War on Crime

The War on Crime is where we really begin to see the lines blur between military and civilian police practice. This is known as a counterinsurgency style of policing. Around the same time, the Office of Public Safety (OPS) was established. This entity began training officers here stateside and overseas, as well as equipping the police forces in those countries. It seemed as though the police state in America was influencing the same unethical behavior in other countries. “During its dozen active years, amid the Cold War global and domestic uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s, OPS hired hundreds of municipal and state police officers, trained them in Washington, D.C., and sent them abroad to instruct foreign police in modern, professional methods and develop their counterinsurgency capacities.”(Seigel, “Objects of Police History,” 152.) These counterinsurgency tactics were trying to prevent the crimes before they happened which led to many mistakes on the end of the police force. Unfortunately with the assumptions of people of color, they still felt like they were locking up criminals even if they had not commited crime.

Another aspect of the war on crime was the backlash welfare recipients. Many Americans felt as if they had no rights. A New York Police Officer along with a few other disgruntled Americans had written letters to government expressing their concerns. For example, the letter the police officer sent stated: “It seems like the law abiding citizens have no rights whatsoever, except the responsibility and obligation ‘to work in order to support and care for the parasites of society, the common and habitual criminal.’” (Kohler-Hausmann, “Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States,” 87.) Even though there was a negative correlation between welfare spending and the rate of incarceration, people still felt as if they were cheated. The war on crime along with the blurring between state/market, military/police, and foreign/domestic led to the societal norm that prisons are integral to our society.