Army to station active-duty unit in the U.S. for 'crowd control'

September 24, 9:53 AMCivil Liberties ExaminerJ.D. Tuccille

Previous Next

3 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Civil Liberties Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

I don't find this news item from the Army Times especially comforting:

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

The piece adds, "They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack."

"Civil unrest and crowd control?"

Look, there's are reasons that the United States -- and liberal democracies in general -- traditionally keeps military troops at arm's length when it comes to policing duties. The military is good at killing people and breaking things. I don't mean to diminish that mission -- it's important and necessary under the right circumstances. If your country is under threat of attack, you may well need to kill people and break things. But police work involves keeping the peace within strictly defined legal parameters. The two roles don't overlap very well.

Machine guns, for instance, are not ideal crowd control devices.

That's why the Posse Comitatus Act  was passed in 1878 after the domestic experience with Reconstruction made it clear that troops and law enforcement don't mix very well. But the Posse Comitatus Act has been eroded in recent years, most particularly by the use of military assets to enforce drug prohibition, and at an accelerating pace in the course of providing security after 9/11.

So the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is coming home. And while I welcome the troops home from Iraq, I'm not really happy with their new mission.