Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
aclu.org
aclu.org
Having big budgets but less crime means these swollen budgets end up being wasted on a lot of "fun" things like military gear. (Did you know that Wisconsin has two anti-terrorism centers? One in Madison and one in Milwaukee.)
I think this has something to do with politicians being unable to touch the budgets of first responders.
Tangentially, due to stringent building codes, the number and severity of fires has been dropping dramatically over time. Yet spending on fire protection only goes one way: up. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1950_2010...
Today in the US, if you call 911 about an emergency medical condition, they will often send a fire engine along with an ambulance and a cop. It makes me wonder if firemen and firewomen are so underutilized they've ended up with mostly make-work.
Two words: public unions.
Too bad we're doing that nation building away from home.
We shouldn't contort ourselves to avoid the simplest answer: the state is getting what it paid for. The US incarcerates its population more than any known state on earth. That isn't unions' fault — other countries with more powerful unions don't jail themselves like this.
If any enemy nation did this, we wouldn't have any illusions. But we refuse to apply the same logic to ourselves, nor conclude as Chomsky did, "Remember, any state has a primary enemy: its own population."
Otherwise, it might be obvious why police are fighting a war, and who their enemy is.
It is, in fact, the unions' fault. The prison unions and police unions are huge proponents of the drug war, longer sentences, etc. It isn't just there fault, of course, America's general Puritan streak helps, but the public unions have really capitalized on that.
> other countries with more powerful unions don't jail themselves like this.
What happens in other countries isn't a good model for the U.S. Sub-segments of the population don't viscerally hate each other in Frankfurt or London the way they do in L.A. or Detroit. It will be interesting to see what happens to the internal social cohesion European countries have enjoyed post-WWII as middle eastern immigration continues to rise. A few more muslim youths rioting in Paris and I think you'd be surprised by what kind of police escalation Parisians will be willing to put up with...
Nixon declared the "War on Drugs". He also pioneered the "Southern Strategy", and many elements of his campaign are now well accepted to have been used as code words.
It wasn't a personal appeal to the puritan morality of drug users to stop, it was an appeal to the fears of scared whites.
The "War on Drugs" almost exclusively effects poor, minority communities and individuals.
In three decades, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has become one of the most powerful political forces in California. The union has contributed millions of dollars to support "three strikes" and other laws that lengthen sentences and increase parole sanctions. It donated $1 million to Wilson after he backed the three strikes law.
It's not precisely what 'rayiner was saying, but the prison guard union is definitely pushing for more people in prison.
Give me a break. Unions have a lot of problems but if they were so damned influential, maybe every public sector union except for federal security wouldn't have been losing jobs and hours for the last 10 years.
Of course certain unions see an interest in the security state. Other, bigger unions are generally opposed but don't have skin in the game. Whatever. The security state is much bigger than the police and prison guard unions.
Fundamentally, the issue here is political game theory where there's no upside to fixing things and a lot of upside to painting your opponent as 'soft on terror' or 'soft on crime'. So policy only moves in one direction, and that direction is often stupid. Unions' wishes are just drops in the bucket compared to that.
It's already here. Every time there is some discussion of Muslim extremism or immigration we have a few HN members saying things that, in even conservative parts of the US, would leave your jaw hanging.
In the US it's common for the more liberal folks to perceive Europe has some kind of bastion of social enlightenment. This view seems to fall apart once you actually inject some different skin colors into the population.
Belfast still has road barriers that are raised at night blocking roads between the Shankill Road and Falls Road areas - not to mention huge walls:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines
Edit: To be fair, I agree with your point, but there are some very noticeable dividing lines in European cities.
[NB. This is not intended as a criticism of Belfast, please go and visit - we went recently and had a great few days and I want to go back.]
[I agree that these cases are exceptional].
As opposed to regular prisons which are just slave camps? What exactly is the moral difference between the state of living between public and private prisons? (I take it that you were implying a difference exists, but I could be mistaken.)
But whatever perverse incentives and moral hazards already exist for state prisons, they are double when there is a profit motive for maximizing headcount. Moreover, the taxpayer still ends up footing most of the bill for private prisons; in state-run institutions, they at least have a budgetary incentive to moderate sentences, rehabilitate, and reduce recidivism. In a private prison, an inmate who finds Jesus/Buddha/etc and becomes an honest citizen is a blow to the bottom line.
I now understand that you were criticizing the incentive structure of prisons, but it didn't seem that way.
> Moreover, the taxpayer still ends up footing most of the bill for private prisons
I would therefore not call them private prisons. Perhaps, crony prisons or quasi-public prisons?
> In a private prison, an inmate who finds Jesus/Buddha/etc and becomes an honest citizen is a blow to the bottom line.
How can this be true while tax payers are simultaneously footing the bill? Moreover, isn't a large part of the comments in this thread about how there is an incentive structure in public prisons to keep more prisoners? (The correctional officer unions.)
> in state-run institutions, they at least have a budgetary incentive to moderate sentences, rehabilitate, and reduce recidivism.
That kind of makes sense. But when there are unions, and the jobs of union members depends on the number of prisoners, it becomes much less clear.
Very true, and equally applicable to many other "private" companies (Lockheed-Martin comes to mind).
> How can this be true while tax payers are simultaneously footing the bill?
Private prisons (that include inmate labor) charge from both ends: per-head to the taxpayer (ostensibly at a lower rate than if the state handled it in-house), and per-hour to businesses seeking cheap labor. State prisons have only the first incentive, with the countervailing force of finite tax revenue.
Also, the prison guard unions have the same incentive to lobby (and/or support the lobbying of their parent corporation) regardless of who signs their checks. I would claim that union influence and lobbying is a constant in either case.
> But when there are unions, and the jobs of union members depends on the number of prisoners, it becomes much less clear.
Agreed. It is bad policy and a waste of taxes in either case.
Well, actually, prison guard unions did lobby for things like three-strikes laws to increase incarceration rates. [1] And yes, unions in general are weaker in the US, but public employees' unions haven't waned in power anything like their private sector counterparts.
[1] http://caprogressivemessage.com/2011/03/04/the-california-pr...
(I know, I know, "it's a left-wing California site!" But it's well-sourced and one of many articles saying the same thing when you google for who is lobbying for three-strikes laws and whatnot.)
Citation needed.
Perhaps the word you're looking for is "lobbyists" and "demagogues".
Isn't this cause and effect? Crime is lower because we are hiring more policemen. That is certainly one conclusion from Freakonomics.
This is just a digression, because I do think the "Cops as Warriors" model is very scary, as "collateral damage" becomes acceptable in a war.
Also, Levitt did say increased policing decreased crime, but only caused around 5% of the decline ( http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUndersta... p. 184)
[1] http://www.zcommunications.org/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-...
Among other things, it argues against the concept of normalizing death tolls of war by population (when the primary variable under consideration is the likelihood of one person to die violently across different times), it tries to cram as much contemporary political rhetoric as it can, and it uses highly pathetic analysis such as "the phenomenon of structural violence, or the kind of violence that is “built into the structure” of social relations" (yes, because past societies based aristocracy that brutally extracts what it can from the majority of the population is so much less structurally violent) and "the increasingly savage global class war of the 1 Percent against the other 99, and the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation”" (conveniently ignoring the fact that endemic undernutrition was the normal state of the world prior to recent times).
It staggers me that someone can actually read that and take it at face value. His entire thesis seems to be "ignore statistics, look at these pretty individual cases" and "look at how bad the world is", completely missing the point that Pinker didn't actually say the world is peaceful, only that it is more peaceful than it has ever been before, and completely failing to make any case against this.
http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9790009/Was-lea...
http://dcj.state.co.us/ors/images/Stats%20Images/crime%20rat...
What?! No, I believe criminal tendencies are produced from your environment. Kids in bad homes tend to grow into bad people.
Link: http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-wh...
The original argument is in the book. The idea is that children from disadvantaged families are more likely to be aborted, while at the same time, children from disadvantaged families are also more likely to be crime prone. So, logically, abortion reduces crime with a twenty year delay. Personally, I like the lead theory[1] better, but it doesn't matter. It's not about eugenics or genes.
1 http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...
Please don't conflate police looking for make-crime, with generous responses to emregency situations risking irreversible damage to life and property.
This is SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).
1. Imagine a scenario where an ambulance arrives as a first responder, and the EMTs [1] find that they cannot gain access to the emergency scene, because the home or other structure is locked or otherwise blocked. In this case, a firetruck would need to be dispatched, because it deploys with the correct equipment (e.g., Halligan bar [2], Denver tool [3], etc.) and personnel trained to handle such a situation. Also, ambulances are typically deployed with only two personnel, and that may not be enough in situations where items need to be moved or cleared to gain clear access to the emergency scene.
2. Most firefighters are cross-trained as EMTs. If they are local to the emergency scene, then they may be the first responders, while an ambulance is en-route.
3. Incoming 911 calls can often be confusing, with callers under extreme stress, experiencing situations that they have never faced in their lives. Imagine a situation where a caller is so distraught, overwhelmed, or focused on a life-saving effort, that they cannot articulate that they need firefighting support, in addition to an ambulance.
The bottom line: in an emergency situation, it is better to have more help on-hand than too little.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_medical_technician
Interesting anecdotal data: here in Italy you have to call the fire department to get a fire truck out, whereas they're part of the standard package described above in the US. Fires aren't that common here because of construction materials, so while you see plenty of ambulances and police cars whizzing around, fire trucks are a far rarer sight than in the US.
Since being here, I've observed fires are quite common amongst the disaffected youth who enjoy burning cars and motos when they are bored.
And what about an anti-terrorist unit? Imagine a scenario where...
Are there any statistics on the number of cases on which a firetruck was really needed?
There may even be a happy middle-ground with regards to firefighters. In eastern King County, they don't send out a firetruck and three firefighters for non-lethal medical emergencies anymore -- they just send a single firefighter in an SUV.
In general, the EMTs you see carrying out an elderly woman are people with a few months of training. When people are getting stabbed, shot, or on the brink of life, you sort of need people with better training.
Of course, the risk is that if the one vehicle has an accident in itself, there's no others that can fall in right then.
Because we need firefighters anyway, and EMT's in ambulances are often volunteers or paid substantially lower than a fireman in most areas of the country. Bear in mind, you're also talking about putting additional equipment in what is already a jam-packed ambulance, if you end up needing to dispatch another vehicle it might as well be a fire-truck (you never know when someone forgot to say "my house is on fire" when they called in because their wife isn't breathing after dragging her out of the house).
Of course the Feds want as many police as possible because of the laws militarizing them and actually disincentive separete rate fire protection with rigged grant processes.
Because that's very expensive (increasing initial and ongoing costs for training and equipping every first-response unit), and in the many cases where more than the minimal response is known to be necessary from the first call, and in cases where those departments aren't acting as first responders, it doesn't save anything.
> I'm not an expert, but that would reduce overhead and cross-department communication needs.
No, training and equipping EMTs to be adequate-for-most-cases firefighters and cops, firefighters to be adequate-for-most-cases cops and EMTs, and cops to be adequate-for-most-cases EMTs and firefighters would not reduce overhead. Quite the opposite.
One of the reasons for this is also that fire stations are often far closer to the scene of a call (fire suppression being something that benefits from being distributed vs. centralized hospitals) so the fire truck will often arrive there first, and can render aid until the ambulance arrives.
What you don't want is the $10,000 bill if they send a helicopter out.
If you frequently find yourself in locations where a heli may be needed you may want to invest in a membership with your hospital or regional network (in the northwest US (ID, OR, WA) there is the life flight network, $60 a year covers any costs that your insurance don't pay).
In response to a similar observation that I once made, a friend suggested that police at a non-law enforcement emergency act as ad hoc project managers. "You need what, Mr. EMT? I'll have it for you directly, and I'll have those cars blocking access towed too. ... You lot! Back away!"
Devil's advocate: that shows they are effective and crime would be even lower with increased budgets.
I honestly do.
They glamorize and hero worship mega violent law breaking cops, while at the same time portraying criminals as super beings with government like resources, who always lose due to the violent law breaking cops.
The people in the end believe this to be a vaguely true, even though in their lives they rarely see it, most cops are in fact fairly decent professionals, and criminals are average to dumb folk with bugger all resources, while the cops think they look crap compared to the Hollywood versions, and want more powers and toys.
No? Well, I'm yet to see a credible argument as to why adverts influence us, but movies don't. One of those special people who claim ads dont work on you? Simply, I don't believe you. Every one reckons that, yet ads work.
Yes, they do dress up news like an action movie. That most obvious and grating feature of this is the emotional music they now play over news and documentaries. Also, they way enemies are completely demonized and dehumanized, and the good guys worshiped. And when a lead character goes off script, they really freak out.
American culture as a whole places a ridiculous emphasis on empowerment through violence. It's everywhere; films, tv, books, music, punditry, news reporting, people's attitudes and idle conversation. A huge proportion of narratives resolve themselves through heroic violence. Often a heroic character will find inner strength through physical violence (and often inner strength means becoming murderously callous).
If you take a step back and look at it critically, it is rather absurd. In the real world true empowerment comes from intelligence and leadership skills. In the real world, having to kill lots of people would be very traumatic (at least for a well adjusted person).
I don't think it's as simple as violent movies causing violence. I think the real dangers come from the unspoken assumptions, the things that movies take for granted, which then become part of everyday thinking.
<<<< I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon the neighborhood that you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory. >>>>
This was written in 2004. With the passage of time, it seems more and more prescient.
Even well respected actor, Levar Burton, knows how to act in front of police. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=M-ck....
For black people we go into every encounter with the police thinking this might be my last moment on earth.
His famous role was in Roots as the slave that kept getting lashed for not taking a proper English name from his owner over and over if he would just say his English name...
So its more than a little ironic that THIS actor makes a video about how to be properly submissive to his mas'ers!
It just sad that he would have to make a video like that because most of his TV time has been spent reading books to children. He's about as threatening as Mr. Rogers and still gets the jackboot.
“Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book” (salon.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6001843
> Police in North Dakota borrowed a $154 million MQ-9 Predator B drone from the Department of Homeland Security to arrest a family of anti-government separatists who refused to return six cows that wandered onto their farm.
There is a base in Grand Forks, ND that houses several CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) Predator Drones, and they work with local law enforcement when asked to.
So, more than likely, the drone is going to be flying home here anyway, and made a pass over some property.
The facility where these things are flown from isn't some top secret bunker or anything, it's an office building on the air force base, and they give tours to local schools[1]. A local cop probably just stood behind one of the pilots while they flew over the property and spotted the cows.
Also: to somebody who didn't grow up in this area, that probably sounds really silly...but keep in mind that cows are worth a couple of thousand dollars each. So you're talking, low end, about $12,000 worth of property that they won't return. That's like having a stolen car.
--
I think something like this (flying a UAV, since CBP doesn't actually fly drones) should require a search warrant, but this is a totally reasonable use of resources IMHO.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, I guess.
[1]: They'd probably give a tour to anybody that asked, actually. Grand Forks is home to one of the biggest and best Aviation and Aerospace engineering schools in the world[2], and it would surprise me if there wasn't a relationship between the air force base there, and the school. If any HNers are ever up there, I'd suggest asking for a tour.
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Odegard_School_of_Aeros...
I'm not a US citizen but if I was I'd love to take that tour.
The Supreme Court decided in 1986 that aerial surveillance of a person's backyard did not require a warrant. Then again, the search was conducted by a human only using his "naked eye". See California v. Ciraolo.
Were these the kind of anti-government separatists who are harmless quirky people who confine their anti-government activity to blogs and leaflets, or the kind of anti-government separatists who amass a ton of weapons and declare themselves independent and vow to shoot any government agents who "invade" their sovereign territory?
I thought it sounded awfully high. Egregious errors like that don't auger well for the reliability of the rest of the article.
The us vs. them stuff is related to the state of affairs in high-crime communities. Cops can't relate to the people they interact with (and vice versa) because they essentially live in different societies -- they might as well be different planets.
If a policeman has access to body armor and machine guns to serve a warrant on some guy in a house, he will take them along. The cop has no idea who may be behind a door when they knock -- they may be intoxicated/high, have a vicious pit bull, or just be a scared kid with a gun and nothing to lose. The policeman wants to go home to see his kids at the end of his shift.
Uh, shouldn't this information be available based on some kind of investigation that the warrant is based on? This argument leads to the "shoot first, ask questions later" ethos. It is exactly what leads to innocent people and animals being murdered by police. The police should not shift the risks of their job on to the public.
I'm not justifying the behavior, I'm trying to illuminate why it's happening. You're attributing responsibility for a situation to people who don't make decisions. Society has made choices (let's move to the burbs to get away from those poor folk) and your representatives have enacted laws that have created all sorts of absurd situations. And we drop policemen into the middle of the chaos to exert some control over it.
As soon as they draw a gun on someone without clear evidence that that person poses and immediate risk to themselves (police) or others, they are putting their safety above that of the general public. If they do not wish to put public safety above their own, then they need to find a new job.
They routinely oppose state level drug decriminalization (with sheriffs and other local police actively coordinating with DEA / Federal officials to undermine local / state policies).
They also oppose and actively hinder investigations into police malfeasance, firing of corrupt / incompetent officers, and many other forms of limited civilian oversight.
The idea that police officers and their ilk (correctional officers, district attorneys, etc) don't have an active hand in the types of laws and policies being practice in America is not at all true.
I'm sorry but last time I checked there was no police draft, these officers chose this line of work and were made aware or the risks and responsibilities (and pay) involved. I agree that the sureounding circumstances are partially at fault, but you make it seem as if these guys are bystanders thrown into thee situations with no culpability of their own.
Interestingly, in the UK, where regular policemen don't carry guns, most policemen apparently don't want to have firearms.
Obviously this is a rather different culture, and there's a difference between a collective matter (should we all be armed?) and an individual matter (should I be armed today for this particular call?). But I mention this to point out that human nature isn't as simple as everyone wielding the biggest stick available to them.
Police carrying guns makes them "scary" to the general public, and as such damages their primary mission (see above). It is also hugely damaging to the police's reputation when someone gets shot (even righteously) and would be catastrophic if someone was illegitimately killed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Meneze...).
The US police is VERY militarized in Urban areas. They also seem to have an "us Vs. them" attitude about the general public, and are less interested in earning respect but rather taking it by force or coercion ("thin blue line," "respect my authority," "quit resisting," etc).
U.S. urban areas are very militarized. London, a city of 8 million people, had 100 murders last year. Over the last 20 years, the number broke 200 only once, in 2003. Chicago, a city of only 2.7 million people, had 532 last year. And this is way down from the peak. Murders in U.S. cities peaked in the early 1990's. L.A. county had 2,589 murders at its peak in 1993. New York peaked at 2,245 murders in 1990.
I know the topics of guns in america is a hot topic in general but even for the usa the general trend is downward.
The trend in America is definitely downward--murder counts in LA county and NYC are about a fifth of what they were in the early 1990's, but they are still 4x higher than London's (greater London is roughly similar in population to LA county and NYC). And the militarization of the U.S. police didn't happen overnight. It happened in the 1970's-1990's when crime rates in U.S. cities skyrocketed. That apparatus hasn't demobilized in response to decreased crime rates.
Of course, the solution for this is not policing but rather to address the fundamental social inequalities that make gangs thrive.
> And the militarization of the U.S. police didn't happen overnight. It happened in the 1970's-1990's when crime rates in U.S. cities skyrocketed.
Violent crime rates in cities have been on a declining trend since the late 70s/early 80s. The militarization isn't caused by violent crime, because we would expect as rates fall that there would be no call to increase police power at any given time. You are definitely right, the policing issue is really institutional in nature, but as a systemic kind of effect it isn't necessarily tied to any factual reality about crime.
The militarization can have been caused by violent crime without being perpetuated by it.
I disagree that the fundamental reason for gangs is social inequality. The feature that general makes gangs distinct from clubs is their use of force. They use force for the same reason society at large uses force, to protect property /enforce contracts/ensure fair play. Society at large has conceeded this force to the government (specifically the police department), however when the police fail to protect a certain group of people, then those people may be forced to take enforcement into their own hands, which is exactly what gangs do.
This problem stems largly from the war on drugs. There is a huge economic force pushing for drug sales, so capitalism tells us that drugs will be sold. However, the people engaging in the drug trade cannot rely on the legal system for the protections any other business has, so they have to do it themselves.
As a counterpoint, for all the early mockery that Police Community Support Officers took, the idea seems to have worked out pretty well. If you call to report a relatively minor problem today, it's a good bet that you'll get one or two PCSOs and maybe a PC turning up. I think the fact that "real people" come to deal with the situation and maybe have a quiet word with someone who's a little out of line probably goes a long way to avoiding unnecessary confrontation. I'm pretty sure I would be far less comfortable if a small paramilitary team knocked on my door and asked to come in, even if they just wanted to ask if I'd seen anything relevant to a break-in at a neighbour's house or something.
And due to the laws in which police are not subject to, they many time ARE the judge, jury, and executioner.
I would much prefer the UK style police, where they work with the citizens (cause, who wants a rundown shack of a drughouse next door). But I believe that is untenable, due to the prevalent amount of guns in our country.
It sounds like a lose-lose, where We the People lose.
The bigger barrier to solving this issue isn't the guns, but the fact that the police have a big reputation that they would need to overcome.
I believe there is a much more pragmatic side to it. One could see fire arms as a specialisation which needs to be handled by a specially trained squad, much like riding a police horse or doing mountain rescue.
In a country with relatively very little gun violence that makes perfect sense. You train but a little group, which also gains in experience from the incidents that occur, instead of (under) training every single police officer for a shooting incident that will most likely never take place in their whole career.
American police just shoot fuckers instead of getting in a minor tussle.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19641398
"Arming the force would, say opponents, undermine the principle of policing by consent - the notion that the force owes its primary duty to the public, rather than to the state, as in other countries."
One way to reduce the risk of encountering these dangers is to not be serving warrants on non-violent drug offenders in the first place. Not that this a police decision, but it should be obvious to policy makers.
The more drug dealers they stamp out, the more rewarding an endeavor selling drugs becomes. Increasingly aggressive police tactics will be met with increasingly drastic measure to secure drug operations, until you've literally got cartels riding around in military hardware.
I wish that was a hypothetical doomsday scenario, but just look to the south of the border.
The cop also has no idea what's waiting for them in a vehicle they've just pulled over on the highway. Some of them have been murdered in exactly that situation.
But should they all suit up before writing traffic tickets?
All kids are different. Personally, I think I would have preferred my father not come home, than come home a murderer. Maybe I was a fluke, but just to be sure the police officers should ask their kids about this, before operating on potentially false assumptions.
Context leads action. Our police are deeply out of context. Bulls in china shops break china. If you don't want broken dishes, don't send in a bull.
...and I do not want to have a gang of soldiers invade my home at 5:00am and shoot my dog. When soldiers are doing police work, police work puts the public in danger.
The methods they use to protect and serve that ideal just need to be one step less that what the masses will absolutely tolerate. If they cross that line, you get a riot.
Police violate individual citizen rights all the time and usually it's just ignored. It's a sorry state of affairs. That's why I'm afraid of police and police actions.
Christ, if that is somebodies genuine reaction after having an encounter with the police, then it is plainly the police involved that should be charged and arrested.
"one felony count of eluding police."
Fucking hell...
b) The police should have been suspended and/or fired. Even if the girl did buy a 12 pack of beer, the level of force used was beyond excessive for the crime they thought occurred.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/03/culpeper-cop-who-shot-and-...
Within the first couple of months of arriving here (London) I had attended several large gatherings, for example festivals in and out of London, and there was a marked difference in the police handling. I was genuinely surprised when I realised that the police controlling the events were interested in the safety and enjoyment of the public. They weren't looking to stir up trouble, they weren't searching for the "bad eggs" to antagonise - they were just trying to do their best to control the situation by working with those involved.
In my time in NZ I saw the police carry out all sorts of actions that were completely unnecessary.
I saw someone arrested for overloading a car with people leaving a party - prior to that I watched the police insist that the driver allow the car to be overloaded in the first place.
I was once tripped from behind by the police (on the pavement) for walking alongside a protest on my way home from University.
Might not seem like big issues but I've seen countless similar examples where the police were actually responsible for instigating the problem.
There's very much an Us vs Them attitude in NZ that, thankfully, isn't the norm in the UK (for the moment).
Our militarized police like to call the rest of us "civilians" but they run straight to their Union when any superior calls them out, and they hide behind the same lawyers as the rest of us and ask for favors from the prosecutor and court.
We need to keep the teacher unions and break the police unions up, then subject them to higher standards of conduct, and LOWER standards of defense and evidence... We have allowed them to become a wild pack of dogs and they need caged up, put back on the leash, or put down.
Certain parts of NYC has seen amazingly drops in violent crime due to more "community-oriented" policing that requires officers to integrate themselves into the fabric of the neighborhoods in their precincts (I think it's NYC...). On the other end, you have that Salon article about SWAT teams gone willy nilly.
Some basic correlations, and visualizations showing comparative effectiveness of the different techniques could go a long way....
Imagine in 2 out of every 100 raids (numbers completely made up of course) that these style raids are called for - the people inside are incredibly dangerous and bargin in unannounced is the safest thing to do. Based on what I've read these police forces seem to treat every situation like this. Whether a hardened criminal or some dude playing poker with his friends they assume the worst and barge in guns a blazing.
And what happens? 2 times out of 100 they nail the bad guys and are probably congratulated on the local news and within the department. And the other 98 times? Nothing. They hand out some minor violations and leave, none the worse for it. Or again that's what it seems the case is based on these articles. So why wouldn't they just barge in and do whatever the hell they want. They are either heroes or the people they are terrorizing have no way to fight back. There needs to be some way to either punish them for this or positively incentivize more civil raids/raiding at all.
As the financial crisis showed us, bankers would bet the country if it meant they get a bigger bonus. It seems we are a point where the police will essentially do the same.
Of course, that's not applicable to most other areas, but it's worth noting that when your day-to-day job is dealing with the criminals and scum of the earth, it changes your perspective on life.
When you send the police to war, the people become the enemy. The goal should be deterring the behavior not taking these people down and stomping them hard in retribution.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville,_Brooklyn
I've been on both sides of the law here, and have always been treated with the utmost respect and humanity, even when I didn't deserve such. (a couple of drunken incidents, which will shame me for the rest of my days)
Sure our local police force has an armored, Lenco Bearcat, which they rarely use, but such measures are necessary in today's world - where criminals possess military-grade weapons.
This is not to say that I disagree with the article, as it's plain to see that the points made in the article are valid for a large portion of the USA.
I guess all I can say is... Lucky we live Hawai'i!
But the Big Island is Hawai'i, and I've lived on this island for my entire life, with the exception of military service.
The U.S. has also seen major mission creep in the military. Instead of going in and bringing a devastating kinetic assault to an enemy in order to get them to surrender, now we're in the mission of Counter-Insurgency (COIN), nation-building, handing out candy to kids, and air-lifting supplies in to earthquake victims.
Because of all of that, I think we need a new branch of the armed forces specifically set aside for nation-building, humanitarian relief, and so forth. It's a completely different mission from the other branches, and deserves its own budget, training, and voice. Then, civilian police forces should only pull military members from that branch.
We need to separate the warrior mentality from the protect and serve, community-friendly mentality. Some organizational re-alignment may help.
http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_barnett_draws_a_new_map_for_...
Honestly, I think the army, along with a handful of progressive city police departments, will solve the problem of community policing long before most local U.S. law enforcement agencies. The army has greater ability to control and change its culture. It won't happen overnight, but we can hope that eventually U.S. cops will learn to respect their neighbors across town by the example of how U.S. soldiers treat people from the other side of the world. The army will also learn how to assess soldiers' fitness for interaction with civilians, which will have interesting implications for law enforcement.
Maybe we could call it something like The Peace Corps?
I don't know that I buy the notion that police are the way they are today because of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam protests. Seems to me like the rise of inner city violence is a far bigger mover.
Not trying to justify militarized police, just trying to understand the reasons why in order to logically approach alternatives.
The devil's advocate in me wonders if the number of police killed is reduced because of the heavy use of SWAT whenever they think there might be any threat to an officer in a raid.
What rise? Crime, inner city included, has been plunging, nationwide, for decades now. Major city crime rates are approaching fifty year lows.
Which raises other questions. Has our militarized police force contributed to declining crime in the past 20 years? If so, to what extent?
I don't know if there have or haven't... that was not snark, but a serious question. My suspicion is that there have not been any such engagements.
Again.. what violence are they seeing now, that they did not see at that time?
Author seems to completely miss the possibility that this is causal.
Edit: Just see gizmo686's comment below. Pretty much sums up my line of thinking.
There has been a lot of spilled ink regarding why big city crime has been going down with lots of decent theories (abortion access, gentrification, easier access to higher education, smarter policing, larger prison population, etc) and I've never really heard that heavy handed SWAT tactics account for this.
But that's not what the thesis of the sentence you quoted above is. The thesis is "it is odd that the relationship between police and the public on the whole is growing increasingly antagonistic." For that relationship to be casual, that would mean that lower crime and higher police survival rates are due to the practice of responding to illegal poker games among retirees at the Elks Lodge with the same degree of force as they'd use to take down an international drug cartel.
If you get raided by overzealous police that don't even identify themselves properly, and you have a gun that you try to use for self defense... EOF
It is not just war, it is a religious war! They attack people while chanting "Allah Allah Allah...".
Kind of funny that the gear used to fight one terrible war overseas is sent back to our own country and used to fight another terrible war domestically, huh?
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/program-1033-military-equipme...
http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/may/03/deviant-globalizati...
And why, after crime has continued to drop dramatically, has SWAT-ification continued to increase (if not accelerated) rather than plateau or even drop in response?
That said, you do raise a good point that it's career-suicide to advocate reducing police budgets in the US unless absolutely necessary -- and even then it isn't ever well-received.
(Which makes the (in)ability to actually reduce staffing a secondary problem, at best.)
But none of that excuses continued growth in the face of plunging crime, let alone the acceleration in use of such tactics.
Seriously, this article, and all 22 comments of this discussion belong on reddit.
Since hackers transform the sign/information system, they inherently infringe upon AND establish authority. This puts us incidentally in the same position as other authority, such as police.
I'd say that's relevant but if you disagree put your fingers in your ears, close your eyes and wait another decade and we'll see
I exist outside of HN.
HN though is where I want to see technology articles and discussion, not politics.
From the guidelines:
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
We got there because we stopped police from policing and instead forced them to respond to situations left to build until they explode.
We got there by telling them, no you can't look at that guy because of where he lives, where he doesn't live, his skin color, the type of clothing he wears, or such.
You are no doubt referring to stop and frisk. I'm so tired of having to say this to folks, but the violent crime rate in NYC has been dropping since before stop and frisk was a policy. In fact, there is no conclusive evidence or study that gives a direct causation for the fall in violent crime rates in NYC, even though Bloomberg and Ray Kelly will continue to claim otherwise.
> We got there by telling them, no you can't look at that guy because of where he lives, where he doesn't live, his skin color, the type of clothing he wears, or such.
If you think the race and poverty oriented profiling that the police employ make you safer, you are totally mistaken. They encourage harm to communities of predominantly black and hispanic people, they encourage imprisonment of those people, they encourage the destruction of those communities, and they encourage the increased power of the police force over all aspects of a city.
Stop and frisk can be legally done, but the way the NYPD implements it is clearly discriminatory. There is no better way to create a criminal than to treat someone like one from adolescence.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...
No, what limits?
> Have you read how "rights" activist are going to strip NYC cops from doing just that which has resulted in an incredible drop in murders and similar crimes?
NYC cops were never allowed to give abortions, so I'm not sure how any changes are going to affect the crime rate.