Scenes from a militarized America
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Similar to how firefighters, EMTs, and police are separate agencies with different uniforms and vehicles, I wish police were split into violent and non-violent crime departments. It would solve quite a few problems. First, we could have something more nuanced than the typical "cops are bad"/"cops are good" debate. Second, we might see decreases in some types of crime, since minor criminals wouldn't fear informing the Department of Homicide. (Similar to how nobody fears calling the fire department if there's a fire.) Lastly, it would make it obvious where budgets were being spent. Most taxpayers are fine with throwing money at law enforcement, because they think it's preventing violent crime. If they saw how much was going to the Department of Vice, they might have other ideas.
Sadly, I doubt this will ever happen. These agencies are too big to change in any reasonable time frame.
But budgeting, training, progress, and influx of war abundance has merged and blurred the two.
We could end up with a Judge Dredd scenario.
Or we could end the war on terror, which in turn reduces the urgency we have now of eroding privacy, and we can also end the war on drugs, which in turn reduces the incentive for police forces to invade homes and seize property for profit.
I firmly hold the belief all that will happen when the current crop of crappy old people in power die.
What prevents a new crop of "crappy old people" from simply taking their place?
The sorts of qualities that attract someone to a life in politics, if not the very qualities that make someone successful in politics, tend to be the same qualities that lead to corruption, pandering, opportunism, and all the other vices. It's not a generational thing; it's a human-nature thing. Before long, the next generation will be looking at us and hoping things get better when we finally get off the stage.
I don't mean to be cynical. I'm just attempting to be realistic. I'm hopeful we can do better -- and if I didn't believe that, I'd be pretty damned depressed -- but I'm not basing that hope on the idea that we'll break a mold as old as politics itself.
What's kind of funny is that a good many of the Boomers were of the peace-and-love dope-smoking hippy '60s. They saw first-hand the results of Vietnam.
You'd think they would be the ones to spearhead gay rights and legalization of drugs and avoiding wars of interventionism. But by the '80s is was clear that all that youthful optimism and charity was but a phase.
As the saying goes, people become conservative the minute they have something to conserve.
tl;dr: time won't make thing better, we need refactoring
It isn't the people. It's the financial incentives, which will outlive the demise of their current beneficiaries and welcome their replacements.
This is the power of a 3rd party winning the presidency. All of this force falls under the executive branch whose policy can be changed in an instant.
Don't think of it as impossible, 20 years ago Ross Perot received around 20% of the vote. All it takes is someone 3 times more "popular" than Ross Perot.
http://rangevoting.org/Duverger.html
There's a political science term called a realigning election, but it involves a radical change to a party, or the displacement of at least one of the two dominant parties with a new party, after which elections go back to a two-party-dominated playing field for a while; a persistent 3-or-more party system is not viable without changing voting systems.
Did you mean first past the post (FPTP) aka winner takes all?
In election reform circles, IRV refers to instant runoff voting.
Right after that, the two factions of the big-business party collaborated to ensure that no other party could mount a serious challenge. This involved forming the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) in 1987, which re-wrote the debate rules to effectively block challengers from participating. Out of sight, out of mind.
Incredible. After Ross Perot ran for president in 1992, they traveled back in time to form CPD in 1987. Amazing story.
I confused the CPD taking over from the League of Women Voters in '87 and greatly dumbing down the format with the CPD raising standards for party inclusion in the debates in 2000.
The sad fact is that even though the power of TV is diminishing, it's still by far where the majority of voters get their information from and if you don't get on the televised debate you don't stand a chance. Unfortunately democracy at this level means you are ruled by the low-information voter.
So if all the people that didn't vote (many because they feel that their vote doesn't change things anyway) voted for a third party candidate, that candidate would win without having to take a single vote from either of the two main party candidates.
No executive order is going to solve this problem.
State governors and city mayors tend to be a lot more willing to do things like this, but you'd still have to get the political will. I'd expect you'd need someone to successfully get elected on a platform of doing it, and for the opposition to not find it reasonable to attack that item on the platform.
1. Would you still have a police commissioner at the top?
2. Does this kind of thing already exist in any form?
...okay, I am bad at coming up with these. Help?
Unfortunately, eventually the criminal gangs discovered that they could do the same thing, and since their victims thought they were cops, the criminals got away with murder, intimidation, etc. After the fall of the Soviet Union, these criminals became known as the Russian Mafia and exported their criminal operations to more lucrative countries like the USA where they still operate today.
How hard is it for modern criminals to get a hold of uniforms and vehicles to impersonate a police SWAT team?
After a decade long (non-)war, the US government has a lot of surplus military-grade equipment they no longer need. By heavily discounting it through DHS grants, they are allowing small town american sheriffs to buy Fallujah-grade armored personel carriers. You know, for the teens smoking a joint and the two murders a year that happen in your 'burbs.
That's what the marine corp colonel in the above video is speaking out against:
> I saw a picture in the Boston Globe during the Marathon Bombing where there was a state police officer– Actually, there were two officers. They both had identical helmets, flak jackets, weapons, everything I wore in Iraq, only it was all blue. The officer on one side had a big patch on his back that said “MASSACHUSETTS STATE POLICE.” Another officer next to him, his patch said “BOSTON POLICE.”
> And so what we’re doing here, and let’s not kid about it, we’re building a domestic army...
Any decent person wants a police force. But when the police force starts to look and behave like paramilitary storm troopers, that's when you start asking if this is really the land of the free.
There are 100 Assistant US Attorneys in Massachusetts, a relatively sane place where the mayor of Boston came out against putting military carbines in every police car. No wonder they had the time and resources to drive Aaron Swartz to suicide. Upstream of them there are hundreds of thousands of armed agents of various federal agencies. That's equivalent to 10 division of soldiers. That's insane. In most municipalities, police are the #2 expense after schools. Not recreation. Not road crews. Not anything else.
Balko's book, "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" is a great read about this exact subject. In it he addresses the issue with many examples and some ideas on how police forces can (and some have) changed somewhat to use less violent tactics and more community policing resulting in less crime. That's blasphemy to any politician of course who cannot be seen as "soft on crime."
The reality is, the "us vs. them" mentality of many citizens nowadays is likely beyond fixing. That is not to say that there aren't a multitude of ideas that could work. Indeed, there are many solutions to these problems, but such solutions will not be pursued.
At least they (I assume) got the address right this time. And the son in the bathroom should buy a lottery ticket. Perhaps his divine luck in staying alive (and luck is all that it was) will make him rich as well.
I think to fix it you need to first fix the "us vs. them" mentality of many cops.
Each marker can be clicked for further information.
Interesting.
His reasoning was that people who find themselves faced with no-knock warrants, or falsely implicated in capital crimes, are probably guilty of something even if they are innocent of the matter of present concern.
I find that sentiment difficult to comprehend, but I imagine that citizens who only experience the 'services' of police tend to forget that people living a few blocks away may have a very different relationship with law enforcement.
They would have to work on the assumption that someone was inside, watching them, so they could plan an attack.
I would think this would be standard operating procedure, regardless of the reason they were there
Let's just say I would die in a raid like that and it scares the shit out of me.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/25/jose-guerena-arizon...
These products are often derivatives of military grade products. The makers of the military grade products need to increase revenue and diversify, which leads to the corporation intensely marketing to the police departments.
And once the police depts buy the new shiny toys, they need to have an excuse for using them some how...
Just a personal observation.
So what has to change? Hopefully, the non-important and trivial laws (i.e. simple drug possession) are no longer enforced. But do concessions have to be made in terms of citizen gun rights? The police would definitely think so.
Meanwhile, while this civic debate goes on, departments are funding these militarized teams. Even if laws are changed so dramatically that these heavy SWAT raids become practically unneeded...you think the middle-managers/deputy-chiefs are going to give up the funds that enlarged their staffing and armories? Or are they going to petition for more trivial laws to enforce?
I couldn't agree more.
> However, when they feel that they need to arrest you, well, they're going to bring a veritable army to avoid being causalities...and that's kind of reasonable.
I couldn't disagree more.
If everybody tried a little bit harder to see things from the point of view of other folks, we'd have way fewer problems.
Of course I can see it from the officer's perspective. The officer is perfectly rational in wanted to be well armed and well supported, to increase his own security. But when that officer is deliberately doing what these officers were doing, I value the security of the victims far more than the security of the perpetrators.
What a pointless waste of life. Police need to go back to basics.
There have? Could you please cite them? In reading the Author's book, mentioned at the end of the article, I was lead to believe that the castle doctrine has pretty much eroded to the point that one has a reasonable sense of privacy in one's own home, buy if you're suspected of illegal activity you basically forfeit that right.
http://www.theeagle.com/news/local/article_549b0586-cefc-53a...
Can't see any others at the moment, sorry.
You might be right about forfeiting the right in illegal activities, I don't know.
I'm not saying gun rights should be abolished or limited...I guess I'm just despondently pointing out difficult (and money-based) of an issue it is.
The police justified their military tactics by saying they expected some residents to be armed.
That (slightly misquoted) statement is the crux of the matter; the level of response, from situations like this, to pepper-spraying college students sitting on the ground, has spiraled out of control in recent years.
There needs to be a nation-wide effort to retrain police forces in "old fashioned" methods of crisis management, instead of battle armor & bulldoze.
I suggest, as a starting point, that we distribute the contact information for the members of the Iowa police department in question (available online) to start a targeted messaging campaign aimed at their households.
If you point a gun at a SWAT team they will likely shoot you, if you don't have reflexes to drop the gun then that's Darwinian evolution in action. I have little sympathy for someone that keeps a loaded gun with them in such a paranoid fashion.
Not to mention, based on most Army and Marine vets I've met over the past few years, I'd wager the majority carry a gun (barring state/local restrictions) outside their home, and a significant number keep it holstered from about the time they dress until they go to bed. SWAT teams should seriously reconsider violating the law when conducting a raid if they want to avoid being target practice for a trained soldier.
Not like it's any of your business what he does in his home anyway.
I can't really comment on if the force they used was too great, as they didn't say what they thought they were up against. Assuming they were justified in their force and paid all damages, I do not see an issue with this.
This is not a complete thought. Please gather yourself and try again.