“Warriors”, says the sign emblazoned in huge letters across the top of the Marriott conference center in downtown Oakland. It refers to the Golden State Warriors, the hometown basketball team who have their practice facilities here, but it might equally apply to the unusual gathering inside the hotel.

Sprawled across the ground floor of the Marriott, a trade show was under way that represents the modern face of policing in America. Hundreds of burly men (they are largely men), heads shaved and dressed in battlefield uniforms in black, green or camouflage are milling around in groups of 10 or 20. There to greet them are scores of weapons manufacturers and military-grade technology companies eager to win their business.



On three sides of the hall, giant black tactical armoured vehicles are stationed, wheels chest-height, sides armour-plated to resist an AK-47 round or blast of a roadside bomb, roofs decked out with spotlights, surveillance cameras and swivel turrets able to house machine guns. One of the vehicles, the aptly named Sentinel – 21ft long, 17,500lbs in weight, and costing $250,000 and up – was developed by a Florida-based company called International Armored Group that began supplying the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan. “With all that experience in blast resistance, we decided to branch off into tactical vehicles tailored to police departments at home,” said the company’s Sally Stefova.



The men huddling in groups around the stalls are all members of police Swat teams, 35 in all, who have come to Oakland from across the US and as far afield as Singapore, South Korea and Brazil. They are here for the annual Urban Shield – a four-day event that concludes Monday.



The schedule includes a 48-hour simulated disaster training program that has put the Swat teams through mock scenarios of a mass shooting, hostage-taking or terrorist radiological attack. When they are not engaging in such exercises, police departments are invited to browse the Urban Shield vendors’ show where weapons contractors who normally deal with the US military seek to redirect their products to domestic use on America’s streets.



‘Keep calm and return fire’

This year’s Urban Shield has been held under the shadow of a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. As a result of the shooting of the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown on 9 August and the protests that ensued, ordinary Americans were introduced for the first time to the look of their modern police force.

Pictures of black armoured personnel carriers trundling through city streets topped by marksmen wielding sniper rifles, while on the ground officers kitted out in full camouflage gear pointed M-16 assault rifles at protesters standing with their hands above their heads, were beamed into millions of living rooms. As the tragedy of Ferguson unfolded, the country collectively gasped and shook its head. Where was all this happening? In a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, or in Fallujah?

Police advance through a cloud of tear gas toward demonstrators protesting against the killing of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Given the national soul-searching about militarized policing that Ferguson inspired, you might expect to see a muted, self-reflective Urban Shield this year. Not so, judging from the hardware on display on the convention floor.

As you enter the vast exhibition space you are accosted by assault rifles, gas masks, helmets, tactical knives, robots, drones, night-vision devices and countless other references to the war zone. The poster for the Urban Shield event itself shows a police officer from Oakland’s local Alameda sheriff’s department wearing a helmet and goggles and pointing an assault rifle directly out at the viewer. He crouches above a clock that has stopped symbolically at 9:11, alongside the words “Critical training 4 critical times”.

Many of the stalls are selling products initially created by the Pentagon and now repurposed for use by police departments.

Armored Mobility Inc is offering body armour with built-in plates that can stop 30 rounds from an AK-47. The company is aggressively marketing its armoured shield to police officers posted within elementary schools. “It’s unfortunate, but school shootings like the one at Sandy Hook in Connecticut can happen anywhere at any time,” said the firm’s Bill Gazza.

A company called Aircover is offering unmanned aerial systems, or drones, that it originally developed for the Department of Defense for sale. Its QR 425 four-propeller drone can be in the air within 15 seconds, rises at 80 feet per second, is largely self-piloting and streams military-grade encrypted high definition surveillance footage back to the base unit.

A UK weapons manufacturer based in Portsmouth, Accuracy International, is trying to interest American police departments in the sniper rifles that it originally designed for the British army. The guns, equipped with interchangeable barrels, are also widely used by the German armed forces.

Even the T-shirts on sale at Urban Shield show no self-awareness of post-Ferguson sensitivities. “Keep calm and return fire,” one model says. Another has printed on it the figure of a person with hands in the air – the same symbol of peaceful defiance used by Ferguson protesters – onto which a gun-sight has been superimposed directly over the head, above the rubric: “This is my peace sign”.

‘If the bad guy has a gun you need a rifle’

Ronnie Fowles is managing a stall at Urban Shield for his company, First Spear, that makes lightweight carriers in camouflaged nylon. First Spear is based in St Louis, close to Ferguson, and before he joined the firm Fowles spent 10 years as a member of the city’s metropolitan police Swat team. Each year, his unit carried out up to 350 raids on houses to search for drugs or weapons, often turning up in armoured vehicles like the Sentinel and effecting what is known in the trade as “hard doors” where forced entry is gained using a battering ram.

In his view, the Swat teams in Ferguson acted entirely appropriately. “Throwing stones and Molotov cocktails – that’s not protesting peacefully. You can’t have police officers stand in the streets without protecting themselves.”

Members of the Sacramento Swat team checkout a sniper rifle. Photograph: Robert Gumpert/Guardian

Fowles’s belief is that the changing face of American policing has been a necessary bottom-up response to the increasingly well-armed criminal and domestic terrorist. But that argument is disputed by criminologists and civil liberties groups who point instead to a top-down cause of militarized policing: billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money that has been spent since 9/11 acquiring tactical equipment for police departments by the federal government.

Under the Pentagon’s 1033 program, mine-resistant armoured vehicles, or MRaps, assault rifles and other heavy gear designed for Iraq and Afghanistan has been thrown at police departments at a rate of about half a billion dollars-worth a year. A similar amount goes out annually under the department of justice’s Edward Byrne Memorial JAG program and the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), both of which provide grants for police to buy the latest military-grade gadgetry of the kind that’s on display at Urban Shield.

The outcome, according to a major report earlier this year from the American Civil Liberties Union, is that military hardware is making its way onto the streets of America for use in everyday policing. “It’s inappropriate for the federal government to be fuelling the militarization of local police. Urban Shield seems to encapsulate this blurring of the lines between military and police,” said Kara Dansky, author of the ACLU report.

In the aftermath of Ferguson, there are signs of change in Washington. President Obama has ordered a review of the 1033, Byrne and UASI programmes and Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri will hold congressional hearings on them on Tuesday.

‘Urban Shield seems to encapsulate this blurring of the lines between military and police,’ said Kara Dansky, author of the ACLU report. Photograph: Robert Gumpert/Guardian

But so far the message doesn’t appear to have filtered down to the local level. The Bay Area UASI helped to fund Urban Shield this year, and the DHS even has its own stall in the vendors’ show where it is showing off the latest whizz-bang tools created by its science and technology directorate. The innovations include a radio-wave machine that can detect heartbeats through a wall to help Swat teams anticipate how many bodies they will face when they make a “hard door”. There’s also a robot that can shoot a pistol – for testing purposes only, DHS officials stressed.

With such federal encouragement beaming out from the DHS stall, it is scarcely surprising that the prevailing mood at Urban Shield is that the trend towards militarized policing is here to stay. As Steve Lenthe, a member of a narcotics unit within the local Alameda County sheriffs office who is participating in the event, sees it, Ferguson-style policing is essential because “my job is not to take a bullet. If wearing full body armour gets me home safely, absolutely.”

He thinks police have to stay a step ahead of the criminal. “If the bad guy’s got a stick you need a baton, if he has a gun you need a rifle, if he gets hold of a rifle you need something even more powerful.”

But what is the precise nature of the threat that obligates this ever inflating police-criminal arms race? Where is it coming from?

‘New threats are being invented to use as justification’

Lenthe was one of several police officers and vendors who told the Guardian that a serious threat came from Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans returning home with post-traumatic stress disorder. “These are sophisticated people, guys coming back from combat who know how to use their weapons and are dealing with PTSD,” he said, despite the insistence of the Department of Veterans Affairs that the link between PTSD and violent crime is overblown to the point of distortion.

The idea raises the paradoxical thought that military hardware from America’s two wars is being transferred to domestic police under the Pentagon’s 1033 programme in order to deal with the threat of US veterans returning from those very same conflicts.

Another paradox is that police forces are acquiring military equipment to protect them from themselves. When I asked Joshua Nielsen, a sales rep from Adamson police products, why the latest model of gas mask on display was necessary, he replied that Swat teams wore them when they propelled gas canisters into a house before raiding it.

Nielsen also said the masks came in handy when police deploy tear gas into a crowd, as they did at Ferguson. Several Urban Shield participants mentioned crowd control as one of the features of the perceived “rising threat levels” that justified the trend towards militarization.

We are in a climate where a lot of people are fighting against authority. In the Sixties people linked arms and sang songs, now we have anarchist groups and the Black Panthers and agitators from all the splinter groups throwing things at us,” said Lenthe.

He mentioned the Occupy Oakland protests as an example of the kind of civil unrest the police were up against. In October 2011, officers in riot gear shot tear gas as they cleared an Occupy camp at City Hall; protesters returned fire with turquoise and red paint.

Matt Foster of Oakland holds a Stop Urban Shield sign outside the convention. ‘I’ve been protesting for 30 years on issues of police brutality and many others,’ he said. Photograph: Rem O'Donnelley/Demotix/Corbis

Occupy Oakland protesters were among the small crowd of demonstrators who gathered outside the Urban Shield convention on Friday wielding placards that said: “Stop police brutality” and “You’re not a hero you’re a murderer”. “Whenever police say they were acting in response to crowd violence against them, it’s normally the opposite. How can you talk about an unarmed public threatening a militarized police like this?” said Lara Kiswani from San Francisco.

Tom Nolan, a criminologist at Merrimack College in Massachusetts who served 27 years in the Boston police department and has studied the trend in modern policing, said that “new threats are being invented that law enforcers and manufacturers use as justification. Weapons companies who used to court the US military now see a commercial opportunity in domestic police forces so they try to convince people of a need that is non-existent.”

So is that commercial opportunity now under threat in the wake of Ferguson? Some of the Urban Shield participants expressed anxiety about a Ferguson backlash that would force police forces to give up some of their armaments and leave officers exposed.

Kendra Nunes, a patrol sergeant in San Jose, said she regretted the fact that her police department had decided as a result of the furore around militarized policing following Ferguson to hand back to the federal government its surveillance drone and to pass on to another agency the armoured vehicle that it had bought with an UASI grant.

“I think it’s unfortunate that we’ve given the drone and the armoured vehicle up,” Nunes said. “What good are we if we are outgunned by the bad guy? What can we do if we are in a school shoot-out facing a guy with an assault rifle and the public don’t want us to have an armoured vehicle because it makes them feel uncomfortable?”

She added that in the end it was up to society to decide where to draw the line. “But until the politicians make up their minds, who are the victims – the innocent people caught in the crossfire and the police officers called out to respond.”

But Nunes’s fear that America is turning away from a heavily-armed police is atypical, judging from the Marriott’s packed exhibition hall. Several of the country’s top companies had stalls in the vendors’ show, suggesting they still believe there is serious money to be made, including telecoms firms such as Verizon, Samsung and Sprint, arms manufacturers like Sig Sauer, and even the ride-sharing service Uber which sponsored this year’s Urban Shield.

“This militarized policing thing – it’s all political chest-beating,” said the narcotics officer Lenthe, expressing a view shared by many Swat officers and vendors who talked to the Guardian. “Americans have short memories and when something else happens all this knee-jerk stuff about military equipment will all be blown away.”