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Comment by po | Hacker News Reader

I can only hope something good comes of this and it's not just "We reviewed it and decided it's fine."

I really have no problem with state police having _access_ to some of this kind of equipment. It's probably good for equipment to be distributed throughout the country but it's obvious that there is a severe lack of training and an really strong desire to break it out and parade around with it like a bunch of teenagers with their first gun. I hear people talking about how the police are the "thin blue line" between law and order but in this case they are clearly a fat green line. This equipment should have gone to the national guard.

If the police use military gear, it should be kept under lock and key and if it is authorized for use, should trigger a bunch of additional reporting requirements as an incentive not to use it.

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I think people might have the wrong impression of the 1033 program. The program makes sense - instead of wasting extra military equipment, give it to local police who can use it. A lot of this equipment is very benign types of things, stuff like shoes, first-aid kits, blankets, etc.

As far as I know, local police aren't getting attack helicopters or artillery units. I don't think the equipment needs to be "kept under lock and key" except for a very few things.

Edit: You can see a list of the most distributed stuff here: http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/08/21/most-p...

Or the full data here: https://github.com/TheUpshot/Military-Surplus-Gear

They aren't getting attack helicopters, but they are getting Howitzers -

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v218/baumgar/ArpaioHowitze...

I get what you're saying. And by the raw numbers there's a lot of good stuff in there too. But if you look through that list you see a lot of things like "MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE" (probably an MRAP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP_(armored_vehicle) )that are totally inappropriate for the local police force to be rolling around in. I'm not saying the 1033 program is a bad idea… I just think if you give someone an armored assault vehicle, it should come with the requirement that they only use it if the country is under attack or something very very serious. Better yet, give it to the guard.

I used to live in NYC and have family that is NYC police and I know they deal with some crazy stuff. They dress a bit more aggressively than most police forces. I'm currently living in Japan where the image of the police is more Norman Rockwell than Soldier. I'm also reminded of reading of a hospital that switched from customizable scrubs where the nurses were picking their own patterns to standard white uniforms and got behavioural change from both patients and doctors. I wish I could find the link.

So.. in some sense I do think there is a bit of a problem with even a set of boots coming from the military to the police. If you wear a respectable blue uniform your mindset turns toward earning your community's respect. If you wear jack boots, body armor and a military uniform, you look intimidating. I'm sure that's what the police want, but it's not appropriate for most normal police work and I believe it's the public's job to tell them so. Police are civilians who have special privilege to enforce the laws of society. They should be protected by the legal system, not body armor. If you need body armor to handle a protest, call in the Guard.

We're probably mostly in agreement, even if we lean slightly different directions on some of the issues. For example, I can't think of any legitimate MRAP uses by local police either (although if anyone can point our a realistic use case, I'd definitely like to hear it).

I completely agree that the police should be part of the community they work in and not some military-like third-party authority force. And because of that it presents an issue when the police look like a pseudo-military. However, I don't think in most cases police look like this, although I might be wrong.

Body armor is a tough call. Just yesterday a Texas police chief was killed making a routine traffic stop, and it's understandable why officers feel constantly threatened. As far as I could find, about 65 police officers die in the line of duty each year. My first reaction is that that is pretty low, perhaps policing isn't as dangerous as one would think, but I'd need to look into it a lot more before drawing any real conclusions. It's quite possible the relatively low death toll is a result of more aggressive policing, but it could also indicate that aggressive policing isn't needed.

Still though, they've distributed a shitload of M16A's

The M16 is a field-issue combat rifle, certainly, but it's also the mainstay of sport hunters and shooting enthusiasts everywhere. It's also the appropriate weapon to have providing overwatch when serving a warrant on a potentially hostile perp; It's accurate at, and visible at, far greater ranges than a service pistol. Sometimes you need a guy in the rear to make certain nobody fucks with you.

This is somewhat misleading. AR-15 patterned rifles are a mainstay of shooting enthusiasts.

You'll be hard pressed to find someone who hunts with a select fire, optionally fully automatic m16.

It's not really humane to hunt anything but foxes and rabbits with a civilian AR-15. 5.56×45mm is too small to guarantee a killshot against a deer, so most consider it pretty inhumane to try -- there's a high likelyhood it'll leave a deer to slowly bleed out.

Frankly, it's a pretty terrible sport hunting rifle. The round is too small for most big game, and the cartridge is too powerful for most small game.

The mainstay of sport hunters is actually the 12-gauge shotgun.

Hunting isn't really a good justification for the proliferation of AR-platform rifles, and is definitely a non-sequitur when discussing the armament of our police force.

I'd argue that we already have military hardware distributed around the country with local people regularly trained to use it: The National Guard. I really don't see a need for police to have access to any equipment of this nature, if a situation is bad enough to require such hardware, call in The National Guard.

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