Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

The other side is they didn't know it was only old women in the home.

And there's so much more wrong than just the rape thing. Just google "amnesty us prison" if you need more examples.

Once I pulled out a bunch of cash in a bar and exactly one bill, a $5, glowed brightly under the black light in the bar. I'd already handed it to the bar owner and I said, "Oh, that one must be a fake, I'll take it back" and he said, "No, it's fine." I was surprised!

(Under my fingers too, it was an obvious fake, but I didn't react in time.)

Cashiers do not have to approach dangerous people who do not want to be approached. If they get held up they give the cash and they're good.

In cities cops are often targeted to be killed since it could be the difference between life in jail and going free.

Even miscellaneous agricultural work is more dangerous and they make 24k/year.

I would love to know what you mean by "military grade" because by every definition I can think of this is so wrong it's either a statement with no bearing in reality, or an intentional lie.

That is not completely true. For example, the narrative on thedonald.win wrt recent rioting is that most protesters are looters and that looters deserve being shot. They seem to be ok with militarized, strong-men police.

Also, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" is used as a justification for violent policing. "Of course you're gonna get tazed/hit/shot at if you don't comply with orders/resist arrest/insult the officers."

Now, we can argue about how representative thedonald.win is to the entire population (I think a non-negligent part of the population subscribes to those views), but the point is, party affiliation does affect one's position wrt violent policing.

Here’s an Italian police car [0]. Here’s a Cobra HISS tank [1]. Here’s a local police department’s default cruiser [2].

When the police car looks more like a GI Joe tank than other nations, that’s an easy fix. Just like making kids were corny uniforms affects behavior, I think having police drive non-threatening cars will reduce violence.

[0] https://images.app.goo.gl/3uEds6hdzPwoiF6D7 [1] https://images.app.goo.gl/eJAaVdK5qNXEKah39 [2] https://www.ajc.com/rf/image_large/Pub/p8/AJC/2017/03/20/Ima...

In what kind of weird and twisted world do police officers need to push cars to the side on a daily basis?

Cops are also generally brutal on their vehicles. The biggest problem is probably a cop in a hurry getting out of a running vehicle without putting it into park. They get into lots of low-speed/rolling car collisions. These things happen if you are getting in/out of your car 50 times a day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSUF6EC5DF0

If not do a Google image search for 'american police officer' - almost every image has a different uniform colour, cut, insignia in it.

Dark blue, light blue, white, brown, black, grey, purple, yellow, green. It's every colour under the sun!

Two police officers:

https://static.trendscatchers.io/uploads/2019/01/bear34-uk.j...

https://writersforensicsblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/chi...

I think there's almost literally nothing consistent between these two uniforms (badge?)

> with a badge and utility belt

That's also what mall security guards wear in the US though.

A thousand people a year are killed by US cops. Canada, with 10% of the population, sees maybe 25 in a bad year.

"Fittingly, the most chilling scene in the movie doesn’t take place on a city street, or at a protest, or during a drug raid. It takes place in a conference room. It’s from a police training conference with Dave Grossman, one of the most prolific police trainers in the country. Grossman’s classes teach officers to be less hesitant to use lethal force, urge them to be willing to do it more quickly and teach them how to adopt the mentality of a warrior. ... In the class recorded for “Do Not Resist,” Grossman at one point tells his students that the sex they have after they kill another human being will be the best sex of their lives. The room chuckles. But he’s clearly serious. “Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.”"

1. You do what you train to do.

2. What you look for in the world is what you will find.

3. Police work is risky, but not excessively so. https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf

Systems have both false positives and false negatives. A system with no false positives but many false negatives can be worse than a system with few false negatives and few false positives.

The police in the U.S. seem to think like they are in the military , in their training and tactics. One big problem is the U.S. military is not exactly well regarded for is nuanced handling of conflict.

I once spoke to a marine who was involved in the invasion of Bagdad who describe their rules of engagement as "shoot any man woman or child holding a spade, a mobile phone, any kind of parcel or anything that might be a wire". These ROE are almost certainly a war crime, but the US is special so it gets away with it.

Now in the military you have a bunch of guys who actually have to deal with very dangerous, fluid situations that have a high likelihood of death. They mostly operate in areas where you have little room for anything other than binary control (obey or get shot). Whatever the details of the culture that was set down by the high ups before the Iraq invasion, I can somewhat get onboard. Casualties in a war zone are logistically hard, getting effective treatment often means at least some part of running them on a stretcher, potentially strapping them to the back of a vehicle and driving for an hour. If you aren't conservative in how you instruct people to respond, the effect can be highly non linear. One casualty take a 3 others out the fight, meaning casualties become more likely etc.

How police respond simply should not be modelled on the military. I entirely disagree with the idea that they are constantly primed to consider themselves one stop away from a body bag.

They almost certainly interact with more innocent members of the public than criminals. They are in largely stable situations. They may deal with bad people, but they do so in places that have good access to support, they will get timely care if something happens to them, and they almost certainly are well backed up if the situation gets out of hand.

My opinion is that the police basically suffer from a kind of dunning Kruger effect. Most would be woefully unprepared to handle an actual combat situation. You just have to compare the countless videos of about a dozen cops all unloading at the same car like the first to finish gets a prize.

Being a good solider is about maintaining discipline and composure under pressure. Most unit tactics involve some variant of your unit shooting over your head or off to your side whilst some of you push some kind of flanking manoeuvre. Our military even dropped the shoot from the hip on contact SOP because of the risk of friendly fire.

The police do not have anywhere near the same level of conditioning to operating under pressure from their training as any competent army gives it's soldiers. If they want to act like the military that's fine, but they should go through similar training before they do.

People are right not to empathize.

Part of the duty of a police officer is to put themselves in higher-danger situations than other citizens in order to protect and serve the public, up to and including taking physical harm or death (in fact half of police fatalities every year are in car accidents on duty).

If you train to be a hair trigger, protect-yourself-at-all-costs cop, that's how you will behave.

So why is the United States police unique amongst all other developed countries for its kill rate then?

> Part of the training also drills in the fact that an untrained opponent with a sharp object like a knife is at a strategic advantage versus someone with a holstered firearm if they are closer than 21 feet away.

And yet I've seen police officers here in Europe deal with people with knives without ever pulling a gun. Why can we do this and you can't?

The idea that a man with a knife 20 feet away from a man with a gun has the advantage! - it just seems like a justification for the incompetent policing that the US is notorious for all over the world.

2) Per [1] the surface area of your torso is about double that of one leg (that is, anterior torso is 18%, an individual leg anterior is 9%), so it's far more likely to hit if you aim for the torso. Even if you aim for a torso and miss, you might hit a limb or head - it's a lot less likely to miss a limb and hit something else.

3) The research behind the Tueller anti-knife self defence drill found an attacker with a knife could cover 21 ft / 6.4 metres in about 1.5 seconds. To stop the attack, you have to be able to shoot them before they can close to melee range - you must aim for the largest possible target to have any hope of success.

I am not commenting on US police practices generally, but specifically that the idea you can shoot to wound is neither responsible nor practical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_body_surface_area

From the top down they simply dont care to follow. There is no punishment for them being violent against whomever they want.

It's mostly not the $300K year MDs just like it's mostly not the $300K police captains. That's "the 1%" (figuratively).

The front lines for riots are the $35K - $85K cops and the front lines for COVID are the $35K - $85K year nurses.

They get paid a reasonable salary to be trained in a job that will provide them a nice income for the rest of their life. Having a lower salary while in training is not unheard of in any field, I am not sure why you believe those numbers are unacceptable.

Further Baltimore shows why a national $15 min wage is untenable, as all that does is make more jobs "minimum wage jobs" because taking the min wage from $8 to $15 does not magically mean all the jobs that paid $15 now pay $22, that is not how economics work

Exactly, this means they are training police in MILITARY tactics, the entire point of this conversation was that the police need to be DEMILITARIZED, having them trained by the IDF is exact what we SHOULD NOT be doing

The rule of engagement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are significantly stricter than they are for America's cops. No firing until fired upon, limits on use of things like tear gas and riot gear, etc. They're also trained significantly more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/08/1...

> In contrast, soldiers continuously and over the course of their careers repeatedly train to employ techniques to deescalate stressful, unpredictable, and dangerous scenarios. They also know what steps they must take before resorting to lethal force. Most rules of engagement (ROEs) — the military’s term for rules that govern the circumstances when soldiers are justified using force — contain explicit instructions requiring soldiers to use verbal warnings, show their weapons, and exhaust all non-lethal physical options before resorting to deadly force.

The military's RoE are also very strict with severe consequences for violating. Contrary to what some think, soldiers are not running around shooting every person they see.

I've brought this up before: US law enforcement has a long-established training relationship with Israel. Is it any surprise that American police have a "siege mentality" when they are being trained by a country that is basically dealing with a multi-decade insurgency/hybrid war?

https://progressive.org/dispatches/us-police-trained-by-isra...

I don't particularly care what the standard is for disposing of unwanted military hardware is so long as it's not a double one. A civilian police force should get no special treatment above any other civilian entity.

We're talking about them paying for military surplus like vehicles, machineguns and other items that 95% of departments don't need.

If the DoD weren't spreading surplus Army gear out like candy to babies who don't know how to use it, there would be a lot fewer opportunities for the not so stable elements of police departments to escalate otherwise normal situations just so they can play with big boy toys/get that "underfire" adrenaline hit again/get that power trip high that they craved from high school/soothe that sociopathic itch to dominate others.

We can put our voices together and force the DoD to stop this bullshit surplus program and acjnowledge that they built and bought too much and get egg on their faces as they destroy old gear and vehicles.