Police were able to brutalize protesters in the 1960s with much simpler equipment than they have today. The equipment is not the problem.
Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear
21–30 of 339 posts
Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear
#22I don’t think the police need MRAPs. That’s a bit over the top. However, it does seem they need some sort of up-armored police cars given how many of them have been destroyed in the rioting. SWAT maybe has some use for military equipment, but only for bona-fide SWAT situations (hostages/bombs/active shooter.) But rolling out MRAPs for general policing is a bad policy. It’s one step removed from deploying tanks and it…
Sure, maybe there is limited use in some of this equipment. But my small city police department recently got a grant for 450 high powered assault rifles and armored vests, on top of the hundreds they already had. There are only 700 officers including things like traffic enforcement. Of course the police union lobbied for more. They have armored trucks and undercover vehicles. They have mobile towers to survey. They h…
The equipment they request betrays their perspective. They see themselves as having more in common with soldiers in occupied Baghdad than police officers.
Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, maybe there is limited use in some of this equipment. But my small city police department recently got a grant for 450 high powered assault rifles and armored vests, on top of the hundreds they already had. There are only 700 officers including things like traffic enforcement. Of course the police union lobbied for more. They have armored trucks and undercover vehicles. They have mobile towers to survey. They h…
This sounds like an excellent case for equipment limitations. At the very least making departments pay 'retail' for gear instead of getting effectively donated surplus.
Why should taxpayers who fund the police have to artificially pay more markup, making someone else rich, just so the police have less equipment?
Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we should also make it legal for police departments to discriminate against combat veterans when hiring, and encourage them to do so. Perhaps as a token of fairness, this could be paired with a separate initiative to provide other sort of jobs to combat veterans. People trained by the military to police occupied communities should not be allowed to act as civilian police in peacetime conditions.
More vets might be a positive thing. The rule of engagement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are significantly stricter than they are for America's cops. No firing until fired upon, limits on use of things like tear gas and riot gear, etc. They're also trained significantly more. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/08/1... > In contrast, soldiers continuously and over the course of their career…
> The rule of engagement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are significantly stricter than they are for America's cops.
Maybe on paper, but in practice they act with little if any respect for the communities they're in. For instance screaming at people and pointing rifles at their heads to "overcome" the language barrier. Or, as apologists phrase it, "use verbal warnings, show their weapons,"
Edit: Here is something else for the haters to consider:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology
After WWII, the American military conducted studies that determined a large portion of their soldiers were unwilling to kill people in combat. This was perceived as a problem and efforts were undertaken to make soldiers more willing to kill people. Among these measures was the use of human silhouette targets at gun ranges, a practice which is not coincidentally common for civilian police today: http://www.americantargetcompany.com/law_enforcement_targets...
It's not just a matter of whether an individual police officer was a combat veteran, but also a matter of whether he ever received training from a combat veteran (which is extremely common.) Look up Dave Grossman.
Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear
#25Police were able to brutalize protesters in the 1960s with much simpler equipment than they have today. The equipment is not the problem.
All the more reason to not give the police even more powerful tools with which to brutalize people. If the equipment is not the problem, take it away. That's one less thing to worry about.
Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear
#26I don’t think the police need MRAPs. That’s a bit over the top. However, it does seem they need some sort of up-armored police cars given how many of them have been destroyed in the rioting. SWAT maybe has some use for military equipment, but only for bona-fide SWAT situations (hostages/bombs/active shooter.) But rolling out MRAPs for general policing is a bad policy. It’s one step removed from deploying tanks and it…
Sure, maybe there is limited use in some of this equipment. But my small city police department recently got a grant for 450 high powered assault rifles and armored vests, on top of the hundreds they already had. There are only 700 officers including things like traffic enforcement. Of course the police union lobbied for more. They have armored trucks and undercover vehicles. They have mobile towers to survey. They h…
I live close to a small town in the Bay Area, called Los Gatos. Quaint, expensive, beautiful place.
It was Big Truck Day at the library and a lot of government employees were showing their vehicles. Fire trucks, trash compactors, a huge bulldozer, and there was a police car and a handful of officers around.
A little girl came and pointed at a rifle and asked the officer, “what is this for?”
He said, “to protect myself”, paused and caught his breath and said “and to protect you”.
This happened a couple years ago. I still think about his pause, the afterthought on why he needs the truck, the rifle and the gear.
Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear
#27I don’t think the police need MRAPs. That’s a bit over the top. However, it does seem they need some sort of up-armored police cars given how many of them have been destroyed in the rioting. SWAT maybe has some use for military equipment, but only for bona-fide SWAT situations (hostages/bombs/active shooter.) But rolling out MRAPs for general policing is a bad policy. It’s one step removed from deploying tanks and it…
Sure, maybe there is limited use in some of this equipment. But my small city police department recently got a grant for 450 high powered assault rifles and armored vests, on top of the hundreds they already had. There are only 700 officers including things like traffic enforcement. Of course the police union lobbied for more. They have armored trucks and undercover vehicles. They have mobile towers to survey. They h…
> And they trot it out for peaceful protests. The police did not come equipped to protect, they came equipped to escalate and occupy.
"What's the point of having all this cool shit if we never get to use it?!"
Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear
#28The equipment issue isn't going to solve anything, this is just lip service to the real problem. Police Unions have effectively created a system by which officers are nearly immune from prosecution and even if successfully prosecuted their record cannot travel with them in many cases.
Now one fix that removing some of the equipment will do will reduce the amount of psychological impact it has on those wielding it, as in reduce the Rambo effect. The idea of attaching military style equipment to the current problems is only for political purposes, they needed to blame Trump for the violence.
However in the end, there are few alternatives to fixing the police and their application and misapplication of force
1) Restrict conditions that can be placed in union negotiated contracts regarding officer behavior, culpability, and indemnification.
2) If not 1) then make it illegal for the unions to exist with regards to any public servant who is armed
3) civilian oversight boards that are veto proof against the police they monitor. Not only would they review incidents which are questionable they would have to involved in any use of concentrated force to include no knock warrants; something which should be illegal except in the most incredible cases.
4) holding elected and appointed officials of the localities, city, county, or state, accountable for the harm caused by their police forces.
Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear
#29A common response to the idea of "police reform" is that it will make it harder/more expensive/etc to hire police, which we all agree we need. As an armchair economist who believes that everything DOES happen at the margins, we can't completely ignore this, so I'm at least somewhat sympathetic to the argument. But what really kills the argument is looking at how our medical professionals have stepped up and responded…
I agree that both professions have the same sort of "service in a time of crisis" mythology surrounding them but how does the fact that the norm for the medical profession is high pay where as the norm for police is slightly above minimum wage starting out with a shot as average pay after several years of service affect those myths?
I think it's worth discussing as I also had slight misgivings about the perceived disparity you mention.
I'm not sure that it's relevant, as the pay scale for LPNs/CNs/CNAs are all over the place... and overtime and retirement benefits can make law enforcement extremely lucrative careers. But I just don't have the numbers for it either way.
Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like an excellent case for equipment limitations. At the very least making departments pay 'retail' for gear instead of getting effectively donated surplus.
Why should taxpayers who fund the police have to artificially pay more markup, making someone else rich, just so the police have less equipment?
Why should the police get a discount? They should have to buy their MRAPs through the auction systems the same way that someone running a logging company has to buy surplus LMTVs. I'm sympathetic to the cause of saving money but if the military won't auction something to a random US citizen I don't see why they should be auctioning that thing to a random US civilian police force. They can sell that stuff to other nations if they can't sell it domestically.
I don't particularly care what the standard is for disposing of unwanted military hardware is so long as it's not a double one. A civilian police force should get no special treatment above any other civilian entity.