This is the Cando Daily Podcast for Monday, August 18th, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The militarization of local police didn't happen overnight.

It took decades.

And much of the change was driven by the war on drugs.

Trevor Burris, a research fellow with the Cato Institute, talks a bit about how we got here.

Events in Ferguson, Missouri have brought to the forefront, you know, in vivid detail, the militarization that we see with police but of course this has a long history there's a lot of programs that have existed that were created and it's helpful to know who has been

promoting and putting these things in place, I guess do we go back to the 1980s, 1990s?

90s?

Even Nixon, I would say.

Okay.

So just to start, I mean, the war on drugs obviously fuels a lot of this, but let's start with a Clinton administration.

This was cops, co-op S, community-oriented policing.

What was the, what was that program?

It was a program, you know, with fighting the drug war and fighting other types of crime.

Actually even going back before that, we have to look at two things.

One, the general ability to have fighting crime always sells well with the voters.

Say if we're going to get tough on crime, it's difficult to find a voter who won't be agreeing

with that. And then the drug war of course on top of that and the crime

rate was going up for a very long time. It started going down about about

1992 but since the 60s started with the riots kept going up there was this idea of a complete

destroyed inner city and you needed to equip cops to do this so they thought of there

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