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Comment by brohee | Hacker News Reader

One point that I don't see discussed often, is the background of police officers. How many are Iraq vets that apply in America's streets the exact same methods that made Iraq hell on earth... And why could anyone think applying occupation tactics to domestic law enforcement was remotely a good idea...

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I've heard the opposite hypothesis. Previously police departments had a much higher percentage of vets. After having experienced the horrors of war, they had no need nor no desire to play soldier on the street. Also they would have calibrated their us versus them response. The criminals they encounter on the street are the same people they were defending and fighting with at war.

Their predictive power depends on the credibility of the premise (are actually vets less violent, non-vets more prone to playing solider-cop), which in both cases is taken for granted.

They don't explain the same conclusion. One predicts that police departments with more vets will tend to be less militarized, the other predicts that police departments with more vets will tend to be more militarized. These could be easily distinguished by gathering data, and it would be very helpful to know which, if either, is true.

That's not what predictive power means, and that's now how causal inference works.

I really doubt it has anything to do with them being vets. In Iraq and Afghanistan you can't shoot until you are fired upon but in the US it's shoot first and ask questions later.

That really puts in context police shootings.

I wonder why the police are given so much more weapon's autonomy than the military?

Maybe because the military has to worry about international laws?

Not the United States military, to any appreciable extent. It does have to worry about its internal laws though, in which restraint is assumed unless specifically excepted.

Oversight from someone other than your own organization seems to be a novell concept for police departments.

Because someone will bring them to court? Hardly.

Unlikely. The military is set up to operate in extremely volatile environments where tiny mistakes can have immediate consequences far more deadly than anything the police ever faces. There are far bigger threats to them than someone else shooting first. Resisting immediate fears for the sake of bigger, more abstract goals/dangers has been a key element of military training ever since the ancient days of hand to hand field battles and this is just the continuation of that.

The police, on the other hand, can easily give in to the immediate fear of someone else shooting first: when they are not careful about not escalating, the worst thing that is likely to happen to their side is having to call in reinforcements and having some more bad press that won't add much to whatever they already have. If you want to put it in very crude terms, they are playing war in easy mode and there, many things that are very important to the military are completely irrelevant.

An opinion from a non American: This is what you get when you focus on tactics without focussing on strategy. Reactive vs proactive. By splitting the American police into many many different layered jurisdictions with no overall plans or even goals, there will never be a coordinated strategic view of anything.

The US military is far more centralised and (despite its many faults) aware of planning for wider strategic issues.

Many police depts don't seem to want to face up to the fact that the tactical problems they have now have root causes in their own short sighted policies, incentives and behaviour. If they carry on like they are, these problems will only get worse.

Other western countries with more centralised police hierarchies seem to put more effort into community relations and other more strategic stuff, even if it means less 'effective' tactics ie less control, arrests and convictions etc.

That does make a lot of sense. This reminded me of battle of adrianople, where the roman army was gathered for negotiation purposes and the emperor was not read to attack. But some Roman units began the battle without orders to do so, believing they would have an easy victory, and perhaps over-eager to exact revenge on the Goths after two years of unchecked devastation throughout the Balkans, however this resulted in the utter defeat of the roman army and was probably start of the process which led to the fall of the entire Western Roman Empire

Rule of Engagement are strict and strictly enforced. You can end up in deep shit for shooting someone in Iraq or Afghanistan if it was not allowed under the ROE. Whereas you can apparently choke someone to death in the US with the primary punishment being desk duty.

Unfortunately now the question becomes "why aren't there strict rules of engagement for domestic police forces?"

Because the people who would write the rules want to be "tough on crime".

"Law and order!"

> I wonder why the police are given so much more weapon's autonomy than the military?

I think because there is no political will to protect the usual victims of police brutality—indeed, the "tough on crime", and concommitant "tough on people who are in the general vicinity of people perceived to be criminals", mentality, is perenially politically popular.

Of course there is also no political will to protect the usual victims of military brutality, but they can and do (in many cases, to some extent, at least historically) protect themselves, and so it has been perceived that it's necessary to reckon with the possibility of reprisal.

I used to walk past the parking lot for Border Patrol at the Rainbow Bridge (US-Canada crossing in Niagara Falls), and 80% of the cars for the US Border Patrol had bumper stickers all over them stating that they were veterans. One of the stickers was even "Vietnam Vets Aren't "Fonda" Jan Fonda" (or something like that).

You could usually tell which ones were probably vets too. For example, during one crossing, the Border Patrol guy started trying to have a "sensible chuckle" with me over the fact that some guy had committed suicide on the casino floor (couple of blocks away) the previous day. He even made a fake "hand gun" to mouth motion.

Speaking of Border Patrol, you can always tell the ones that have been recently rotated up from the Mexican to the Canadian border crossing stations. Long-time Canadian border regulars saunter out of the office, casually ask for your passport and barely scan it over, and ask you how your trip was before waving you on through. The officers that are used to the other border come out with one hand on their pistol, on red-alert, spring-loaded to react at the slightest thing.

It makes for quite a contrast, particularly at a place like the sleepy border crossing closest to where I grew up; 95% of the traffic through it was log trucks or Canadian locals that crossed over to buy cheaper gas at the station just across the line on the US side.

Unrelated to the article and discussion of policing, but how does money work in border towns? Do towns close to the border accept both forms of currency? Do people just carry both? Does using a credit card just do the conversion behind the scenes?

Some credit cards charge international fees, some do not.

I can't speak for the Canadian side, but I grew up in El Paso. El Paso is right on the Mexican border with another large Mexican city on the other side, Juarez, and a fair amount of travel in both directions. On the US side, everything is done in dollars. On the Mexican side, pesos or dollars both generally work. I can't answer how Mexicans get ahold of dollars -- it's just never been a problem I've had to solve. I would suspect it's similar to when I've gotten local currency outside the US. There are currency exchange places, though I've only seen them in airports, your CC does the conversion automatically, an ATM does, or you go to a bank.

> your CC does the conversion automatically

At a markup. This was 1% for Visa and MasterCard back in ~2006 when I looked into it.

ahlatimer gave you the southern perspective, and for the Canadian side, my experience says that a store will take your foreign currency at (approximately) the exchange rate, but you'll get local currency as change. As you get further from the border, a vendor will still take your funny money, but "at par": my $20 U. S. buys me $20 Canadian in goods. Which currently means I, a holder of U. S. currency, get screwed by 28%. That's the penalty for not finding a Canadian ATM or using a credit card.

On the U. S. side, it would appear, according to signs at the cash registers, that many U. S. vendors work in a similar manner. The registers signs disappear within tens of miles of the border.

Military vets are vastly better trained than the kind of police discussed in this article and most importantly have an understanding that a. This is not a game b. The relative level of danger in these drug raid situations is usually vastly smaller than what warrants a militarized approach and c. American citizens are supposed to be the "good guys" in any case

Really? Some US soldiers in Iraq looked very young, maybe 20? How many years of training can you get before they deploy you, maybe two? Most professions require more training.

Most professions require more training.

Not policework in the US, though: From what Google tells me, training often lasts less than 6 months. In comparison, in Germany it's normally 30 months, but it can vary from state to state (in a few, it's 24 or 36 months).

Some US soldiers, airmen, marines, and sailors in Iraq/Afghanistan are 18. It took about 6 months from entering BCT to being with the unit I deployed with. You can attend BCT and AIT or OSUT at 17. And you can deploy when you're 18.

Post Vietnam, in the eighties, almost half of US were veterans.

This has been going down ever since. At least in my area, new officers are usually straight out of college with a criminal justice major and no military service. (Though I do know several officers who have joined the national guard or the reserves later on.)

>> Post Vietnam, in the eighties, almost half of US were veterans.

Source? A quick Google search shows roughly 3.4MM deployed soldiers in Vietnam and another 4-5MM non-theater personnel.

[1] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004615.html

[2] http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/what-percentage-of-americ...

It does seem high, but he probably also included veterans from previous military engagements, not just Vietnam veterans.

> ...the exact same methods that made Iraq hell on earth...

...the suicide bombings, beheadings, religious wars, and terrorist organizations had something to do with that as well.

The bureaucratic divisions of the arms of the security state mask the underlying cultural fluidity between them all

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