- [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)