- [Narrator] Protests sweeping the country
in response to the killing of George Floyd
by Minneapolis police,
have reignited an ongoing
national conversation
about police brutality
in black communities.
- [Woman] So tired,
like so fricking tired.
- [Narrator] And in video
after video of demonstrators
clashing with police,
the protests are also revealing
an aggressive response to civil unrest,
that has become common
in American policing.
So how did law enforcement come to use
these aggressive militarized
tactics to respond to protests?
And how have they continued today?
20 years ago, one protest
changed the way police respond
to civil disorder.
The 1999 demonstrations against
the World Trade Organization in Seattle.
- The 1999 WTO protests in
Seattle were a turning point
for the American police, in
terms of how they think about
how to handle crowd events,
particularly mass demonstrations.
- [Narrator] The battle for
Seattle as it came to be known,
began peacefully but
escalated into multiple days
of confrontations, mostly
after police attempted
to disperse protesters with
tear gas and pepper spray.
After the civil unrest of the 1960s,
the government found
that a forceful response
from the police actually
escalated conflicts.
So this led police to
start using this tactic
called negotiated management,
where they communicated with protesters
before demonstrations
and agreed on a plan,
and for several decades
this was how police managed protests.
Until the WTO demonstrations in Seattle.
Thousands of anti-globalization
demonstrators
blocked the streets around
the convention center
and things escalated quickly.
A small group of disruptive protestors,
would not consult with the police,
so this policy of negotiated management
completely broke down.
- I was sent to to the
WTO meetings in Seattle
to cover the environmental side.
I just started covering
the environmental beat
for the Wall Street Journal.
What I noticed at the time though,
was that the Seattle police department,
they didn't seem like
there was very many police
in comparison to the protestors.
I was nervous.
I'm not sure why I was nervous,
it was almost like a premonition.
- [Narrator] Norm Stamper was the Seattle
police chief at the time.
- [Norm] We had 50, 60 thousand people
on the streets of Seattle.
It's a city at the time, of 530 thousand,
with about 900 available police officers.
- [Narrator] He says he now regrets
having directed his officers
to handle the demonstrations.
- [Norm] I made the biggest
mistake of my career
by authorizing the use of chemical agents
against non-violent,
non-threatening protesters.
- What happened in Seattle
is really consistent
with what we know from a large body
of research on crowd psychology,
and we know that when crowds
feel that they're engaged
in peaceful, lawful behavior,
then the police use force against them
or make mass arrests against them,
the reaction is often going to be defiance
and rebellion, rather than
sort of people just peacefully
saying "okay I'm gonna go home now"
- [Narrator] Immediately
after the protests,
Stamper resigned,
and he has since dedicated
the rest of his career to police reform.
Though there were few
injuries and no deaths,
the images coming out of Seattle,
depicted a city that had
lost control of it's streets,
and so control became a key theme
for police departments in the aftermath.
- Seattle really to me,
marked the beginning
of a whole new era in the way
police dealt with protest.
- [Norm] To me 20 years later,
the greatest significance of all,
is that the lessons we learned
are not generally being followed,
in the rest of the country.
- Following Seattle, other
law enforcement agencies
around the country realized that they had,
events that were coming up,
that very likely, they would experience
some of the same protest
that they had seen in Seattle
and some of the potential disruption,
and they were going to need to deal with
this new way of doing protests.
This leaderless, disruptive,
not willing to negotiate with police.
- [Narrator] Howard Jordan
was the chief of police
in Oakland California
during the occupy protests
and he said his officers struggled
with the leaderless structure
of the demonstrations.
- Our policies required us
to meet with demonstrators
and try and come up with
a peaceful solution.
Sort of, work out a deal where
they stay on their side of the street
and we stay on our side of
the street and that's it.
But as time went on over the years,
even today obviously that
stuff kind of went away.
- [Narrator] In the early 1990s,
the U.S Department of Defense
created the 1033 Program,
which gave unused military equipment
to local law enforcement free of charge.
The justice department
also starting giving money
to local agencies for policing programs,
training and equipment.
After September 11th and
the ensuing wars abroad,
the militarization of U.S law enforcement
kicked into a new gear.
The newly created Department
of Homeland Security,
started granting money
to states for equipment
and training related to
anti-terrorism strategies.
- That kind of combination
of racketing up the police response
to the anti-globalization protesters
and then being concerned about
the presence of terrorists,
in these crowd events,
these things led American
police to really adopt,
much more intensive, much
more invasive approaches
for handling these events.
- [Narrator] And then came the
unrest in Ferguson, Missouri
after Michael Brown, an
unarmed black teenager
was shot and killed by police.
More than 50 law enforcement agencies
were involved in the response to Ferguson
and revealed a complete breakdown
of communication and strategies.
- The police response to the protests,
in and around Ferguson,
it was really almost a case study
of how not to respond to these incidents.
- [Narrator] It also
exposed just how militarized
local enforcement had gotten.
In response the Obama administration
started restricting standards
on the provision of
military style equipment
to local police departments.
Later they created a task
force on American policing
and released a comprehensive report
detailing what went wrong in Ferguson.
Writing out policy
plans for police reform.
Despite the efforts of
the Obama administration
the response to today's
protests have shown
that the equipment and
tactics used by police
are not standardized.
President Trump signed an executive order
reversing Obama's restrictions
on military equipment in 2017
and has called himself the
law and order president.
Law enforcement agencies
across the country
still hold billions of dollars
worth of tactical equipment.
But the recent protests are
already leading to changes.
There's a renewed push
by lawmakers to shut down
the surplus military equipment program,
and some cities have
started restricting the use
of chemical and less
lethal weapons by police.
There's also a growing movement
to defund local police departments,
and reinvest that money.
- That incident in Minneapolis,
it's not good for law enforcement.
We just took 20 years,
we just went 20 years backwards.
We're not gonna recover
from that, anytime soon.
- [Narrator] Stamper, says
he understands the complexity
of systemically reforming the police,
but sees this moment as
a golden opportunity.
- [Norm] I do believe after all the years,
that I've been clamoring
for police reform,
we're at a crossroads.
The timing could not be
better for legitimate reform.
(gentle music)
