A quick bit of Googling, I can't find any evidence of weapons a being placed on police drones in Illinois, so this seems preemptive, which is good to see!
(Our own police force has many of its own problems)
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/08/police-bo... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/san-francisco-decide...
More about that here: https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-10...
“It’s a transfer, so that means that the agencies don’t have to pay for this equipment. So because the government has already possessed it, paid for it, it’s the Department of Defense’s property.”
It seems technically it is still DoD property?
But alltogether it is indeed worrysome. Here in germany we have the same trend, even though quite light in comparison.
It is rare nowdays, that I see police without bulletproof wests and machine pistols are more and more common. It creates a very different impression ...
Speaking of it: my car broke down once and I parked it on the side of a rural road (not in the way). It was weekend and I put a big note in it, saying it will be towed away very soon.
Monday morning my wife with the baby were suprised by police on the door. And the first thing they see is the machine pistol and fighting gear.
Surely totally necessary to get the same information, they could have gotten from the note in the car (that this very day it will be moved away). I seriously don't know what they were thinking. Probably nothing at all and war gear becomes just standard for engaging with potentially dangerous civilians, who park their car next to the road.
That story is horrifying.. it creates a scenario where the slightest misunderstand could escalate things to a point of no return.
This has been going on ever since the F.B.I. started requiring police departments to report their crime statistics in a uniform way.
I remember one PD took advantage of a flaw in the forms that only allowed one category per crime. So if someone got robbed and killed, they'd mark it down as a robbery, not a homicide.
I heard from a relative who's on a neighboring town's police force that the DA busts down first time felony offenders to misdemeanors nearly every time (this is at the county level). Except for the really bad stuff like murder, or selling drugs on a playground.
I've heard anecdotally from friends that police just refuse to take reports of assault. This is domestic assault, or more "stranger danger" types of assaults (like late at night on the riverwalk). Both physical and sexual types of assault. This apparently doesn't count as "the really bad stuff" I described before.
My sister knew a gal who got hit by a van while crossing the street, where there's a crosswalk and a yellow flashing light and a sign. Her leg was broken in a few places. When the police arrived, she received a ticket for jaywalking because she wasn't in the crosswalk. (A funny thing happens when you get hit by a van - you tend to move far away from where you were standing) That jaywalking ticket did not raise the crime stats like ticketing the driver would have. Bonus: It was potentially racially motivated, because the victim was black, and the cops have a reputation for harassing black people in town.
Naperville is a fine place to raise your children if you're wealthy and white and your husband is not abusive.
With that in mind, it doesn't seem right to paint the US with one brush when Chicago's murder rate is more than 5x higher than New York City's. For the case of small PDs having big budgets I agree it's wasted money, and maybe even damaging to the town.
But in urban areas like Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago, it seems tone-deaf to focus on police violence when so many people are victimised by people the police could have locked up if they were better equipped. (Ignoring of course the weakness of courts to imprison violent offenders, which is also a huge issue in London.)
You should watch it from this side.
Even people who aren't minorities and have never done anything wrong in their lives are starting to distrust and shy away from the police.
It's one reason that so many (most?) police departments are understaffed.