06-09-2014, 05:16 AM
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It's 42
Industry Role:
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Global
Posts: 18,083
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USA Police "solider up"
Interesting article from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us...ents.html?_r=0
As we gear down our foreign wars in the Middle East the tools of war are not being mothballed as was done in previous wars but the Obama administration has made them charityware for civilian law enforcement agencies ...
Quote:
[T]he equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look and act like military units. Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of ?barbering without a license.? ...
?It just seems like ramping up a police department for a problem we don?t have,? said Shay Korittnig, a father of two who spoke against getting the armored truck at a recent public meeting in Neenah. ?This is not what I was looking for when I moved here, that my children would view their local police officer as an M-16-toting, SWAT-apparel-wearing officer.?
A quiet city of about 25,000 people, Neenah has a violent crime rate that is far below the national average. Neenah has not had a homicide in more than five years.
?Somebody has to be the first person to say ?Why are we doing this?? ? said William Pollnow Jr., a Neenah city councilman who opposed getting the new police truck. ....
The ubiquity of SWAT teams has changed not only the way officers look, but also the way departments view themselves. Recruiting videos feature clips of officers storming into homes with smoke grenades and firing automatic weapons. In Springdale, Ark., a police recruiting video is dominated by SWAT clips, including officers throwing a flash grenade into a house and creeping through a field in camouflage. ...
Pentagon data suggest how the police are arming themselves for such worst-case scenarios. Since 2006, the police in six states have received magazines that carry 100 rounds of M-16 ammunition, allowing officers to fire continuously for three times longer than normal. Twenty-two states obtained equipment to detect buried land mines.
In the Indianapolis suburbs, officers said they needed a mine-resistant vehicle to protect against a possible attack by veterans returning from war.
?You have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build I.E.D.?s and to defeat law enforcement techniques,? Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff?s Department ...
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And you wonder why we Americans own weapons as infective as they may be. The weapons we own are self delusional ... |
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