Quote:Just after midnight on May 16, 2010, a SWAT team threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of a 25-year-old man while his 7-year-old daughter slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. The grenade landed so close to the child that it burned her blanket. The SWAT team leader then burst into the house and fired a single shot which struck the child in the throat, killing her. The police were there to apprehend a man suspected of murdering a teenage boy days earlier. The man they were after lived in the unit above the girl's family.
The shooting death of Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley-Jones sounds like it happened in a war zone. But the tragic SWAT team raid took place in Detroit.
Shockingly, paramilitary raids that mirror the tactics of US soldiers in combat are not uncommon in America. According to an investigation carried out by the Huffington Post's Radley Balko, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement over the last 30 years, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units for routine police work. In fact, the most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.
Some 40,000 of these raids take place every year, and are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. And as demonstrated by the case of Aiyana Mo'nay Stanley-Jones, these raids have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries.
How did we allow our law enforcement apparatus to descend into militaristic chaos? Traditionally, the role of civilian police has been to maintain the peace and safety of the community while upholding the civil liberties of residents in their respective jurisdiction. In stark contrast, the military soldier is an agent of war, trained to kill the enemy.
Clearly, the mission of the police officer is incompatible with that of a soldier, so why is it that local police departments are looking more and more like paramilitary units in a combat zone? The line between military and civilian law enforcement has been drawn for good reason, but following the drug war and more recently, the war on terror, that line is inconspicuously eroding, a trend that appears to be worsening by the decade.
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This is madness! Given the racist elements of law and law enforcement along with the too-regular "You WILL respect my authori-ty!!!" (see Cartman from South Park) attitudes of too many cops, this is a recipe for disaster on a major scale. Like the mortgage crisis, it won't be limited to urban areas and regular communities of POC. It's now not a matter of if, but when.
I would think the police have tanks because criminals have progressively increased their armaments to the point that a bullet proof vest is not much protection.
“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.”
(07-06-2011 07:47 AM)NJMaverick Wrote: I would think the police have tanks because criminals have progressively increased their armaments to the point that a bullet proof vest is not much protection.
The ones you are noticing are more terrified than anything else. They are lashing out because they are comfortable; and to acknowledge what is happening is a threat to that comfort. Ignore them, for they are not the voices that will rise in the coming days, months and years. They are not the voices of our collected humanity. They are the old voices of fear and impotence. - Anonymous
(07-06-2011 07:47 AM)NJMaverick Wrote: I would think the police have tanks because criminals have progressively increased their armaments to the point that a bullet proof vest is not much protection.
Did you read the article?
Yeah I read the article. I also appreciate that it's not a good idea to take one incident and extrapolation it to the countless warrants served every day. Heck if you want an interesting exercise Google killed while serving warrant and you will get 8 millions hit. Drug dealers are the worst as they often have plenty of cash and their arsenals easy out class what the police carry. It's a bad situation. I am all for looking at what goes wrong in cases like this and fixing the mistakes and faulty protocols or procedures. However I would not go nearly as far as this article went with its conclusions. Heck if you are trying to disarm the police, why not go back to six shot revolvers?
“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.”
(07-06-2011 07:47 AM)NJMaverick Wrote: I would think the police have tanks because criminals have progressively increased their armaments to the point that a bullet proof vest is not much protection.
Did you read the article?
Yeah I read the article. I also appreciate that it's not a good idea to take one incident and extrapolation it to the countless warrants served every day. Heck if you want an interesting exercise Google killed while serving warrant and you will get 8 millions hit. Drug dealers are the worst as they often have plenty of cash and their arsenals easy out class what the police carry. It's a bad situation. I am all for looking at what goes wrong in cases like this and fixing the mistakes and faulty protocols or procedures. However I would not go nearly as far as this article went with its conclusions. Heck if you are trying to disarm the police, why not go back to six shot revolvers?
The article said nothing about disarming the police, but the stats show that the reasoning don't match the facts. There's no justification for the police to become a secondary branch of the US Army. Considering the poor policing and other everyday problems the police have, I don't think it's a good idea to give them the super-lethal hardware that they really don't need.
(07-06-2011 07:47 AM)NJMaverick Wrote: I would think the police have tanks because criminals have progressively increased their armaments to the point that a bullet proof vest is not much protection.
Did you read the article?
Yeah I read the article. I also appreciate that it's not a good idea to take one incident and extrapolation it to the countless warrants served every day. Heck if you want an interesting exercise Google killed while serving warrant and you will get 8 millions hit. Drug dealers are the worst as they often have plenty of cash and their arsenals easy out class what the police carry. It's a bad situation. I am all for looking at what goes wrong in cases like this and fixing the mistakes and faulty protocols or procedures. However I would not go nearly as far as this article went with its conclusions. Heck if you are trying to disarm the police, why not go back to six shot revolvers?
The article said nothing about disarming the police, but the stats show that the reasoning don't match the facts. There's no justification for the police to become a secondary branch of the US Army. Considering the poor policing and other everyday problems the police have, I don't think it's a good idea to give them the super-lethal hardware that they really don't need.
Maybe I am mistaken but the article seems to call for the ending of SWAT teams and the weapons they carry. As for not needing it, watch this
Here is live footage. The police actually had to break into or get weapons from a local gun shop to handle the situation.
The North Hollywood shootout was an armed confrontation between two heavily-armed and armored bank robbers, Larry Eugene Phillips, Jr. and Emil Matasareanu, and patrol and SWAT officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California on February 28, 1997. It happened when responding patrol officers engaged Phillips and Matasareanu leaving the robbed bank. Seventeen officers and civilians sustained injuries before both robbers were killed. Phillips and Matasareanu had robbed several banks prior to their attempt in North Hollywood and were notorious for their heavy armament, which included automatic rifles.
United States patrol officers at the time were typically armed with a 9mm or .40 caliber pistol on their person, with a 12-gauge shotgun available in their cars. Phillips and Matasareanu carried fully automatic rifles and wore body armor. Since most handgun calibers cannot penetrate body armor, patrol officers had a significant disadvantage until SWAT arrived with equivalent firepower; they also appropriated several semi-automatic rifles from a nearby firearms dealer to help even the odds. The incident sparked debate on the appropriate firepower for patrol officers to have available in similar situations in the future.
“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.”
Benjamin Franklin
07-06-2011, 01:37 PM (This post was last modified: 07-06-2011 08:41 PM by Brewman_Jax.)
(07-06-2011 07:47 AM)NJMaverick Wrote: I would think the police have tanks because criminals have progressively increased their armaments to the point that a bullet proof vest is not much protection.
Did you read the article?
Yeah I read the article. I also appreciate that it's not a good idea to take one incident and extrapolation it to the countless warrants served every day. Heck if you want an interesting exercise Google killed while serving warrant and you will get 8 millions hit. Drug dealers are the worst as they often have plenty of cash and their arsenals easy out class what the police carry. It's a bad situation. I am all for looking at what goes wrong in cases like this and fixing the mistakes and faulty protocols or procedures. However I would not go nearly as far as this article went with its conclusions. Heck if you are trying to disarm the police, why not go back to six shot revolvers?
The article said nothing about disarming the police, but the stats show that the reasoning don't match the facts. There's no justification for the police to become a secondary branch of the US Army. Considering the poor policing and other everyday problems the police have, I don't think it's a good idea to give them the super-lethal hardware that they really don't need.
Maybe I am mistaken but the article seems to call for the ending of SWAT teams and the weapons they carry. As for not needing it, watch this
Here is live footage. The police actually had to break into or get weapons from a local gun shop to handle the situation.
The North Hollywood shootout was an armed confrontation between two heavily-armed and armored bank robbers, Larry Eugene Phillips, Jr. and Emil Matasareanu, and patrol and SWAT officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California on February 28, 1997. It happened when responding patrol officers engaged Phillips and Matasareanu leaving the robbed bank. Seventeen officers and civilians sustained injuries before both robbers were killed. Phillips and Matasareanu had robbed several banks prior to their attempt in North Hollywood and were notorious for their heavy armament, which included automatic rifles.
United States patrol officers at the time were typically armed with a 9mm or .40 caliber pistol on their person, with a 12-gauge shotgun available in their cars. Phillips and Matasareanu carried fully automatic rifles and wore body armor. Since most handgun calibers cannot penetrate body armor, patrol officers had a significant disadvantage until SWAT arrived with equivalent firepower; they also appropriated several semi-automatic rifles from a nearby firearms dealer to help even the odds. The incident sparked debate on the appropriate firepower for patrol officers to have available in similar situations in the future.
Now, back to the article. How often does the N. Hollywood shoot out occur? A major city police dept. can justify a SWAT team and advanced weaponry. Also, and a bit more pertinent, why do the police depts of Roanoke, VA and Lancaster, PA, to name a few non-big city depts., have (with federal backing) advanced weaponry?
From the article:
Quote:In 1997, Congress, not yet satisfied with the flow of military hardware to local police, passed the National Defense Authorization Security Act which created the Law Enforcement Support Program, an agency tasked with accelerating the transfer of military equipment to civilian police departments. Between January 1997 and October 1999, the new agency facilitated the distribution of 3.4 million orders of Pentagon equipment to over 11,000 domestic police agencies in all 50 states.
By December 2005, that number increased to 17,000, with a purchase value of more than $727 million of equipment. Among the hand-me-downs were 253 aircraft (including six- and seven-passenger airplanes, and UH-60 Blackhawk and UH-1 Huey helicopters), 7,856 M-16 rifles, 181 grenade launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, and 1,161 pairs of night-vision goggles.
The military surplus program and paramilitary units feed off one another in a cyclical loop that has caused an explosive growth in militarized crime control techniques. With all the new high-tech military toys the federal government has been funneling into local police departments, SWAT teams have inevitably multiplied and spread across American cities and towns in both volume and deployment frequency. Criminologist Peter Kraska found that the frequency of SWAT operations soared from just 3,000 annual deployments in the early 1980s to an astonishing 40,000 raids per year by 2001, 75-80 percent of which were used to deliver search warrants.
SWAT was constructed for major shootouts and similar events that don't happen often. The vast majority of the time, SWAT should be a "break glass in case of emergency" organization, not for regular and general use. The proliferation of surplus military hardware to municipal police forces is creating a "solution" that's looking for a problem--it's looking more like a problem that's causing a problem. Seems to me that the police have enough problems without adding new ones.
The murder of an innocent child is sufficient grounds for re-examining these smash and shoot guerrilla warfare tactics IMO.
Quote:However I would not go nearly as far as this article went with its conclusions. Heck if you are trying to disarm the police, why not go back to six shot revolvers?
The article discussed the increasing militarization of police forces culminating in the purchase of armor plated vehicles that can knock down walls and insert a large number of "troops" behind said wall. What you've quoted above is your biased opinion as I do not see any call to "disarm the police" in the article.
The ones you are noticing are more terrified than anything else. They are lashing out because they are comfortable; and to acknowledge what is happening is a threat to that comfort. Ignore them, for they are not the voices that will rise in the coming days, months and years. They are not the voices of our collected humanity. They are the old voices of fear and impotence. - Anonymous
It is disturbing to me too. They've gone too far into the "Shoot first, ask questions later" mode of thinking and operating.
While I know that the "bad" guys now have access to such things as armour piercing bullets and such, that should not give carte blanche to police departments to go storming into a place, any place, guns blazing. Whatever happened to assessing a situation? Whatever happened to doing what one can to check something out before acting? Whatever happened to thinking first and then acting?
I've had a number of friends throughout my life who were police officers, and believe me, they aren't monsters in human suits. But I absolutely agree that the mililitarization of police departments across this country is very disturbing, and frankly, something that scares me.
Does anyone remember the shooting in CA where the bank robbers were so heavily armed that the police had to go to a gun shop to get weapons that would penetrate the bullet prooff vests they were wearing?
The violent criminals continue to have access to bigger and deadlier weapons and the police have to be better armed to deal with them.
I agree the police brutality is up in this country and I hold the police and states responsible for not getting rid of the criminals among their ranks.
Now having said that, I personally know 4 police officers that were killed in the line of duty. They were good people serving the community, killed by repeat offenders.
The night raids have to stop, it is clear that the police fact checkers (like verifying addresses) suck at their jobs and are incapable of getting addresses correct.
“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”
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