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:
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“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)
“The due process of law as we use it, I believe, rests squarely on the liberal idea of conflict and resolution.”
—June L. Trapp (b. 1930)
“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)
“If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won’t. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterwards act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your better judgment.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)