The Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act is a United States federal law enacted in 1981 that allowed the military of the United States to cooperate with law enforcement. Operations in support of law enforcement include assistance in counterdrug operations, assistance for civil disturbances, special security operations, combatting terrorism, explosive ordnance disposal (EOD), and similar activities. Constitutional and statutory restrictions and corresponding directives and regulations limit the type of support provided in this area.
The Act is cited in the 1992 essay The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 as having set a precedent that the author, a United States Air Force officer, considered dangerous.
The Act was known as Public Law 97-86 and is codified at title 10 of the United States Code, Chapter 18.
Famous quotes containing the words military, cooperation, law, agencies and/or act:
“I would sincerely regret, and which never shall happen whilst I am in office, a military guard around the President.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“While it is generally agreed that the visible expressions and agencies are necessary instruments, civilization seems to depend far more fundamentally upon the moral and intellectual qualities of human beings—upon the spirit that animates mankind.”
—Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958)
“We all have—to put it as nicely as I can—our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terrible power that sometimes destroys us; but they don’t talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before—truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)