From Muslim foreign students to immigrants from Latin America, the most visible targets of current militarized policing by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), local police, and other authorities are racialized minorities. As legal scholar Fanna Gamal writes, the use of weapons of war in policing has always been a “race-making process” in the United States.

The first case Gamal examines actually involves the withdrawal of military forces—the federal troops that enforced voting rights for Black Americans during Reconstruction. Following the 1876 election, the parties struck a deal to remove those forces, allowing vigilante and southern white authorities to reinstate control over Black southerners. Notably, many troops were redeployed within national borders to put down the Great Strike of 1877 and move Native people to reservations.

Gamal points to a continuing pattern in which Black communities have been simultaneously over- and under-policed. In the 1960s, for example, one galvanizing experience for the Civil Rights movement was the lack of a response by local and federal officials to the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls. And another was police surveillance, arrests, and violence directed against Black, and also Latino, communities.

In response to both nonviolent Civil Rights protests and uprisings like the 1965 Watts Riots, a 1967 FBI report claimed that “Negro unrest” was the result of Communist and Black militant propaganda. It called for increased cooperation between military and police and suggested that police departments needed plans for an “impressive display of force,” potentially with the help of National Guard or federal troops.

“Advancing police militarization as a response to racial uprisings meant constructing an identity for the protestors that placed them outside of state protection and in the realm of state threat,” Gamal writes.

After Watts, the Los Angeles Police Department consulted with the Marines and other military forces for tactical training and guidance on reacting to snipers. This led to the creation of the first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team. The team’s first major raid was on the Black Panther Party’s Los Angeles headquarters.

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Unlike in the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe, the arrest of Jewish people was largely in the hands of ordinary policemen in France, especially in Paris.

Over the decades that followed, almost every city in the country followed suit, and, by the mid-2000s, as much as 80 percent of small towns had their own teams. While SWAT teams are often presented as a resource for dealing with active shooters, one study found that the vast majority of their deployments are for executing a warrant.

In the 1980s, as part of the War on Drugs—which focused in wildly disproportionate fashion on arresting Black drug users and sellers—Congress expanded opportunities for the military to provide equipment, training, and other assistance to police departments. It also authorized the federal government to transfer surplus military equipment to local police with almost no public transparency. By the time Gamal was writing in 2016, military equipment was on display in the response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The images of black neighborhoods patrolled by tanks and armored vehicles in Ferguson and Baltimore clearly demarcate who is outside of state protection,” she writes.

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