221–230 of 254 posts
Crime is at an all-time low yet spending on police is near an all-time high. (Those factors could have a causal relationship, but I doubt it's the primary cause based on reading "The Better Angels of Our Nature".) http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1950_2010... Having big budgets but less crime means these swollen budgets end up being wasted on a lot of "fun" things like military gear. (Did you know t…
What police should be doing is being rudimentary members of the community at large. That is being just as vulnerable as the rest of us.
We have all seen the situation where a traffic cop gets killed by someone they stopped for speeding and has a warrant and kills the cop.
Then the state police go crazy and embark on a manhunt which can and has had collateral damage. As if because that policeman died that a mob of local and state police can avenge the death of one of their own at any cost.
This is a sick psychological proposition, if police can unleash a vigilante hell against citizens when someone shoots or injures one of them, then why cant citizens do the same without repercussions? The police state is setting a very bad example for the rest of us.
If police were part of the community in the same sense of being vulnerable to the same bad forces the rest of us are, they would command a lot more respect and be seen as our protectors, but as it stands they have adopted the overwhelming force of stormtroopers.
As a result the respect they attempt to pursue from shooting dogs, breaking down doors, driving humvees, shutting down streets, invading homes with no-knock warrants, targeting people with no facts, will only erode their standing in our society while putting more people in jail unjustly, but also deny citizens from having any rights based on our national constitution.
And Washington will call it a debate.
David Simon and Ed Burns wrote the following passage for the TV show, "The Wire" spoken by Bunny Colvin: >>> This was written in 2004. With the passage of time, it seems more and more prescient.
Even well respected actor, Levar Burton, knows how to act in front of police. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=M-ck....
For black people we go into every encounter with the police thinking this might be my last moment on earth.
Not a flippant comment...... I blame Hollywood. I honestly do. They glamorize and hero worship mega violent law breaking cops, while at the same time portraying criminals as super beings with government like resources, who always lose due to the violent law breaking cops. The people in the end believe this to be a vaguely true, even though in their lives they rarely see it, most cops are in fact fairly decent profess…
You are missing a news industry, who secretly want a Micheal Bay like special effects budget .
Yes, they do dress up news like an action movie. That most obvious and grating feature of this is the emotional music they now play over news and documentaries. Also, they way enemies are completely demonized and dehumanized, and the good guys worshiped. And when a lead character goes off script, they really freak out.
Yet another reason to not have guns in your house. If you get raided by overzealous police that don't even identify themselves properly, and you have a gun that you try to use for self defense... EOF
In other words, you shouldn't have a gun because some scary men might break into your house and point their guns at you.
A large number of police officers are former military personnel. It's not surprising that this militarized philosophy is common among police today.
This is an awful generalization, there are many veterans that see this as excessive and abhorrent. They left the Middle East to trade the military environment for quiet(er) civilian life.
"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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an awful generalization, there are many veterans that see this as excessive and abhorrent. They left the Middle East to trade the military environment for quiet(er) civilian life.
Yet they presumably chose to join the military, right? Is it really excessive and abhorrent to suggest that those who decide to join the military would tend towards militarized philosophies? They're not saints.
Tanks, automatic weapons, helicopters, bulletproof vests, helmets, armor piercing ammunition, bomb squads, all provided by the federal arms dealers.
Any idea that the militarization of local and state police is driven by ex-veterans is not only factually wrong but a crazy excuse for the fact that the US federal government has been training them to militarize themselves.
And once they have these toys, you might expect them to feel pretty powerful just for having them.
In fact, I think you could make the opposite case, that actual veterans if they made up the police force would respect the constitution and would never treat US citizens on US soil in this manner.
You can't make this shit up. > Police in North Dakota borrowed a $154 million MQ-9 Predator B drone from the Department of Homeland Security to arrest a family of anti-government separatists who refused to return six cows that wandered onto their farm.
> North Dakota [...] a family of anti-government separatists Were these the kind of anti-government separatists who are harmless quirky people who confine their anti-government activity to blogs and leaflets, or the kind of anti-government separatists who amass a ton of weapons and declare themselves independent and vow to shoot any government agents who "invade" their sovereign territory?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Today in the US, if you call 911 about an emergency medical condition, they will often send a fire engine along with an ambulance and a cop. It makes me wonder if firemen and firewomen are so underutilized they've ended up with mostly make-work." One of the reasons for this is also that fire stations are often far closer to the scene of a call (fire suppression being something that benefits from being distributed vs…
You also get a bill for $400 for the firetruck and $10 for each fireman