstration the city had ever seen. Waves of people moved toward the State House with a social breadth the police themselves recognized. When I asked a police supervisor watching over an intersection, Maj. Robert Lepre, if he knew any of the protesters, he replied, “I just saw my cousin.” Behind him, one of his uniformed officers, a young black woman, wore a Black Lives Matter armband over her right forearm. People chanted, “I can’t breathe,” a few of George Floyd’s dying words.
Throughout the afternoon, the city’s Police Department opted for a generally hands-off, nonconfrontational presence. The department’s chief, Col. Hugh T. Clements Jr., and the public-safety commissioner, Steven M. Paré, stood at the edge of the rally until early evening, talking with any passers-by who came forward. The chief wore a normal daily uniform. The commissioner wore a suit. They had no further security and kept their body language relaxed.
The real test was to come. Earlier in the week, thieves smashed their way into the city’s showcase retail mall and then scuffled with the police. With the curfew looming and National Guard soldiers at prominent buildings and intersections, Providence was under emergency measures that, like a baked-in showdown, forced the consideration of next moves upon demonstrators and the authorities alike.
Before nightfall, most of the people trickled away. But hundreds remained to face off against two law-enforcement agencies — the Rhode Island State Police and the state’s National Guard — that lined the grand staircase descending from the State House’s southern facade. A third agency, the state police of neighboring Massachusetts, flew a helicopter overhead.
Acts of civil disobedience require disobedience; the holdouts intended to stay out past curfew. Several organizers, including a cadre of young women, loudly signaled to the police and the crowd their explicit intention of remaining nonviolent. White protesters formed a front line between the helmeted force and the protesters of color. Among them were teenagers and schoolteachers. The protest had entered its next phase.
At about 8 p.m., the state sent out fresh soldiers wearing helmets and face shields and carrying batons, with pistols at their hips and gas masks strapped to their thighs. This marked a change. At the peak of the demonstration less than two hours before, the immediate line of police officers between the crowd and the State House was a single rank of state-police troopers, dressed in black tactical uniforms instead of their organization’s usual patrol grays. These troopers carried pistols, batons and Tasers but wore no helmets and held their batons single-handedly, keeping them low and angled toward the steps.
Now, in the face of a far smaller crowd, National Guard soldiers had roughly doubled the size of the force. Everyone but the senior supervisors wore helmets and leg pads, and the soldiers had raised their batons near their faces in a two-handed grip. Another officer walked behind the front rank with a large police dog.
The crowd chanted on and waved signs. One man held up a poster that read: “IF THEY SHOOT, STAND BEHIND ME.”
A state-police officer issued a warning, telling the crowd that it was unlawfully assembled and that people had five minutes to disperse or face less-lethal munitions and arrest on charges of disorderly conduct.
The crowd, perplexed at being asked to leave before curfew, hissed and booed. A few people left. Most stood fast.
The five-minute deadline for arrests came and went without the police following through with their threats. The next deadline, it seemed, would be 9 p.m.
I had briefly left the State House steps to recharge my phone a few blocks away and was jogging back to the standoff at 8:15 p.m. when I came upon a large black vehicle performing a slow turn in the intersection where Clements and Paré were casually standing not long before. It was a Lenco BearCat, the police cousin of the armored trucks from which American troops engaged in gunfights in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like my old unit’s Humvees in Compton, it had no visible automatic weapon. Still, its dark color and hulking form summoned many memories at once: of tactical trucks used against demonstrators overseas; of riding in similar vehicles with American troops at war against combatants using machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs; of governments that are anything but popular or democratic; of the time I carried a weapon inside a military vehicle and took up positions in an American city after unrest following police brutality against an unarmed black man; of dashing to a Compton apartment after my Marines opened fire.
I was struck by how tone-deaf it was for the authorities to deploy the truck near a crowd that, alongside demands of justice, was calling for police de-escalation. Clements, when I contacted him later, told me that the Providence Police Department possessed no such vehicle, “basically because of the optics of militarizing local police.” A state-police major acknowledged that their organization did have a BearCat — the name is an acronym for Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck — but said that it had not been present where I saw it, because it was held back at “a secure location.” After I emailed a snippet of time-stamped video of the black armored truck at the intersection, the major amended his answer, replying: “I can confirm the vehicle to be ours.”
At the State House steps, just uphill from the BearCat, not everyone in helmets appeared onboard with the escalation underway. There were signs of enthusiasm; one large young man rocked on his feet, clasping his baton with two hands and grinning mischievously, telegraphing what looked like eagerness to use it on the people below. Others were expressionless. Several soldiers looked nervous and uncomfortable; they wore the age-old expression of young troops wishing they were somewhere else. Protesters appealed to the line, asking whether cracking down on unarmed fellow citizens was the job they joined the National Guard to do.
“What would your mother think of you?” someone shouted. A woman led a chant: “I don’t see no riot here, why are you in riot gear?” One soldier, a young man, cried.
As 9 p.m. approached, the state and the city faced another choice: Enforce the curfew and remove the crowd at risk of further fueling the public mood, or accept that the curfew had created an incentive for exactly the challenge mounted here. Maj. Gen. Christopher Callahan, commander of the Rhode Island National Guard, walked the line, talking on his phone. This time, unlike in Baku, I could see official uncertainty as the deadline came. No orders moved through the ranks. Neither the soldiers nor the protesters braced.
Just after 9 p.m., the protesters announced that they had broken the curfew and would hold a long moment of silence — 8 minutes 46 seconds, the amount of time the Minneapolis police officer pressed the weight of his body down through his knee onto George Floyd’s neck. Demonstrators knelt, fists held high, sensing that they might have won.
When the crowd stood, Gov. Gina Raimondo arrived. Raimondo, who is short and lean, is not imposing. But her frequent pandemic news conferences throughout the late winter and spring had given her an outsize presence in Rhode Islanders’ recent lives. She passed through the helmeted ranks into the crowd, where she put her arm around one protester. Demonstrators pressed near.
“Thank you for coming out tonight,” Raimondo said into a small microphone. “Thank you for standing up for what matters.
“You deserve to be heard, you deserve to be seen and you deserve action,” she continued. “You deserve change.”
Several protesters interrupted. “Lift the curfew!” one called out.
Raimondo kept talking, telling the crowd that she wanted to work for change. “It is not fair,” she said. “It is not right, what is happening in this country.”
“So what have you done?” a voice shouted.
A chant broke out: “Defund the police! Defund the police!”
The governor tried to lead a prayer, but the crowd mostly drowned her out. She yielded the mic to a protester. As she turned to leave, the voice of a young woman rose above the others. She demanded to know whether the governor was abandoning the protesters to the helmeted formation still milling on the staircase. The state police, a force that answers to Raimondo, had threatened this crowd with less-lethal munitions and arrests roughly an hour before.
“You going to stay when they do us?” the woman shouted.
“Yes!” Raimondo shot back, “and no one is going to do you!”
The exchange, played out in front of the armed ranks, felt like a quiet renunciation of the reflex to see force as the solution to problems that can’t be fixed with a rifle or a baton. Raimondo offered nothing to satisfy the protesters’ many complaints and demands. But for a moment, a person doing the governing stood before the aggrieved among the governed, instead of leaving the rank and file to shove complainants with shields or shoot them with plastic projectiles or spray them in their faces with irritants that would have made them repeat for the cameras what they were saying anyhow: I can’t breathe. It was almost as if someone understood that militarized police units, like the Insurrection Act, confront symptoms of foundational American injustice — clumsily and often cruelly — but do nothing about the cause.
C.J. Chivers, a former foreign correspondent, is a staff writer for the magazine. He received the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2017 and is the author of two books, including “The Fighters,” which chronicled the experiences of six American combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq.
