This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 26, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's no secret that military hardware has been finding its way to police departments,

the people who protect and serve throughout the country, the military

equipment build up along the U.S. border among explicitly non-military agencies that is often

then shared with local cops, raises some pretty serious concerns over the

accountability of local law enforcement all in the name of border protection.

Nathan Goodman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Economics at NYU. We spoke last month in Las Vegas.

Listeners to this podcast will know based on conversations I've had with Patrick Edington

about the Customs and border protection that they operate with relative

impunity within 100 miles of the U.S. border. but you, Nathan, say that this is actually, it's worse than that.

The tactics and methods used by people who operate at the border trying to protect the U.S. border

is becoming militarized.

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so when we talk about militarization, that occurs along multiple dimensions.

So one is the level of hardware.

The military transfers a variety of forms of hardware to customs and border protection.

And this can be everything from Black Hawk helicopters to weaponry to unmanned vehicles, better known as drones.

And so a lot of tools that have originally been used in America's foreign interventions abroad

come home and are then deployed at the border by the Border Patrol.

So that's one dimension is the hardware dimension or the physical capital dimension.

But there's also a training and practices dimension and we might call that the human capital

...