Anything that keeps us scared and submissive works well for the plutocracy. Citizens should never think that they live in a neighborhood, oh no, they live in a terrorist infested war zone.
Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
61–70 of 254 posts
Re: Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a policeman has access to body armor and machine guns to serve a warrant on some guy in a house, he will take them along. The cop has no idea who may be behind a door when they knock -- they may be intoxicated/high, have a vicious pit bull, or just be a scared kid with a gun and nothing to lose. The policeman wants to go home to see his kids at the end of his shift. Uh, shouldn't this information be available base…
Easy for a guy sitting in a chair in front of a computer to say. I'm not justifying the behavior, I'm trying to illuminate why it's happening. You're attributing responsibility for a situation to people who don't make decisions. Society has made choices (let's move to the burbs to get away from those poor folk) and your representatives have enacted laws that have created all sorts of absurd situations. And we drop po…
Yes, it is easy for a guy sitting in a chair in front of a computer to say, and since those guys are the ones paying for the small chance to one day be murdered by a police officer, it should be easy to say, and should be said confidently.
Re: Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
#63"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people" -Commander William Adama, Battlestar Galactica
Re: Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
#64The SWAT issue is a different issue IMO, more related to politicians wanting to "do something" at the Federal and State levels. "Doing something" translates to "allocate funding". That money can pay for more cops/overtime, or stuff. Or it may be earmarked by a congressman whose donor makes light tanks to only buy tanks. The us vs. them stuff is related to the state of affairs in high-crime communities. Cops can't rel…
> "The cop has no idea who may be behind a door when they knock"
The cop also has no idea what's waiting for them in a vehicle they've just pulled over on the highway. Some of them have been murdered in exactly that situation.
But should they all suit up before writing traffic tickets?
Re: Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
#65In the interest of playing devil's advocate, couldn't the fact that we have 94 guns per 100 Americans have something to do with it? To be honest, the cops that work in Oakland, Compton, Detroit, Chicago, and many other cities effectively are fighting wars with heavily armed gangs, etc.
I don't know that I buy the notion that police are the way they are today because of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam protests. Seems to me like the rise of inner city violence is a far bigger mover.
Not trying to justify militarized police, just trying to understand the reasons why in order to logically approach alternatives.
Re: Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US police is VERY militarized in Urban areas. U.S. urban areas are very militarized. London, a city of 8 million people, had 100 murders last year. Over the last 20 years, the number broke 200 only once, in 2003. Chicago, a city of only 2.7 million people, had 532 last year. And this is way down from the peak. Murders in U.S. cities peaked in the early 1990's. L.A. county had 2,589 murders at its peak in 1993.…
This is true but a lot of these murders are gang related so it isn't quite a great comparison not? I know the topics of guns in america is a hot topic in general but even for the usa the general trend is downward.
Gang-related murders are the result of gang activity, and gang-activity is very scary for a community. First, lots of teenagers and young people are gang members, and gangs have major presences in inner-city schools, so even a "gang-related murder" isn't like some mobster getting killed, but something that hits really close to home in the community. Second, this activity is very geographically segregated, which makes particular neighborhoods seem more like war zones. Third, even a few innocent bystanders getting caught in the cross-fire can have a chilling effect on the community. In Chicago this year, a kid who sang at Obama's inauguration was gunned down in gang-related cross-fire. Just one kid in a city of 2.7 million people, but it still had a tremendous effect on the community.
The trend in America is definitely downward--murder counts in LA county and NYC are about a fifth of what they were in the early 1990's, but they are still 4x higher than London's (greater London is roughly similar in population to LA county and NYC). And the militarization of the U.S. police didn't happen overnight. It happened in the 1970's-1990's when crime rates in U.S. cities skyrocketed. That apparatus hasn't demobilized in response to decreased crime rates.
Re: Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
#67In the interest of playing devil's advocate, couldn't the fact that we have 94 guns per 100 Americans have something to do with it? To be honest, the cops that work in Oakland, Compton, Detroit, Chicago, and many other cities effectively are fighting wars with heavily armed gangs, etc. I don't know that I buy the notion that police are the way they are today because of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam protests.…
America has always had that many guns, but the police weren't always militarized. In addition, the amount of crime and number of police killed in the line of duty has steadily decreased over the years.
The devil's advocate in me wonders if the number of police killed is reduced because of the heavy use of SWAT whenever they think there might be any threat to an officer in a raid.
Re: Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
#68Simple, do you see the limits to preventive actions they can take in most cities? Have you read how "rights" activist are going to strip NYC cops from doing just that which has resulted in an incredible drop in murders and similar crimes? We got there because we stopped police from policing and instead forced them to respond to situations left to build until they explode. We got there by telling them, no you can't lo…
Yeah, who needs that stupid Fourth Amendment anyway?
Re: Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
#69How did we get here? When gangs and organized crime turned the cities into war zones in the 1970's and 1980's.
Then why did the practice only catch on and spread like wild-fire after crime had already begun its plunge?
And why, after crime has continued to drop dramatically, has SWAT-ification continued to increase (if not accelerated) rather than plateau or even drop in response?
Re: Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think limited freedom cultures are good for our work go on ahead ignoring this stuff. Or realize that we generally need a good free society to work in and flourish in and these are all precursor warnings to more political crack downs that could drastically curb the hacker scene in the US. There are already increased cases of security researchers getting the SWAT treatment followed by jail. Who thinks thats goo…
If you think limited freedom cultures are good for our work go on ahead ignoring this stuff. I exist outside of HN. HN though is where I want to see technology articles and discussion, not politics. From the guidelines: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
Between this and the PRISM stories, some hackers seem to think the interesting new phenomenon of a US surveillance state run by warlords is just as important to talk about as the Nth new javascript framework or blog post about MVPs.