Against that sort of threat, I think the police having a few armored vehicles makes sense.
Is there any particular reason why a clear edge-case scenario should be our basis for arming police departments, which spend most of their time solving mundane domestic disputes, pulling apart drunken fights and responding to break-ins where someone's Playstation was stolen? We should orient policing towards deescalation based on what they usually face. If their most common problem is a drug addict high on PCP, they don't need a gun, they need proper training and, perhaps, a taser.
Basically, make the cops look less like the US Marines and more like UN peacekeepers (specifically their white vehicles.)
As for camouflage, I think police should be forbidden from using it. If a bank robber needs to be ambushed from the bushes in some sort of 'Bonnie and Clyde' scenario, let the beat police call in specialists. These armoured vehicles don't need camo in the likely scenarios in which they'd ever be used, particularly since the entire premise of such vehicles in a police role is that they'd be impervious to the small arm fire they might encounter. In a military role they might get hit by an RPG, but such anti-armour weapons are exceedingly unlikely to be relevant to police.
SWAT teams need camouflage so they can park vehicles and stage raids at night or early dawn without announcing their presence.
Why did you decide all cops are bad and start a war against them?
Risk is the chance of something happening coupled with the effect it would have. Perhaps the police should not be the ones protecting the public from a Mumbai style attack - possibly it should be the military - but it should be someone because of the grave consequences.
That does not have any link to whether police should routinely use de-escalation techniques (which they should).
There has never been a Mumbai-style terror attack, and the National Guard could be activated for such a thing.
Some edge cases deserve more addressing than others.
Not only is no one arguing different, the "hundreds of thousands of car accidents in the USA annually" has been addressed (in several ways). Perhaps other problems may also be addressed?
> There has never been a Mumbai-style terror attack
No, only in most (if not all) of the other G8 countries, but have they had a Pulse nightclub attack or planes flown into buildings? How many have had a Bataclan or a London Bridge style attack?
Let's not split hairs.
> the National Guard could be activated for such a thing
Well, I did suggest “possibly it should be the military” so the National Guard, being part of the military, would fit.
In short, an edge case being rare does not imply that it should not be prepared for. What's the response time for the National Guard if terrorists start attacking people in the street?
Edit: typo
'Hours' would probably be quick, since you'd probably need to get the governor's approval first.
a) whether they are edge cases, which they are in terms of occurrence b) risk, which are comparable on a personal level
Additionally, when seat belt laws were introduced there were arguments about whether it was a moral hazard. Their requiring some effort (try strapping in a small child) and considerable danger to some (again, children, and pregnant women) was not relevant to that (ultimately wrong) argument and it's not relevant here either.
I don't think this is the right question to ask. There are a lot of things that one can reasonably think could happen in America. Do we need to prepare every police department in the country for all those situations regardless of the odds of the worst happening? Do the costs, both literal monetary costs and the harder to measure societal costs, of militarizing our police departments outweigh the potential that an increase in police firepower will allow them to save lives in this extremely remote possibility actually happens? Maybe we are just better off leaving some of these extreme outliers as something to be dealt with by the military if it ever happens here.
Then most of the rest of the country just needs normal policing, because realistically, they're so unlikely to be a target. Look at all the big terrorist attacks that have happened in the past several decades. They've targeted huge international cities: DC, NYC, London, Paris, Mumbai. These are the kinds of targets (and the only kinds of targets) that plausibly need military-level policing on stand-by 24/7.
Absolutely not. The military does not handle issues like this on US soil. (If you meant something else by "troops", please choose your words more carefully.)
I have zero confidence that, with such a force on standby all the time, departments will resist using that force for more mundane matters until it becomes routine.
> They've targeted huge international cities: DC, NYC, London, Paris, Mumbai. These are the kinds of targets (and the only kinds of targets) that plausibly need military-level policing on stand-by 24/7.
Would "military-level policing" have actually helped in any of these terrorist attacks? I fail to see how a tricked-out army would have stopped 9/11. I did a quick search for "terrorist attacks in washington dc", and nothing really came up, except for some theoretical worries and a few foiled plots, which clearly did not need "military-level policing" to deal with.
I'm really tired of how "oh my, terrorists!" is used as an excuse for domestic militarization and draconian domestic policy. The threat of terrorism in the US is hugely overblown, and traditional policing at the local and federal level is what we need to handle these sorts of things, by catching them during the planning phases. And with most terrorist attacks, if you get to a point where there's an active attack, it's too late to do all that much that's meaningful, and bringing in militarized units has just as much potential to make the situation worse. Sure, there are exceptions, but not enough to warrant militarized police on call 24/7.
In what sense are the police not military?
Edge cases like MPs and the Coast Guard exist, and some countries blur the line more than others. The Paris fire department, for example, is a military branch for historical reasons.
The police are in exactly the same business as the military, enforcing compliance through violence. Using a different word doesn't make them a different thing.
No it doesn't. It exists to protect national interests. The rare exemption is when a state decides to deploy the Army National Guard or Coast Guard. The Posse Comitatus Act is very specific about this, and the U.S. Army Military Police Corps were slapped with administrative actions for violating the act when they intervened in murder spree in Alabama.
This is meaningless, and to the degree that it has meaning, ridiculously overbroad. Almost all activities that "protect national interests" are not military. The definition you purport to provide here does not distinguish the military from anything else.
What actually defines the military is that it achieves its goals through the use of violence. And the police belong in this category too; there isn't a difference. Saying the police are not military purely because they wear a label saying "the third amendment doesn't apply to us, for reasons that will make sense if we beat you enough" would be the same error as saying that a newspaper didn't enjoy freedom of "the press" if it published online (and therefore didn't use a printing press).
Actually, it would be more like saying that the New York Times didn't enjoy freedom of "the press" because they're "the Times", not "the press".
Using your logic I can prove many different things that are pretty silly. For instance, since a gun can be used to kill people, and so can a pillow, the pillow must be an “assault weapon”.
I have a question for you, have you ever needed the police for anything?
For what it's worth, your average soldier isn't equipped with a handgun at all, and as such, handgun training is minimal to non-existent. Your average soldier is more likely to need to know how to operate the squad's crew-served machine gun, a grenade launcher, or a door-busting shotgun, so to the extent that there is cross-training, it'll focus more on that kinda stuff.
> Under international humanitarian law, civilians are "persons who are not members of the armed forces" and are not "combatants if they [don't] carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war".
(from Wikipedia)
No, I'm not referring to 9/11. However, over the past several decades, there have been several attempted/successful terrorist attacks by people on the ground. At some point you do need someone heavily armed enough to take out an active ongoing attack, like what we saw in Mumbai or Paris. The odds of it happening again within the next decade are not that small. Do you really do nothing to even try to be ready to respond to it? I just don't think most voters are going to be willing to accept it.
And the problem with military gear -- as we're currently seeing, plain as the day -- is that cops will not just save it for the truly dire situations; they'll use it more and more until it becomes a part of routine operations.
Anyway, the cops aren't using these armored vehicles to kill people, they primarily do that with guns. It isn't the use of these vehicles that concerns me, but rather the role these vehicles play in recruiting macho edgelords to be cops (the sort prone to shooting people with guns.) To address this, I would like all their vehicles to be repainted, uniforms redesigned, etc. Aesthetics matter, it influences the sort of person drawn to the job. A police force with a particularly militarized aesthetic will attract men who want to LARP as occupying forces in Baghdad.
Mainly because gurs in general aren't hard to get in America. Any would-be shooter has to fear not only cops, but armed civilians. And if they are spanning an entire city and the police aren't able to keep up, you'd definitely get recreational hunters with their rifles trying to take them down.