The Causes and Consequences of Global Police Militarization

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The Causes and Consequences of Global Police MilitarizationIn recent decades, police forces around the world have become more militarized adopting the weaponry, organizational structures, and accountability more typical of military forces. This project examines how militarized policing spread internationally, why it spread in the way that it did, and what the security consequences have been. The project will include an examination of the impact of police militarization on the attitudes of police officers towards civilian oversight and their willingness to engage in political action. The project will also produce a new global dataset of police militarization, which will be useful for scholars studying policing and crime, repression, counterinsurgency, and civil-military relations. The findings of the project will have important implications for the use of security sector assistance in foreign aid policies as well as efforts to undertake police reform. The goals of this project are to: (1) document patterns in police militarization across countries and within them over time through the creation of a new, cross-national time-series dataset on global police militarization, which includes 170 countries, 1946-2022; and (2) develop and test innovative arguments that advance scientific knowledge about the causes and consequences of global police militarization. The project will test new and innovative arguments with mixed methods, including statistical analyses of the global police militarization dataset, archival research on international police assistance programs during the Cold War, and a survey of police officials with an experimental component. The findings of the project will advance basic research on questions regarding the development and performance of police forces in comparative perspective, police attitudes toward civilian authorities and reform efforts, and security sector assistance as an instrument of foreign policy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.