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Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

nytimes.com

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Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#61

Post by _qbjt »

Shivetya wrote: post #28

The 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…

The first sentence of your post is simply not true. Demilitarization does help to reduce police violence [0]. Your points about union contracts and civilian oversight are valid and important to point out though.

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#62

Post by luckylion »

jkaptur wrote: post #48
luckylion wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that the medical professionals will not be happy if you made this the new normal, so I'm not sure it's wise to bring this out as an argument for "so it should be okay for the police to do this normally". Also, fewer surgeons and nurses get shot on the job, I assume.

You may want to check that assumption (particularly if you expand to violence in general).

Relative to industry size?

From what I understand, assaults on health care workers is a large issue, but they are also much more numerous than law enforcement. It's hard to find exact numbers, as I really don't know the US government industry names very well, so I have no idea whether "Police protection" in IIF contains all LE and "Health care and social assistance" is the appropriate other category, but HE has slightly more deaths (138 vs 111) while employing a lot more people (16m vs <1m).

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#63

Post by klmadfejno »

matwood wrote: post #47
catalogia wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

I would love to see some statistics before discriminating against veterans. My intuition says combat vets would make better police officers because they would likely be better trained, and are used to dealing with high pressure, dangerous situations. The military's RoE are also very strict with severe consequences for violating. Contrary to what some think, soldiers are not running around shooting every person they s…

Just posted this to a different adjacent thread but since you're asking for this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30281075/

Study suggests ex-military cops are 2.9x more likely to be involved in a shooting if they had been deployed, and still 1.9x if they were ex-military but not deployed.

It's worth considering that people who leave the military to join another high risk of violence job may simply be violence seeking individuals, and that a randomly selected solider who was required to be a policeman would not show this effect. But given we can't really control that, we'd likely be better hiring fewer ex-military vets.

Another search suggests vets are over-represented in police jobs by about 3.5x their baseline rate

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#64

Post by rsynnott »

dashundchen wrote: post #11
briandear wrote: post #2

I 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…

> 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.

What always confuses me (I live in a country where the police don't generally get guns, even) is what they're preparing for with this sort of thing? A full-on war? Like, if they need hundreds of assault rifles for police work, then arguably society has already collapsed and the police are probably surplus to requirements anyway.

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#65

Post by minimuffins »

briandear wrote: post #2

I 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…

> it does seem they need some sort of up-armored police cars given how many of them have been destroyed in the rioting

Police cars that can be destroyed by unarmed civilians are a feature not a bug.

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#66

Post by jointpdf »

jeffbee wrote: post #50
core-questions wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't see why it's not clear there's a difference here, in terms of community interest, but whatever > A civilian police force should have no special rights above any other civilian entity. What a weird way of loo…

Police power is not intrinsic. It is granted by the people through their elected government. In my state, every local authority has the power to designate entities to exercise their various powers. By tradition these are police or sheriff departments but there's nothing preventing the local government from vesting police powers in the 4-H club or Wal-mart.

> there's nothing preventing the local government from vesting police powers in the 4-H club

Would love to see this happen. Being policed by literal pigs would be better than...well, you know.

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#67

Post by dang »

tehwebguy wrote: post #54
rconti wrote: post #14

A 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…

Taking away their toys would have a massive impact, don't concern troll that vital point away.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Instead, make your substantive points thoughtfully.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#68

Post by Spivak »

twblalock wrote: post #21

Police were able to brutalize protesters in the 1960s with much simpler equipment than they have today. The equipment is not the problem.

True but modern weapons have made it possible for a single officer/small group to brutalize people much more efficiently.

You can really only beat one person at a time with a club. You can spray rubber bullets and water pumps into a crowd.

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#69

Post by dang »

inerte wrote: post #10
jmastrangelo wrote: post #5

Focusing on the gear seems like a cheap and easy solution compared to fixing training and accountability, the actual root of the issue.

No when life gives you lemons, there is no need for whataboutism. Let’s keep pressuring and working to get to training and accountability too.

This comment breaks the site guidelines against calling names in arguments ("whataboutism"). Please don't do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#70

Post by eloff »

Shivetya wrote: post #28

The 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…

Yes, you're right that this won't achieve real change. I truly like the idea of civilian oversight boards.

However, I think any meaningful change or even competent governance is of the table in the US until something is done about the broken and polarized two party system. Right now the two factions are about evenly matched and can hardly agree on anything. Until that changes the US will continue to have their most unproductive governments in their history.

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