Exploring the Militarization of US Police Forces | Hacker News Reader

Exploring the Militarization of US Police Forces

vcolano.github.io

42 pointsvcolano18 comments

I encourage Americans to think about this militarization at their next Fourth of July Parade.

Watching the Sheriff's Department marching, in formation, dressed in black, with ARs, behind an MRAP, is, well, disquieting.

With whom are they going to war, exactly?

> With whom are they going to war, exactly?

The criminals who are attacking them in neighbourhoods you don't go to.

This particular Sheriff's Department hasn't lost an officer in the line of duty since 1998 (and that's a good thing):

https://www.odmp.org/agency/3457-san-mateo-county-sheriffs-o...

San Mateo county's violent crime rate is 2.1 per 1,000 people, well below the US national average of about 3.7.

> This particular Sheriff's Department hasn't lost an officer in the line of duty since 1998 (and that's a good thing):

Great, here's to the next two decades of nobody being shot in a county where the neighbourhood with the most violent crime still has housing prices higher than 99.4%(!) of the country. The next time somebody is shooting at them, they might have the armoured vehicle out; you should be happy for that. Armoured vehicles are not a weapon of war, they are a common tool for protecting business and life. Banks use armoured cars , VIPs use armoured cars. If you were responding to a shootout, even if it's the first and last of your career, you would want to arrive in an armoured car.

I'm not sure about the other equipment, but I can say that police definitely need designated marksman rifles(7.62x51mm NATO)and infantry rifles(5.56x45mm NATO [typo'd as 6.65mm in the article]) as a matter of course.

Here in Toronto the other month, right across the street from my home, there was a man having a mental breakdown in a park swinging a handgun around, and they had five marksmen in range ready to take a shot if it got out of hand on the ground, and rifles on the ground to make sure it doesn't get too far out of hand.

Grenade launchers are fairly common equipment for a police force these days, there are a large number of crowd control and tactical (visibility flares, IR flares) devices which can be launched out of standard grenade launchers, since the military has brought down the cost of this equipment, police forces seem to standardize around it.

The border states having higher spending on weaponry and armour is intuitively understandable, given how hot the border is. Per-landmass and per-police-officer numbers might also be a more interesting stat to look at.

LA county makes regular use of their armoured vehicles, that I understand. So unless you're arguing that police officers in LA county should just let themselves get shot when people are shooting at them, I think it'd be hard to imagine it being a bad thing that they have armoured vehicles.

Explosive Ordinance Disposal vehicles (and other equipment, such as X-ray imaging devices, tracked robotic vehicles, projected water disruptors) make a lot of sense. The New York Police Department has had a bomb squad since 1903(!). If you love the idea of bomb technicians being shredded into mists of blood, flesh, and bone; or love going to funerals where there is no recovered corpse, then sure, their lives are not worth even a couple hundred k per capita, less than the average person in the general population in the U.S. government's estimation.

6.65mm rifle should be 5.56mm

there is a 6.5mm round but its very specialized and not likely to be acquired by police forces

Police militarization is the not the non sequitur many believe it to be. The top two spenders on military hardware are US border states fighting very well armed drug gangs, and episodically its own well armed populace. Chicago is in Cook County, infamous for its heavily armed street gangs, record shootings, and close ties to Mexican drug cartels.

Unrelated to the content of your article, but something that I noticed:

The link to your GitHub profile page in the footer of the article is broken: it points to 'https://github.com/https://github.com/vcolano'.

This does not appear to happen in other developed, western countries. Not to the same extent at least. I have not seen it in New Zealand or Australia, although there are criminals and drug dealers in both. I have not heard of such a thing in the UK, France, Germany, Italy or Canada. Is this an American thing?

France and Italy, from what I know, have literal military [1,2] doing the job the police does in the US. So no, it's not an American thing.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gendarmerie

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carabinieri

Especially true in Paris these days...

The gendarmerie and the carabinieri are both national police services (like the FBI). They also do things like port security.

I've seen gendarmerie, carabinieri but also local sherrifs offices; There is a world of difference between the first two and the last in terms of discipline and training. For example the first two don't make YouTube videos like these: https://youtu.be/CYunIrWDANU

I think you are slightly confused about FBI and city/county/state police forces in the US and policing in Europe. French police is a national police service like the FBI [1], Gendarmierie is a branch of military under command of the same Ministry of Interior, which also controls the National Police. It's an actual military, with military weapons, uniforms, barracks, chain of command etc. etc. There is nothing like this in the US indeed. National Guard is closest but it does not do law enforcement on regular basis.

Similarly in Italy. National Police [2] is separate from Carabinieri, who are not even under the command of Ministry of Interior, but under the Ministry of Defence, making them even more "militarized" (which makes sense, since they also serve as MP).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Police_(France)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polizia_di_Stato

The British and the anglo Dominion countries (can/aus/nz) have police that follow Peelian principles. Sir Robert Peel introduced these reforms in 1829, well after the American Revolution, and somewhat in response to the shady practices of the French police during their (post-)revolutionary period. The principles are basically starting from "work with the community" rather than "us vs them thin blue line".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

Mind you, the other countries also don't have a population which has hysterically self-armed itself in the last 2-3 decades. When everyone carries a gun and the police are still expected to do their duty, they have to have superior firepower at the end of the day.

See the future of German police mobility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMMV_Survivor_R

Of course the police needs their own tank, because, you know, terrorists. Boo!

Plain wrong.

In addition to Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza, Italy has had "classic" military (infantrymen in camo, from the Italian Army, Paratroopers and Artillery regiments) patrolling the streets in two separate operations, one of which is active nowadays:

- Operation Sicilian Vespers, against the Mafia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sicilian_Vespers_(19...), ceased in 1998.

- Operation Safe Streets (strade sicure), against terrorism and generic crime. Still active (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operazione_Strade_sicure)

The 1033 program is a donation (permanent loan) from the DoD to the individual requesting agencies; the spending involved as described by the author does not actually represent money given by local agencies to the DoD, but rather value written off by the Dod.

Good ol' Illinois in the top 10. Represent!

Cook County kinda sorta expected, but why Lake County? Waukegan really that bad?

EDIT: http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Waukegan-Illinois.html not that bad

Reply on news.ycombinator.com