We should be careful to draw a causal relationship here. It might not be that getting the military equipment causes police to be more aggressive and therefore have more killings.
It might instead be that the more aggressive police departments are the ones that more seek to purchase military equipment, and the more aggressive police are the ones with more killings. I tend to think that's the case.
Regardless, there is no need, ever, for police to have the automatic weapons, APCs, and "non-lethal" weapons they are buying from the military. If they are facing an opponent like that then call in the FBI, who generally have much better training, or ATF (no idea about their training).
> Regardless, there is no need, ever, for police to have the automatic weapons, APCs, and "non-lethal" weapons they are buying from the military.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout is the catalyst for all of this. Police were heavily outgunned. The FBI would take hours to get there as FBI tactical teams are not in most cities and are not on call like normal SWAT teams are. APCs are purely defensive. Its effectively a Brinks armored money truck, but instead of money it carries people to/from gunfire safely.
And yet the only two people who died were the two bank robbers. It sounds like the police were able to eventually take control of the situation even while heavily outgunned. So does adding more firepower on the side of police actually provide more safety when this is an example of the worst case scenario?
I think most are a third option; not theoretical, but neither occurring in America. Consider something like the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 10 men with rifles and explosives terrorized an entire city causing hundreds of casualties. Is there any particular reason to think such a thing couldn't happen in America, where rifles and explosives aren't hard to get?
Against that sort of threat, I think the police having a few armored vehicles makes sense.
> Is there any particular reason to think such a thing couldn't happen in America, where rifles and explosives aren't hard to get?
Is there any particular reason why a clear edge-case scenario should be our basis for arming police departments, which spend most of their time solving mundane domestic disputes, pulling apart drunken fights and responding to break-ins where someone's Playstation was stolen? We should orient policing towards deescalation based on what they usually face. If their most common problem is a drug addict high on PCP, they don't need a gun, they need proper training and, perhaps, a taser.
I think the biggest problem with these vehicles is the aesthetics and the mindset they attract. But in this regard, those armoured vehicles are only a small part of the problem. Their dark uniforms should be replaced with light uniforms. Replace black and dark blue uniforms with baby blue, white or 'day-glo' neons. Do the same to their guns (white plastic 'furniture' where possible), cars, and armoured vehicles. It doesn't particularly bother me that they own armored vehicles (given the armed nature of the American public), but those vehicles should be repainted to look uncool to the sort of person who fetishizes military hardware and edgy 'punisher'/'tacticool' aesthetics.
Basically, make the cops look less like the US Marines and more like UN peacekeepers (specifically their white vehicles.)
In other words, you want more WA State Patrol (white cars, light blue uniforms) than Seattle PD (navy blue for both), it seems. Though I recall the move to the navy blue uniforms in Seattle was for cost reasons - their old baby blue uniforms were custom, so they cost more.
Yes basically, though I would like to see these sort of aesthetic changes across the board, not just to uniforms. The uniforms and the rest of their equipment should convey peaceful professionalism, not macho militarism.
Some of the black on the metal hardware comes from coatings to prevent rust and other corrosion, not to look cool. Custom colored coatings (cerakote I guess if you want light blue) would be much more expensive. It’s not just simply painted black. The other hardware that is painted is done for camouflage, and I’m betting the vehicles were sand colored when they got them as a black APC is gonna stand out real well in the desert.
I'm aware that black metal components often have a protective black oxide layer. In another post in this thread I mention that the plastic 'furniture' could be made white at least. And in common police firearms, namely glocks, that's most of the gun that could be recovered. I don't think the Glock company offers such guns presently, but if there were widespread police aesthetic reforms I don't think supply would necessarily be a problem.
As for camouflage, I think police should be forbidden from using it. If a bank robber needs to be ambushed from the bushes in some sort of 'Bonnie and Clyde' scenario, let the beat police call in specialists. These armoured vehicles don't need camo in the likely scenarios in which they'd ever be used, particularly since the entire premise of such vehicles in a police role is that they'd be impervious to the small arm fire they might encounter. In a military role they might get hit by an RPG, but such anti-armour weapons are exceedingly unlikely to be relevant to police.
I’m still failing to see how this will solve anything, as you’ve yet to explain why you’re scared of the color black. GLOCKS come in a few different colors of frames, but not white and the frames are made from nylon, not plastic, and you’ve still increased the cost of manufacture because of fear of a color.
SWAT teams need camouflage so they can park vehicles and stage raids at night or early dawn without announcing their presence.
Why did you decide all cops are bad and start a war against them?
You protect yourself from edge cases all the time, ever put on a seatbelt?
Risk is the chance of something happening coupled with the effect it would have. Perhaps the police should not be the ones protecting the public from a Mumbai style attack - possibly it should be the military - but it should be someone because of the grave consequences.
That does not have any link to whether police should routinely use de-escalation techniques (which they should).
> Some edge cases deserve more addressing than others.
Not only is no one arguing different, the "hundreds of thousands of car accidents in the USA annually" has been addressed (in several ways). Perhaps other problems may also be addressed?
> There has never been a Mumbai-style terror attack
No, only in most (if not all) of the other G8 countries, but have they had a Pulse nightclub attack or planes flown into buildings? How many have had a Bataclan or a London Bridge style attack?
Let's not split hairs.
> the National Guard could be activated for such a thing
Well, I did suggest “possibly it should be the military” so the National Guard, being part of the military, would fit.
In short, an edge case being rare does not imply that it should not be prepared for. What's the response time for the National Guard if terrorists start attacking people in the street?
This is a false equivalency. Putting on a seatbelt poses no danger and requires no effort. Giving police military-grade vehicles and weapons, on the other hand, costs money and isn't safe, considering their track record.
That you find a property or trait that is different between them does not make them a false equivalence. The comparison is about:
a) whether they are edge cases, which they are in terms of occurrence
b) risk, which are comparable on a personal level
Additionally, when seat belt laws were introduced there were arguments about whether it was a moral hazard. Their requiring some effort (try strapping in a small child) and considerable danger to some (again, children, and pregnant women) was not relevant to that (ultimately wrong) argument and it's not relevant here either.
>Is there any particular reason to think such a thing couldn't happen in America
I don't think this is the right question to ask. There are a lot of things that one can reasonably think could happen in America. Do we need to prepare every police department in the country for all those situations regardless of the odds of the worst happening? Do the costs, both literal monetary costs and the harder to measure societal costs, of militarizing our police departments outweigh the potential that an increase in police firepower will allow them to save lives in this extremely remote possibility actually happens? Maybe we are just better off leaving some of these extreme outliers as something to be dealt with by the military if it ever happens here.
It's a good point. Our largest and most targeted cities (e.g. NYC, DC) absolutely should have dedicated heavy weapons troops on call to respond in real time to a terrorist attack. Their equipment and training should be separate from workaday policing.
Then most of the rest of the country just needs normal policing, because realistically, they're so unlikely to be a target. Look at all the big terrorist attacks that have happened in the past several decades. They've targeted huge international cities: DC, NYC, London, Paris, Mumbai. These are the kinds of targets (and the only kinds of targets) that plausibly need military-level policing on stand-by 24/7.
> Our largest and most targeted cities (e.g. NYC, DC) absolutely should have dedicated heavy weapons troops on call to respond in real time to a terrorist attack.
Absolutely not. The military does not handle issues like this on US soil. (If you meant something else by "troops", please choose your words more carefully.)
I have zero confidence that, with such a force on standby all the time, departments will resist using that force for more mundane matters until it becomes routine.
> They've targeted huge international cities: DC, NYC, London, Paris, Mumbai. These are the kinds of targets (and the only kinds of targets) that plausibly need military-level policing on stand-by 24/7.
Would "military-level policing" have actually helped in any of these terrorist attacks? I fail to see how a tricked-out army would have stopped 9/11. I did a quick search for "terrorist attacks in washington dc", and nothing really came up, except for some theoretical worries and a few foiled plots, which clearly did not need "military-level policing" to deal with.
I'm really tired of how "oh my, terrorists!" is used as an excuse for domestic militarization and draconian domestic policy. The threat of terrorism in the US is hugely overblown, and traditional policing at the local and federal level is what we need to handle these sorts of things, by catching them during the planning phases. And with most terrorist attacks, if you get to a point where there's an active attack, it's too late to do all that much that's meaningful, and bringing in militarized units has just as much potential to make the situation worse. Sure, there are exceptions, but not enough to warrant militarized police on call 24/7.
Yes, I meant militarized police by "troops", exactly what the article is talking about. Though here in NYC I do routinely see heavily armed actual troops (they might be National Guard? not sure), at Penn Station, Grand Central, and airports.
No, I'm not referring to 9/11. However, over the past several decades, there have been several attempted/successful terrorist attacks by people on the ground. At some point you do need someone heavily armed enough to take out an active ongoing attack, like what we saw in Mumbai or Paris. The odds of it happening again within the next decade are not that small. Do you really do nothing to even try to be ready to respond to it? I just don't think most voters are going to be willing to accept it.
There is no definition of the word "civilian" under which members of the military qualify.
> Under international humanitarian law, civilians are "persons who are not members of the armed forces" and are not "combatants if they [don't] carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war".
Sure, now next step is to determine if a military member in civilian clothes is considered military or civilian. Speaking from first hand experience we call ourselves civilians then.
Police exist (in theory) to enforce law. The military does not.
Edge cases like MPs and the Coast Guard exist, and some countries blur the line more than others. The Paris fire department, for example, is a military branch for historical reasons.
The police are in exactly the same business as the military, enforcing compliance through violence. Using a different word doesn't make them a different thing.
No it doesn't. It exists to protect national interests. The rare exemption is when a state decides to deploy the Army National Guard or Coast Guard. The Posse Comitatus Act is very specific about this, and the U.S. Army Military Police Corps were slapped with administrative actions for violating the act when they intervened in murder spree in Alabama.
> No it doesn't. It exists to protect national interests.
This is meaningless, and to the degree that it has meaning, ridiculously overbroad. Almost all activities that "protect national interests" are not military. The definition you purport to provide here does not distinguish the military from anything else.
What actually defines the military is that it achieves its goals through the use of violence. And the police belong in this category too; there isn't a difference. Saying the police are not military purely because they wear a label saying "the third amendment doesn't apply to us, for reasons that will make sense if we beat you enough" would be the same error as saying that a newspaper didn't enjoy freedom of "the press" if it published online (and therefore didn't use a printing press).
Actually, it would be more like saying that the New York Times didn't enjoy freedom of "the press" because they're "the Times", not "the press".
Except the police lack a lot of the training that would be useless in urban environments. Your average cop is also trained with a handgun as their primary, instead of a rifle as primary and handgun as secondary. Your average military personnel is more fit than your average cop as well. Not to mention the military doesn’t have jurisdiction inside the US to enforce laws. If you believe they are the same then how come military cannot arrest you (ignoring MPs near or on bases)?
Using your logic I can prove many different things that are pretty silly. For instance, since a gun can be used to kill people, and so can a pillow, the pillow must be an “assault weapon”.
I have a question for you, have you ever needed the police for anything?
> Your average cop is also trained with a handgun as their primary, instead of a rifle as primary and handgun as secondary.
For what it's worth, your average soldier isn't equipped with a handgun at all, and as such, handgun training is minimal to non-existent. Your average soldier is more likely to need to know how to operate the squad's crew-served machine gun, a grenade launcher, or a door-busting shotgun, so to the extent that there is cross-training, it'll focus more on that kinda stuff.
In the time it takes for an APC to show up some beat cop the rampage will be over. They will either run out of ammo and detonate suicide vests or someone will have managed to shoot the threat. An APC is of no use except when you know where and when you want it and those situations tend to not be the kinds of situations we want civilian police engaging in.
You are picking one particular attack and are attempting to use that single, outlying instance to argue for things that will not be necessary in the 99% case.
And the problem with military gear -- as we're currently seeing, plain as the day -- is that cops will not just save it for the truly dire situations; they'll use it more and more until it becomes a part of routine operations.
There have been numerous attacks like that in other countries, some far more extreme. I chose a single example to illustrate my point, but that doesn't mean a single example is all that exists.
Anyway, the cops aren't using these armored vehicles to kill people, they primarily do that with guns. It isn't the use of these vehicles that concerns me, but rather the role these vehicles play in recruiting macho edgelords to be cops (the sort prone to shooting people with guns.) To address this, I would like all their vehicles to be repainted, uniforms redesigned, etc. Aesthetics matter, it influences the sort of person drawn to the job. A police force with a particularly militarized aesthetic will attract men who want to LARP as occupying forces in Baghdad.
Or we can just do psych evals and stop this nonsense about things “looking” aggressive. You know what they DIDN’T do when designing the APC? Find ways to make it look more “tacticool”
But you’re running around saying it makes people crazy and militaristic by it’s looks alone, so it is relevant. Let’s discuss the looks of it because why are you scared of an inanimate object.
I am not. I am refuting the assumption that a coordinated terrorist attack would play out quickly. Even if the responding police/military are well equipped it remains possible that a terrorist attack could last for several days.
Do we really need to pull up instances of when police use APCs to insert SWAT teams? It’s very easy to find and pretty well common knowledge if you look.
Is there any particular reason to think such a thing couldn't happen in America, where rifles and explosives aren't hard to get?
Mainly because gurs in general aren't hard to get in America. Any would-be shooter has to fear not only cops, but armed civilians. And if they are spanning an entire city and the police aren't able to keep up, you'd definitely get recreational hunters with their rifles trying to take them down.
APCs are not "purely defensive". They're an intimidating presence which is by itself, a type of force. On top of that, it's becoming "a thing" to use vehicles to run over people you disagree with.
Is that a challenge or an honest question, I really can't tell?
If it's a question, probably because of its association with night and darkness, and it's contrast with bright colors.
If it's a challenge, give me a basis because you're fighting common sense. I'm not here to convince you that black is intimidating in a way that pink is not.
The only person doing this mental chase here is you. Why don't you just come out and say what you mean?
If you're really this confrontational about "the color" black being tied to darkness since pre-history (not much of a stretch there) and the significance of darkness being the physical manifestation of something like "evil" (also since pre-history) EDIT: and why "evil" is "intimidating", then nobody should take your contributions to this discussion seriously.
EDIT: I just don't understand how your response of "if black is intimidating, why do they paint them tan for military use" is in any way an honest argument. Did you simply not even think of camouflage? There are more important tactical advantages in warfare than intimidation. And now I feel like I did the job that darkserside was trying to avoid.
Nope, you see I’ve been on the black isn’t evil argument for a while because I own various black colored guns. It’s a pretty common argument to say the black guns are scary yet nobody can explain why. So again, why do you think black makes it scary or intimidating?
I have, in fact if you see my replies to others you’ll see me point out that very thing. But people are going around saying the goal of painting it black is to be intimidating. If that were true then why doesn’t the military use the same tactic when they do want to look intimidating? This would imply it’s used for camo, like you said.
It’s not a race thing, don’t take it there because I most definitely am not.
No I’m sorry. We still don’t have a reason why grown adults are scared of a color and we can’t even talk about it without it becoming a race thing. What a world the democrats have made.
I didn't make it a race thing. With all due respect, which is very little based on your comportment in this discussion, kindly find another community to flame.
what exactly are you talking about? Read. nobody but you two are making it a race thing. It’s a simple question, why does the color black make something look intimidating. You said it first and now you’re trying to make it a race thing to avoid explaining why the color black is scary on a gun. If you can answer a non racial question about a color then perhaps you should grow up?
Let’s make this real simple for you two what makes a black gun more scary or dangerous than one painted pastel? A rational human would say there’s no difference. A gun is a gun. But you have a certain class of people claiming very interesting and dangerous things about the looks of items. It has nothing to do with color, nobody is overtly calling you a racist, it’s a question to find out why you think the way you do because maybe public education on why guns are black is warranted.
You shouldn't get rid of a vital tool in a riot or active shooter situation because they look scary to you. And I have yet to see anyone use an MRAP/Bearcat to run over anyone (though I have seen quite a few patrol cars hit active shooters - quite justifiably)
In Western nations, APCs are frequently armed with the .50
calibre M2 Browning machine gun, 7.62mm FN MAG, or 40mm Mk
19 grenade launcher. In former Eastern bloc nations, the
KPV, PKT and NSV machine guns are common options.
You're looking at actual APCs. OP was saying APC but police actually get the MRAP varients similar to the Lenco Bearcats that they buy. Those have no offensive weapons. Its just armor and bullet resistant glass on a heavy truck frame. Thats it.
I believe the problem wasn't so much that they were "outgunned," but that they lacked longer range weapons of any kind. So that problem could be entirely solved by issuing some fraction of officers hunting rifles to carry in their patrol car's trunk. No need to kit them out like infantry or give them APCs.
The police's advantage in numbers and organization would take care of almost any other disadvantage WRT weaponry.
> After retrieving [a pistol that had been shot out of his hand], [Phillips] placed the muzzle under his chin and fired; he was simultaneously shot by a bullet fired by Officer John Caprarelli that severed his spine.....
> Later reports showed that Mătăsăreanu was shot 29 times in the legs and died from trauma due to excessive blood loss coming from two gunshot wounds in his left thigh.
> Following their training, the responding patrol officers directed their fire at the "center of mass", or torsos, of Mătăsăreanu and Phillips. However, aramid body armor worn by Phillips and Mătăsăreanu covered all of their vitals (except their heads), enabling them to absorb pistol bullets and shotgun pellets, while Mătăsăreanu's chest armor, thanks to a metal trauma plate, successfully withstood a hit from a SWAT officer's AR-15.
What are you asking for here? Take a headshot? You can disable someone with leg shots, it takes time as per your own evidence. Depending on how the armored perp is standing there may not be a gap. Then trying to hit such a small target with any kind of range will be very difficult for most. And you best believe if a SWAT officer had a lethal shot with an AR they would’ve taken it. So what makes you think the unarmored opportunity presented itself prior to the it did moment?
Also why are you questioning police owning an APC but it civilians owning body armor, which is most definitely legal.
Your point about the FBI taking time and not being on call is good. New procedures and Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) would need to be put in place, i.e. politics. But there are more tactical teams than people realize. The FBI openly admits that the FBI maintains SWAT teams at each of its 56 field offices throughout the country[1]. The field offices are distributed ideally, so they'd probably need additional field offices. For example, there are two in VA and two in PA, but none in WV. The reason I am so for the FBI doing this is that they watch their people much more closely, and have a higher psych bar to entry.
Also, regarding distance for the North Hollywood incident, the FBI's LA Field Office is at 11000 Wilshire Blvd, along with our their office in Los Angeles, they have 10 satellite offices, known as resident agencies, in the area. The estimated travel time for the CIRG from the field office to incident site is 22 minutes by car. That doesn't count using sirens/lights, or using a helo. The problem was likely being asked to participate, and getting approval to participate. As with many things at scale, tactical or techie, politics is more often a root cause than a technical issue.
[1] "Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG)". Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retrieved 15 August 2020. https://www.fbi.gov/services/cirg
No but a used beater M4 is a whole lot cheaper than a new Mk18 or a new M4 and it's probably been maintained by military armorers it's entire lifespan.
Though yes, the military firearms tend to be select fire. Probably not a useful feature for police but I can't imagine they use it with any frequency.
Er, no, they aren't. They are mostly offensive, since the point of them is to allow infantry to more effectively conduct offensive maneuvering in the presence of automatic weapons fire rather than being pinned down in static defensive positions.
Military technology is almost never purely defensive.
Yeah, I wouldn't bet on it being causal though I could make a plausible story that police departments that put dangerous looking military equipment in their recruitment videos tend to attract the wrong sort of people.
Unfortunately a lot of police training in the US is about lowering inhibitions about being the first to use violence, google "warrior training" for more details.
But I think that is a very real problem in regards to the sort of late night kinetic entries that result in the deaths of so many civilians and cops. I think that SWAT teams can have their place in large metros like LA where the sort of events that called for them happen every once in a while. But in third or fourth tier cities the local government can't afford the sort of intensive training required for a job like that but also those teams are always being sent on drug raids or things like that because there just aren't any incidents that would justify the existence of the teams otherwise. But sending a SWAT team into a situation that isn't already violent is just a terrible idea and US army forces, for instance, make an effort to avoid late night raids in a way that I wish our law enforcement community would follow.
There is so much that is legal to own (but of course not legal to use violently). 50 caliber machine guns are legal to own, quora reports that it can take a year to get a permit. There are places you can go and fire mortars on private land. Should the police have tanks to counter these things? Because they are legally owned in the us. The answer is no, the police should not. They have shown through their actions (repeatedly during the past 6 months on top of historical actions) that they can't be trusted with weapons this powerful.
> The newspaper’s analysis used the military’s database and paired it with a database of fatal police shootings from across the state, controlling for statistical variables like community income, rural-urban differences, racial makeup, and violent crime rates.
The article explicitly cautions against drawing conclusions about causality. My intuition is that there’s truth to both explanations: cosplaying as a military makes police more violent, and intrinsically violent departments are more likely to seek out military equipment.
And frankly, the second conclusion scares me more. If the causal relationship is “equipment —> violence”, we can solve it by simply banning the use of military equipment by police. If the relationship goes the other way, though, we still have to deal with violent cops who want to hurt civilians.
We would have to deal with violent cops who want to hurt civilians, but at least they'd have less efficient tools to do so. And maybe the violent people would be less drawn to a career in law enforcement if it wasn't associated with a militarised image.
If it's both effects at the same time, in a feedback loop, it's actually ok - you can stop the loop by cutting either effect.
When I think of the outrageous crimes committed by police, I see handguns and batons and knees, not military gear.
I suspect the tacticool gear is more about the culture and mindset (your second effect). As tech companies attract computer nerds with computer toys, LE attacks violence nerds with violence toys.
I'm sorry a 38 caliber "old school" pistol will kill you just about as quickly as an AR15 and a shot gun with correct shells will be far more likely to end you. It's not about the style of gun, it's about who's using it and how aggressive they are.
Something I've long thought on is what types of people are attracted to the US police force. If you look at it economically, by what incentives are offered, it's a bit disturbing:
1) Power over others
2) Chance to stop violence
3) Little educational requirements
4) Access to cool gear
5) Immunity from law
6) Ability to help or hurt weaker people
7) Access to drugs, guns, etc...
The list goes on, but I really see two types of people drawn to these: those that seek to help, and those that seek power. The defenders, and the bullies. The saviors, and the criminals.
It's naive to expect that one type makes it through much more often than the other (the "a few bad apples" analogy). If I were in organized crime, or a gang, or a neo-nazi, or just someone who was a sociopath, what better possible job is there than being a cop? Would it be that hard to fake it through whatever screenings they use (which can be NONE in some PDs) to weed out the bad actors? No. We must expect some large minority or even a majority of cops to fall into the class of bad actors.
one more thing to add to your list is that police tend to be pretty well paid for their level of education. in my area, starting salary for a police officer is not much lower than a typical salary for a junior dev. a rank-and-file cop with a few years of experience who pulls a lot of OT can make a surprising amount of money.
> If the relationship goes the other way, though, we still have to deal with violent cops who want to hurt civilians.
If the problem is iterative, then I'd think in terms of adjusting probabilities in a Markov chain, and having the goal be to minimize instances of avoidable police violence over time. Anyway, it's not possible to eliminate violence from the police, unless we find a way to eliminate violence from human nature, so the goals should be about adjusting priorities, duties, and tone to minimize unnecessary violence.
"Risky areas" sounds like a dog whistle to me, much like "bad neighborhood"... When you think of these "risky areas", what do the people within them look like? Do they deserve to have militarized police literally rolling armored tank-like vehicles through their neighborhood, and what sort of impact do you think that has on them?
I honestly do not know about how they look like. What I meant was higher rate of crime against people and police.
But to give you an idea what might turn police force to want to have more serious weapons. Just few days ago there was a 2 hours long attack on the local police station in France. Attackers used fireworks. Police did not respond though and I do not have an idea why. Perhaps they were outnumbered and outgunned.
In such situation, where criminals do what they like, would you prefer your police force have some serious weapons or you would think that it would be an overreaction?
i downvoted it because it’s not a dog whistle. people insist on seeing race everywhere. a risky area by common sense is an area with increased violence, regardless of the racial makeup. if you can’t see why somewhere with increased violence would possibly require police to have increased capabilities i’m not sure what to say. or how it’s magically a dog whistle
Because the down voters agree that "risky areas" aka communities full of minorities like black and hispanic people, deserve military style occupation and tactics.
If you think that's not true, ask yourself why analysis of that term is not welcome.
There is a long proud tradition of terrible anti-human bullshit being hidden behind neat euphemisms like that.
Plural? Like one could make sense, in a siege type situation or bank robbery in progress perhaps. The sort of event that might happen once a decade or so maybe.
But how many sieges or bank robberies are they expecting to need multiple of these?!
My city only has 1. I was mistaken because I saw a big police show and tell at an abandoned parking lot late last year, and saw multiples. The city next door has 2, and all the adjacent cities also have their own. Keep in mind these these cities are all basically considered the same large city. It's not like they separated by 100s of miles or anything.
Thanks for the interesting link. Ars at its best. Though my interpretation of the article is more that the risk / reward ratio simply has become too poor, nothing to do with inflation.
I suppose it is easier to rob a 150k watch from an unprotected person on the street, of hold up a Chinese tourist (who often have their holiday money in cash), if you're into that sort of thing.
> Or departments with more military gear are in more risky areas where the use of force is more likely.
Which, itself deserves a different study to understand whether risky areas lead to more use of force, or whether excessive use of force leads to police distrust, making areas more risky for police.
There is probably no single causal path here. Use of force, aggressive police, police's fear of the public, the public's distrust of police, militarized training, military gear, socioeconomics, race, and crime are likely interrelated in complex ways, without an easy line to draw from one to the other.
> A newly published article by a group of scholars with the Emory University Department of Political Science found no relationship between the presence of surplus military equipment and lower crime rates.
Under the 1033 program, police departments pay for shipment and storage of the materials they request, but they do not pay for the equipment itself. While the military may purchase more equipment then it actually needs to lower per unit price, the acquisitions as a whole are not made any cheaper and the weapons developers make no more profit. In fact, given that this material is specifically diverted from what would be sold as surplus, the military would have more money to purchase weapons with if it didn't give these supplies to police forces. It's also worth noting that, while military vehicles like MRAPs are very visible, most of the requested property is more mundane: bulk ammunition is the most requested category, followed by office supplies.
It's pretty obviously just a way for the federal government to subsidize domestic police forces with money nominally intended for the defense budget.
And perhaps a way to turn over the army's stockpile & keep its suppliers in business.
Quite a bit of the defense budget seems to have this goal, and it's not crazy -- if you skip a generation of tanks/planes/ships because your old ones are OK, the experience to build the next generation will have to be re-grown from scratch.
The simplest explanation that adequately explains the observation tends to be correct. There's really no need for any conspiracy here, support for "law and order" has been a winning political strategy for decades. Meanwhile, getting the department of defense to increase the number of MRAPs they order by a fraction of a percent seems like it could be achieved in other, easier ways. It's good to be skeptical, but at some point you need evidence.
My take on the neutral explanation would be is to assume that it's like every other policy -- about a dozen people with varying motivations had to support it, and then a few more motivations got added by PR people, and by whoever doesn't want it to stop. Policies "pretty obviously" driven by exactly one factor are extremely unusual.
You are talking about a group of powerful politicians crafting legislation with a secret ulterior motive to transfer money to an unknown entity or entities in the military industrial complex. That's a pretty textbook conspiracy.
If you dig into the line items I'm sure there will be some compromises to get the maximum number of votes, but that's a far cry from an elaborate scheme to line the pockets of the military industrial complex.
It's not hard to imagine this bill passing on its own merits without heavy lobbying. No one in the 90s was going to want to be painted as anti-cop, pro-drug, pro-terrorist, and/or pro-government waste. Even if we now see the terrible consequences of police militarization, and many still don't, that's hindsight. At the height of the war on drugs, as children who grew up hearing about serial killers in the 70s were now worrying about their own young kids, taking the weapons that had been lying in warehouses since Nam and putting them to good use protecting the streets here at home had wide bipartisan support. It costs very little, makes people feel safe, and makes a lot of politicians look good.
Again it is good to question the official narrative, but your hypothesis needs to be falsifiable. You will always be able to go a layer deeper and say "oh well they did it this way to make it harder to see their real motive" but without evidence there is no reason to continue going down that rabbit hole.
You're mis-reading me. Nowhere have I proposed any well-thought-out secret scheme. I'm pushing back against a story that says there's one precise purpose to this, which I thought was your claim above: "pretty obviously just a way for the federal government to subsidize domestic police forces".
I suggested one other motivation some people might have felt, of keeping the hardware moving. You've suggested some more, too, now, like looking tough on TV. Maybe that means we agree.
Most 1033 materials are simple things like ammunition and office supplies, which wouldn't have any maintenance contracts. I'm sure if a police department got an APC they'd want it to be maintained, and I highly doubt you can just take an APC down to the local mechanic, but to my knowledge there's nothing in the 1033 program that forces them to continue a maintenance contract.
I agree with your first part that there is not necessarily a causal relationship between military equipment and killings.
But your "no need, ever, for police to have automatic weapons" part is, to me, just wrong. In general, police should have enough kit to easily overpower the criminals they expect to face. We have been fortunate in many areas (e.g., most of the US, Europe and practically all urban areas) for the police to not need automatic weaponry. But this is not universal. In other parts of the world police may face a much better equipped adversaries and automatic weapons.
We should strive to make the world safer so the strongest weapon the police on the street has is a book for writing fines, but until we are there we should equip law enforcement to overcome threats they expect to face. My 2c.
The problem with your logic here is it makes the line between police and the military incredibly blurry to the point where police become just another type of military personnel.
Maybe if you have criminal activity at the level of needing automatic weapons, then you need military intervention and not police.
As many ex-military have pointed out in various forums, even in war situations rules of engagement for soldiers are very clear and strict, which is not true of most police. Soldiers are trained to deal with situations where lethal force and high power weaponry are assumed standard.
Police, if they are really to protect and serve, and act as part of the community should be dealing with an entirely different set of tools and skills. A solider and a police officer should be completely different roles. The former should be an expert in using state sanctioned violence to deal with high level threats to public safety and the latter should be a member of the community with the ability to resolve local conflicts and enforce standards agreed upon by that community.
You can't reasonably mix these two responsibilities and expect good results.
> The problem with your logic here is it makes the line between police and the military incredibly blurry to the point where police become just another type of military personnel.
Many other countries have Gendarmerie forces that bridge this gap in various ways. The most famous being the RCMP. Other countries mix these responsibilities with varying success, but they do it intentionally. Some have found good success with it.
RCMP are regular police everywhere but Ontario and Quebec. RCMP are closer in remit to the US Marshals, but also have the investigatory powers of the FBI. "Gendamarie" isn't inaccurate, but they're not militarized any greater or lesser than the SPVM.
To me, the military should not be a part of any law enforcement for the citizens. In practical terms, "never" is too harsh, but the bar should be very high. When military gets involved in local matters there is a risk that it takes power and holds it for a long time. Sometimes a military junta might be the least bad option, but this is not a path the country should risk taking lightly.
There were plenty of countries where gangs possessed and used automatic weapons, from Scandinavia to Germany, from Brazil to former Soviet Union. And that is not even touching Africa. A gang with machine guns is not a reason to ask military to take over law enforcement. My 2c.
what's the difference between military and police if both look the same and use the same weapons? what's stopping a rebel police chief from taking power in that case instead of some rebel general?
How does "protect and serve" not include removing dangerous, violent criminals from society?. To do so you need efficient weaponry and tactics that differ from conventional warfare. Does every police officer need to be equipped with such firepower? No, but police forces around the world facing these threats tend to have an intermediate (or more) group for dealing with threats that fall between petty thievery and terrorist organizations/nation-state level actors.
Are you taking about actual real need in cities or a fantasy? It sounds flippant, but other counties don't need such ammo.
The murder clearance rates are low, corruption seem to be persistent problem and actual police work does not actually seem to involve attacking actual super armed gangs.
SWAT-like teams are used rarely and they don't buy used arms from military. They are few in numbers.
The issue with catching organized criminality is in investigation and dealing with corruption - including police corruption. The whole need to shoot out with them thing does not happen unless the local police is spectacularly bad.
What parts of the world are you referring to? In general if you have people with automatic weapons attacking the police, you are basically in a civil war and the army takes over. The police is supposed to be a numerous local presence, not a fighting force.
When police has been equipped with automatic weapons, things usually end badly, particularly in those other parts of the world where police pay is nothing and alternative sources of revenue are very tempting when you are armed like a soldier. Having a corrupt cop is a thing, but a corrupt military armed cop is even worse.
Yeah I agree that specialized police forces (e.g. those who are called when people are taken hostage) need modern weapons that can counter the weapons of criminals.
But when I say specialized I mean specialized. That means special training, special deployments, special oversight.
That is how it is done in most civilised nations and it works very well. Regular cops rarely even need their handarm in most western nations. The whole German police force fires roughly 35 bullets at people in an average year, with an average of 8 deadly ones. There are cops in the US who shoot more bullets at people in a week than the entire police force of a nation with 80 million people in an entire year.
This so obviously due to bad (and too short) training, a misguided police culture (rather than neutral enforcers many US cops seem to think they are the law) and of course a lack of hard consequences for the "bad apples".
Of course it has to do with weapons in general, but the Austrian village I grew up in has a Glock factory in it, every second family has rifles in their locked rifle cabinets etc — yet Austria and other Nations with a lot of guns (Canada, Finland) don't have comparable problems.
My brother, who spend most of his life in the Marines, explained the difference between the military and the police to me many years ago.
The job of the military is to accomplish a set mission by any means necessary, including force. The job of the police is to ensure that law and order are kept. If you send the police to do the job of the military, the result will be dead police and and unaccomplished missions. If you send the military to do the job of the police the result will be dead civilians, and eventually civil disorder.
We have a lot of police who have forgotten this. And the results are obvious.
1. you're advocating providing people with milspec weaponry but without milspec training. there's a saying - with great power comes great responsibility - which seems to be forgotten about in some police departments.
2. you don't want to engage in an arms race with criminals.
3. law enforcement shouldn't be confused with urban warfare.
I don't know of any developed country where the police can reasonably expect to face better equipped adversaries than they can in the US. This is interesting for two reasons: You may have a point that it is necessary in the US for the police to have automatic weapons, but the US is also the only western country that has put itself in such a situation. Take from that what you will...
"automatic weapons" is sort of a red herring. even in the military (US military at least), rifles are usually used in semi-auto mode. AFAIK, the main exception would be suppressive fire on a position, which is probably not an appropriate tactic for police in a residential area.
even in the US, you are much more likely to encounter criminals armed with pistols than rifles. it's a much more appropriate platform for the use case.
That’s because with a m4, your job isn’t to push random rounds down range. Your job is to actually hit what you’re aiming at. Even with covering or suppressive fire, you’re not randomly shooting down range and your shots are calculated to keep whomever your shooting at either dead or where they are so they can be flanked. You might have some full automatic weapons in your team, but they can’t hit anything so they just lay down suppressive fire. Point is, you can’t hit what you’re aiming at in full auto.
There are plenty of places. Mexico for example where the narcos have capabilities similar to the mexican military and In brazil we have little kids with automatic rifles roaming the favelas.
It specifically does mean rich, but includes China and Japan and South Korea, which are not white. The description of economic development was specifically to exclude race and political affiliation from the equation while still capturing the relevant metrics -- poverty causes violent crime.
"first and second world" does a pretty good job covering it since there's plenty of nations that are formerly in the USSR's sphere of influence that aren't exactly rich but don't have to worry about cartel type violence.
Pretty much nobody likes to think that way though because the majority of the time "developed nations" are brought up it's in the context of how the US should be more like western Europe and it's usually ideologically convenient to leave Eastern Europe out of those kinds of comparisons.
"first and second world" describes more or less the same set of countries (perhaps modulo some eastern european countries like you said), but doesn't it have most of the same baggage as "developed nations"? as I understand it, the problem with "developed nations" is that it raises the question "developed compared to what?". in other words, it implicitly sets the west as the standard against which "developed" is measured. doesn't first/second/third world center the western perspective in pretty much the same way?
Denmark and Sweden have increasing problems with drugs gangs using hand grenades, and they've had a lot of experience with the motorbike club gangs in the eighties and nineties, who raided army barracks for military weapons and waged war.
Should they use the military to patrol the streets?
I disagree; there's some range the police should be equipped to handle. When the danger escalates out of that range, they should step back and have a better equipped group step in like the national guard
It may also be that the police departments that seek to purchase military equipment operate in cities/neighborhoods with a higher incident of violent crime.
Los Angeles PD for example was the poster boy for getting military style gear before most departments in the country, but at the time it also dealt with more serious violence than most police departments (such as drive-by shootings).
The per capita incidence of police shootings in the US compared to other developed nations seems high until you normalize it by the per capita rate of violent crimes committed by citizens.
> If they are facing an opponent like that then call in the FBI, who generally have much better training, or ATF (no idea about their training).
Except those agencies aren't responsible for everday law enforcement, and some police departments are essentially fighting a war. For example, when I was a kid growing up in LA in the 90s, the gangs there were basically like warlords. Even recently, you can find examples of execution style gang murders in Los Angeles, and shootouts on the streets.
I would guess that apart from 'super gear' making people feel more confident, it also would draw in even more people with power issues into police ranks.
There is no statistical evidence supporting the claims implied by this article or even the reversed claim that 'more aggressive' departments are seeking out military equipment.
> Regardless, there is no need, ever, for police to have the automatic weapons, APCs, and "non-lethal" weapons they are buying from the military. If they are facing an opponent like that then call in the FBI, who generally have much better training, or ATF (no idea about their training).
I disagree with this. The police should have automatic weapons so they are able to overpower criminals and protect themselves in dangerous situations. I want my police department to be effective and safe. It is also important that they have non-lethal equipment to de-escalate situations safely when possible.
As for APCs - if it is available as a surplus piece of equipment, why shouldn't they have it? It isn't something they use everyday. There aren't police departments using heavy gas guzzling APCs for daily patrol. They use it for rare situations like riots and shootouts.
Your statement about the FBI and ATF doesn't make sense to me and makes me think you aren't aware of what those agencies actually do.
It might also be because military equipment is statistically more likely to be acquired by departments in more dangerous environments.
Though I still feel the explanation is a positive feedback, where being more aggressive causes more aggressive behavior to normalize faster, causing more aggressive equipment, causing police to feel more like an occupation force rather than civil servants, causing more aggresive behavior, and so on.
This makes a lot more logical sense. The already had pistols and shotguns aplenty to shoot people, adding some armored carriers, camo, and some AR15s isn't going to really add much to that capability. I find your proposal a lot more likely, the police departments that get this stuff are much more aggressive and see it more as a War on Crime, rather than to Protect and to Serve.
If the reverse is true, you are positing that American society, the most wealthy society in the history of Earth, is so dangerous that we need jackboots and APCs in the streets. I don't buy it for a second. I think cops should be unarmed, and if they are armed, they should at least pretend to be as brave as their propaganda portrays them as and resist shooting people even if it puts them in danger.
EDIT: To be even more clear, when you are not literally in a state of existential civil war, deploying militarized police is a political judgement not an evidence based one. It is a tool of para-military force used against the less powerful by the more powerful. I would argue that paramilitaries are never appropriate in civil society, even in a state of war.
Oh I want to give them the benefit of doubt but metropolitan Atlanta's Doraville Police department made headlines a decade ago with their tank video.
Frankly, as a Libertarian, I see zero reason that any police department have at its disposal any equipment the military has used or discarded that can lead to physical harm. This includes no vehicle that is not street legal; and no making exceptions to grant them legality does not count. As for automatic weapons, they should require a court order to unseal usage of if not by a committee which must be alerted to any request to use them.
If there is an excuse for heavy weapons or such, call in the national guard or local military to assist. The police still do not need this hardware.
"We should be careful to draw a causal relationship here. It might not be that getting the military equipment causes police to be more aggressive and therefore have more killings."
True. Still, when the only tool you have is a hammer, soon or later every problem will look like a nail.
Its all fine to imagine the police are operating in a vacuum, where they can wait days for the FBI to respond when they encounter an emergency call with somebody with an automatic weapon.
Sure, they shouldn't have to have that kind of weaponry. But neither should they encounter them on the street. Are the police are some sort of ablative shield, that can be sacrificed to a political ideal?
> In Georgia alone, police departments and sheriff’s offices have received more than 2,700 military rifles, night vision goggles and laser gun sights, and literally hundreds of armored vehicles, including more than two dozen mine-resistant vehicles built to fight the war on terror abroad.
How else will they protect themselves in the dangerous minefields of Atlanta? /s
I’m glad someone has put together the data on this, but it’s entirely unsurprising that police cosplaying as the military murder more people. It’s dystopian as hell, and it baffles me that it’s a contentious issue rather than being universally condemned.
Edit: added /s to relevant paragraph. I know, Poe's law, my bad.
The police in Atlanta, collectively, made a point to hit home how OK it was and how any else of them would do the same thing, with police management saying such under oath during her trial.
They don't get a "only once" pass under those circumstances.
Multiple police in Atlanta do through multiple grenades. They just only threw it into crib with an infant in it once. But made sure we all knew that they think they did nothing wrong by doing that, and would absolutely do it again under the same circumstances.
When you go out of your way, under oath, to say that your organization systemically didn't learn from the mistake and would absolutely do it again, an "only once" defense doesn't hold any water.
I get your point. It doesn't change the fact that your post is factually inaccurate.
If you said that the Lebanese government was bad because they have all these deadly ammonia nitrate explosions, then it is factually incorrect because there was really only one explosion. Even if the Lebanese government tries to shirk responsibility, or say the explosion was a good thing and they'd do it again - none of that means that all of the sudden there was more than one ammonium nitrate explosion.
> Because the suspected drug dealer, Wanis Thonetheva, had a previous weapons charge, officers were issued a "no-knock warrant" for the residence, Terrell said.
> Thonetheva, 30, was not at the home at the time of the raid, but the toddler's mother and father and their other three children were inside.
Not only was the raid unannounced, but the suspected drug dealer wasn't even home at the time.
... and it's even worse than that. It seems there was no reason to suspect that this was the home of a drug dealer, as the police informant never purchased drugs there. The deputy who lied to the court to get the warrant was indicted but acquitted.
In 2015:
"a federal grand jury indicted the undercover Habersham County deputy who secured the no-knock warrant, Nikki Autry, alleging that she provided false information to gain entry to the home where the Phonesavanhs were staying. The informant who she claimed purchased meth there never did, the indictment states, and Autry never "confirmed" that there was heavy drug traffic at the home, as she also claimed to have done."
Flashbangs. They are violent, but in a totally different class than actual hand grenades. No police in the US use hand grenades. The kid in the crib survived. Had it been an actual grenade ... not a survivable event.
> On 28 May 2014, a 19-month-old baby boy's face was severely burned and mutilated when a stun grenade was thrown into his playpen by a SWAT team serving an arrest warrant for a suspected drug dealer in Cornelia, Georgia. The baby survived with facial disfigurement.[17] The family received $3.6 million in settlements in 2016.[18]
So yeah, the baby survived. That doesn't mean there was no harm done.
Well, you see in this situation the baby was asleep, so the SWAT tactics manual only calls for a stun grenade. Had the baby been awake, of course a 120mm howitzer shell would have done a better job of ensuring the safety of the brave officers from this dangerous infant.
A flash-bang is a grenade. It's not a fragmentation grenade (which you're referring to); or an incendiary grenade; or any number of other 'less than lethal' (which can be lethal) grenade types.
A 'hand' grenade is one thrown by hand as opposed to projected from a grenade launcher. So, yes, a flashbang is a hand grenade.
And it's a good thing those policemen used a concussive grenade to pacify that dangerous child. I'm sure that child was a threat that needed to be neutralized./s
For justice, outcomes matter. This is why there is a difference between "attempted murder" and actual murder. Yes, both are punished, but the actual outcome does matter. Therefore, the distinction between a flashbang and an incendiary/fragmentation grenade (which what most people think when they read hand grenade) too does matter. When I read the initial statement, I thought that the child was killed and am happy to hear that thats not the case. Even though the child was definitely harmed, I am happy that it is still alive.
You're wrong. The differences between "attempted murder" and "actual murder" are just codified laws which were enacted by a legislature. People decided. And it's certainly okay in this situation to debate those decisions. If you're just arguing that definitions matter, don't hide it under something that it's not.
Did you just read what you wrote? The kid in the crib survived. How does that not stop you in your tracks? What prompts a SWAT team to do a night raid on a potential family home? Please tell me how any other point in the day where the potential of a family not being there, isn't a better option? Then if you could please explain if this was the case, that any other time is/was plausible, what you think the reason to throw the flash grenade is or was at the time? Actually interested how you divest your self from being human under the guise of being analytical and miss such an obvious analytical point.
It's not a fragmentation grenade, but it's still a type of hand grenade. Not as deadly, but not exactly harmless either. And very irresponsible to use it in a situation that does not warrant it.
Wikipedia redirects "flashbang" to "stun grenade" and describes it as a "less lethal explosive device", so I'd say they're using the vernacular correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashbang
Not the op, the gp, or even the parent, but I'd like to say that while I'm certainly not condoning flashbangs in cribs or saying that "grenade" is technically inaccurate in the original sentence, there is a very different mental picture when someone says "grenade" vs "stun grenade". I feel like in an era where it's easier and more prolific to crucify a person because of their words than in the known history of mankind, the distinction between "grenade" and "stun grenade" should be made.
Does that make this okay? No. Not even a little. But let's err on the side of clearer communication.
Exactly. It's akin to the difference between dropping "a bomb" and dropping "a nuke". The terms are sometimes interchangeable but should never be confused.
The worst part about the police getting military gear is that the actual military has much stricter rules of engagement. With great power comes great responsibility.
I hang out a lot with a lot of former US infantry guys on discord, and they talk all the time about how rule one was come back alive, and rule two was 'make sure you all get your stories straight.' This mythos of the American warfighter being above and beyond is propaganda. Good propaganda, because it has some basis in truth, but it whitewashes a lot of nastiness.
This was the case for the danish military in Iraq and Afghanistan as well.
The people I feel worst for are the soldiers themselves. You're informed over and over about the rules of engagement, and when you get there none of it applies.
If you don't shoot first, then your next to you friend will die. Obviously you're going to break the rules in that situation, it's what any human would do.
Now you have to live the rest of your life, knowing you broke conventions. You should be tried like the war-criminal you are. Or so it feels.
While I disagreed with the west's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have the utmost respect for the soldiers who fought there. They deserve a set of rules can realistically be followed.
There was a story about a ex-marine police officer who accurately judged that a suspect did not need to be shot, and then got fired for not shooting him.
I stopped and read this. Thank you very much for sharing. It is excellent and very well-written.
For anyone who hasn't read it, this is a similar, excellent article in the New Yorker on an ex-CIA officer's experience working as a beat cop on the streets of Atlanta. It dovetails magnificently with the ProPublica piece.
I believe that the following three paragraph-long quotes serve as a sufficient tl;dr:
"According to David M. Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading criminologists, American policing is practiced more as a craft than as a profession. “The kind of thinking that should go into framing and refining what a profession of public safety should be has still not been done,” he told me. Officers are deployed as enforcers of the state, without being taught psychology, anthropology, sociology, community dynamics, local history, or criminology. Lethal force is prioritized above other options. When Skinner joined the police force, everyone in his class was given a pistol, but none were given Tasers, because the department had run out."
"At Georgia’s state police-training facilities, the focus is “all tactics and law,” Skinner told me. Officers are taught that “once you give a lawful order it has to be followed—and that means immediately.” But the recipient of a “lawful order” may not understand why it’s being issued, or that his or her failure to comply may lead to the use of force. There’s no training on how to de-escalate tense scenarios in which no crime has been committed, even though the majority of police calls fall into that category. It is up to the officer’s discretion to shape these interactions, and the most straightforward option is to order belligerent people to the ground and, if they resist, tackle them and put them in cuffs."
"“This is how situations go so, so badly—yet justifiably, legally,” Skinner said. Police officers often encounter people during the worst moments of their lives, and Skinner believes that his role is partly to resolve trouble and partly to prevent people from crossing the line from what he calls “near-crime” into “actual crime.” The goal, he said, is “to slow things down, using the power of human interaction more than the power of the state.”"
Yep, even in a warzone, if a member of the US military killed somebody because they thought they were reaching for a gun, they would be court-martialed and put in jail, and then kicked out of the military after their sentence.
The standard for police in the USA is appallingly low, and getting lower.
Well, apart from that guy who shot so many civilians that his colleagues kept bending his sights, who eventually got prosecuted for war crimes .. then pardoned by the President.
As shitty as they are, drone strikes are operated by the CIA, and not subject to the military's rules of engagement, or military oversight, this is entirely on purpose.
The hot head will at least get a bollocking from the captain that shooting people dead isn't how you pacify a town. Within the police, no such concerns.
> How else will they protect themselves in the dangerous minefields of Atlanta?
They could put the money into dealing with the social problems that cause it to be a "minefield". Their job is to protect citizens including criminals. They're not doing it properly if they're shooting people. And they're likely making people a lot more likely to shoot at them in the process.
This is a great point, it's not in the job description of a police officer to punish criminals. But if you see the types of language that police officers frequently post with on social media, you see them framing themselves as warriors in a battle of good and evil.
Cops shouldn't see suspects as evil they the cops themselves are at war with. Formally their job is to keep the peace, get the suspect into the justice system and allow the justice system to work. Instead cops view themselves as armed enforcers on the side of "good" that the cops themselves define ad hoc.
It's funny you say that, because legally, the police have no requirement to protect people, as established by a long tail of caselaw; Gonzalez v. Castle Rock, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, and most recently Lozito v. New York City. Even in cases where you would think they were legally bound to protect you, e.g., if you had a restraining order against someone and called on the police to enforce it, the justice system in the US has found that they have no legal duty to do so.
The amount of money spent on this gear won't make a dent in resolving these societal issues. Our police are a bandaid on top of a deep wound that is our failings in mental health, poverty, and education.
An interesting turn of phrase, but not reality. Cops are there to enforce laws. Some of those laws are meant to protect citizens. Other laws are to protect property, protect government interests, and enforce codes of behavior. This is particularly true when dealing with mental health issues. Protection of anyone quickly becomes secondary to physically stopping the person who is acting strangely.
That's an interesting set of distinctions without a difference.
> Some of those laws are meant to protect citizens.
Laws are made for the just common good. They may not be ideal, but that's what they exist for.
> Other laws are to protect property,
Again, for the sake of the common good. The ability to hold private property is a prerequisite for other goods we need to flourish.
> protect government interests
What is a government interest? You seem to be alienating government and construing it as some foreign body with competing interests. No, government exists for the sake of the common good of the society it governs. Once governments begin to turn into cliques that serve, e.g., some oligarchy (quite common), esp. at the expense of the common good, we call this a tyranny.
I was under the impression that one of the main reason police forces are getting "military gear" is because they're getting it at a steep discount due to the actual military not having anything else to do with it once they're done.
IMO this is even less charitable, since it implies that more violent police departments are seeking out surplus military equipment to better subjugate civilians.
On the other hand, there's presumably a significant technical difference between police cars and mine-resistant vehicles created for military operations in the Middle East.
I remember reading once that what you think of as military gear obtained at a steep discount is not the first thing that comes to mind : essentially air conditioning.
I think one possible reform is that SWAT teams should belong to a separate department than the regular police. If the situation gets out of hand, then the police can call in the SWAT.
But we shouldn't be expect regular beat cops and detectives to be the people kicking down doors with bullet proof vests. The two jobs require very different skillsets and temperaments. Unfortunately because of the long-running wars in the Middle East, the US has no shortage of combat veterans with experience in these types of urban warfare situations. I'd definitely a trust a SWAT department filled with ex-special forces more than I'd trust a small-town cop LARPing in military gear.
The second benefit is that a lot of times, I think police start itching to break out the military gear because they have it and think it looks cool. By separating the departments, it removes that incentive. They're not going to hesitate calling in SWAT, when the situation's genuinely dangerous. But they're going to think about letting an outside agency step on their turf for everyday situations.
More research needs to be done, but there is evidence that police officers with military backgrounds are more likely to be involved in shootings. Consider also that some of the training soldiers receive today is meant to overcome the natural tendency of soldiers to deliberately miss when shooting at the enemy. Consider also that the mindset of a veteran who seeks out a job with the police is not necessarily representative of the typical veteran mindset. It's a subset of veterans, those who wish to work with guns and have authority over others.
tl;dr: 10-years of data were pulled from Dallas PD.
"Records were abstracted for 516 officers. In the adjusted models, veteran LEOs who were not deployed were significantly more likely to be involved in a shooting than non-veteran officers. Veterans with a deployment history were 2.9 times more likely to be in a shooting than non-veteran officers."
Interesting food for thought. I've heard many arguments about ex-military folks training in rules of engagement making them less-likely to use a weapon in a frivolous scenario. But, maybe that's not borne out by the data.
Or there's a selection-bias thing. Either way, good point.
I think what the parent was getting at though, was that this would silo the guys with all the guns and stuff in a way that they're used only in more carefully-considered situations as opposed to giving every yahoo on the force an MRAP, a tactical vest full of 123123 mags for their AR-15, and a fuzzy mandate to enforce the 'thin blue line.'
The question here, in my opinion, is whether we're looking at actual causation or simple correlation.
Is this an example of, "receiving free coyote-colored tacticool gear and MRAPs prompts cops to become more aggressive, detached from the population they are ostensibly there to protect, and likely to unnecessarily end civilian lives in the course of doing their job"?
Or is it an example of, "police departments with toxic cultures -- e.g., power-tripping, roided-out hardos with motarded haircuts who treat black people like shit and maintain a blue wall of silence -- are more likely to jump through the hoops necessary to get the military surplus gear, and as a result, departments who have embraced the 1033 program generally do more bad cop shit"?
In social sciences cause and effect often intermixed. It is pain in the ass for researchers. From the other hand, it means that it not so important to distinguish cause and effect.
If we had a correlation, we would have a predictor, so we could do something about it. Just studying agencies with military gear would change outcomes. Even media discussing this correlation could change things. The role of an observer even more noticeable than with quantum phenomena.
Alternatively we should probably abandon the notion that anything at the society level has a simple cause and a simple effect.
When dealing with society, we're dealing with a chaotic system. I don't see much in society that can be clearly defined in terms of "if this then that."
It seems like we would be much better off by being honest about the complexities of what we're dealing with.
There is a lot of work being done in the casual space. Sure we might not be able to ever arrive at 100% causation but doesn’t mean we can’t improve our tooling and understanding.
Policy decisions based on simple correlations can range from harmless to disastrous.
> From my experience most people don’t understand this difference and assume any narrative around correlation equals causation.
I know. Our thinking is built around cause and effect and when confronted by a correlational data it start to come to a wrong conclusions, because it have no idea what to do with correlations. It tends to assume that correlation is a causation, because such an assumption allow our thinking to do at least something with the data.
I would like to see if there is an correlation between the hiring of ex-military people, the purchase of military equipment, and any increase in police-related violence. Many people think that soldiers make good cops. In reality, the jobs share almost nothing in common.
In reality, the jobs share almost nothing in common
That's right, the military has rules of engagement and no mirrored sunglasses. With cops it's opposite. Imagine, standing in formation with half of the men wearing cool sunglasses. It would be unthinkable.
I'd suspect reinforcing. They're quoting a ratio of fatal shootings of 4:1 between with:without military gear. I don't think police departments are insular enough to maintain that level of work culture disparity. There is certainly significant variance, though, and toxic culture is more impactful when it's empowered and visibly supported. It would also would be unsurprising if providing overkill response methods resulted in, well, overkill.
Why not explore the possibility that police departments who are more likely to be shot at are both more likely to shoot somebody and also more likely to take 1033 funding? This seems like a pretty obvious possibility to consider.
> The newspaper’s analysis used the military’s database and paired it with a database of fatal police shootings from across the state, controlling for statistical variables like community income, rural-urban differences, racial makeup, and violent crime rates.
It seems like those two causes plausibly amplify each other - machismo warrior culture more likely to take military gear, which in turn makes it easier to recruit more machismo types.
Or just the looks of the police makes de-escalation less likely, resulting in more officers getting attacked, resulting in more officers shooting back.
That should be testable by looking at the “how often do officers get attacked seriously” metric. I haven’t checked whether the article discusses this, as I can’t read the article because AJC can’t, in two years, figure out how to handle GDPR requirements. I wonder what they do to visitors from California.
Note that the 1033 program has a "use it or lose it" provision. Police must use equipment they receive via this program or it's taken away. So they find reasons to use their toys.
I wonder what the details around that are. So if I drive the APC on a training run once per year... is that "using it"? Have any of these departments actually lost any equipment? ie. is there any enforcement of that rule?
Is it the actually equipment they must use, or is it the funding? ...because if it's the funding, that's a pretty standard accounting practice.
It's the equipment, they must apply for a reason they need it and conduct audits to make sure they still have the item. The rule is in place to prevent requesting items and then selling them though.
Even that is rarely enforced, I doubt anyone has been punished for not using something. The article mentions a department that keeps some guns permanently locked up because the DLA refused to take them back.
The sentiment of the threads in this discussion are very anti-police. I personally see this as a privileged perspective.
>It might instead be that the more aggressive police departments are the ones that more seek to purchase military equipment, and the more aggressive police are the ones with more killings. I tend to think that's the case.
Causal relationship between killings and military gear can easily be explained by "dangerous communities motivate police to seek out military gear. Dangerous communities have more killings in general." I believe it's the most straightforward explanation.
I'm personally of the opinion that much of the training is the problem. The vast majority ends up enforcing a "us vs them" mindset. So, outside of legal classes, what they need to do is get out of the freaking cars and talk to people, so they understand that not everyone is out to shoot them.
In Oregon it’s 21-weeks followed by a probationary period. At least for the Oregon State Police: you attend five weeks of pre-academy and sixteen weeks of regular academy. Then there are ongoing trainings and required education courses. I’ve had numerous friends go through the process, with some failing out, and they all agree it is both thorough and grueling.
(It's difficult to bear witness for any length of time without revealing far more than 30 bits of information about oneself. Therefore, my post history will narrow it down to the city, if you really wish that level of detail. But I believe the 2 years is the same for my "state" and its neighbours, whom we share a police academy with, and roughly the same across the country. NB that we don't even have judicial execution, so extra-judicial execution would especially be frowned upon.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate. )
One bit of information was enough: you're not in USA, which is the context assumed by TFA and much of the rest of the discussion here. Congratulations on living where police are less of a menace.
There's typically a training 'residency' period for new police officers as well. Where I'm at it's one year plus the original ~600-1000 hours in academy.
Seems there is actually a direct link between the knee-on-the-neck technique and military tactics, i.e., that the Minneapolis police had learned that through IDF training (and that that technique is used against Palestinians) [0].
Fixing the process (formal training in this instance), rather than focusing on specific mistakes (a specific instance of police violence) is generally the correct approach.
However, given how little accountability there is for specific instances, maybe part of "training" is cops actually facing substantial repercussions when they resort to violence?
Side note: Does Jocko have a vested interest here? ie. does he sell a police training course? That could explain his bias to pointing to more training while skating over repercussions.
> For an untrained cop an arrest can be very stressful. This then can result in using way too much force.
I don't doubt that this is true at all, but it still points to major systemic flaws in how police are managed throughout the country.
We wouldn't permit or accept a first-year medical student to perform open heart surgery, nor a first-time flight student to pilot a commercial plane full of people, but throughout the country, we're seeing brutal violence being carried out by people who lack the training, and in many cases, the emotional intelligence to do a job that very clearly requires it.
Such failure warrants massive overhauls to the system, regardless of whether it's a training issue or something more sinister. "Lack of training" is, frankly, a really piss-poor excuse when you're seeing videos like George Floyd. How much training do you need to know not to kneel on someone's neck for almost 9 minutes?
The culture and management of policing is far too opaque and if the lack of training is the number one issue, the various systems of police training programs need to be brought to light and people need to be fired across the board.
>I don't doubt that this is true at all, but it still points to major systemic flaws in how police are managed throughout the country.
I think that's what Jocko's point is, there's a systemic lack of training in police forces across the country, and some portion of the newsworthy interaction with the general public stem from that.
>Such failure warrants massive overhauls to the system, regardless of whether it's a training issue or something more sinister.
Unless the federal government takes control of law enforcement nationwide, it's not even obvious where how you would start a 'massive overhaul to the system'. You'd probably have to start with declaring martial law then plan to operate that way for the next 5-10 years as law enforcement is reshaped from the ground up.
The likelihood that anyone in our current administration or on deck would attempt that is vanishingly small, and the likelihood that they would actually pull it off even less so. It's likely going to take decades to fully repair this, and I think we need to consider incremental improvements vs some kind of big bang change.
> "Lack of training" is, frankly, a really piss-poor excuse when you're seeing videos like George Floyd. How much training do you need to know not to kneel on someone's neck for almost 9 minutes?
It's not piss-poor, it's just not a complete explanation. There isn't one. More training isn't going to help if you don't have sound policies at their foundation. Policies need to be adjusted for sure, practices need to be expanded to build a relationship with the community, and then training needs to be increased to navigate the broad set of circumstances that police officers may counter. All of this might not have prevented Chauvin from doing what he did, but it seems likely that if the other officers at the scene were better equipped across those dimensions we wouldn't have had the same result.
I would think agencies that relieve military gear would be operating in more dangerous cities. That would explain the higher level of police involved shootings.
I think this is because the police departments that get military gear are in more dangerous areas, with more dangerous situations, leading to more deaths.
The biggest problem I have with the article is that it focuses on absolute numbers rather than any kind of proportional impact. Per-capita numbers or something along those lines would be helpful. Even the chart halfway down that appears to address proportionality doesn't indicate what percentage of indicated departments are in each distribution...you could have, for example, a university police department that's in a district with 15k violent crimes per year but they are only responsible for handling parking and property violations.
I don't doubt there's an impact, I would expect it to be honest, but it's not clear that this article is making an objective case for it.
I'm not saying it's warranted for Police to have military weapons - but wouldn't departments that request military gear be somewhat correlated with ones with more intense crime.
I'm guessing there aren't many sleepy hamlets that request the high-end stuff.
The police department at Ohio State University has an APC.
No city in the USA, much less college campus, looks like a war zone. I would hope most people would not need to experience Kandahar first-hand to understand this fact.
No city in the USA looks like a war zone, but they can encounter situations that are dangerous. Things like gang shootouts or riots. I don't understand why APCs are a reason to be outraged. They are armored personnel carriers. Is it bad to want to keep our limited, trained, experienced police staff safe? I feel like APCs and MRAPs have been picked as a target of manufactured outrage without any concrete reason to actually be outraged.
It's commonly understood by even a child that an armored military vehicle belongs in a war zone. Having one driving around your home town sends the message that you live in a war zone, and guess what - you, the citizen, are the enemy.
Even if they are reserved for "gang shootouts or riots" you are wasting money in the 95% of US towns that don't have gang shootouts or riots on such a regular basis that police need to engage in military operations to contain them. So I'm outraged as a taxpayer to see my money being wasted.
> It's commonly understood by even a child that an armored military vehicle belongs in a war zone
I don't feel it is "commonly understood". Remove the word 'military' from your descriptor of the vehicle and let's talk in specifics. Do people working in dangerous conditions deserve protection? Yes. Do we need police to handle dangerous conditions even if they are rare? Yes. Do some of those situations require armor to protect them? Yes. Do they require a transport to get police to or from those situations? Yes. So we need armored vehicles, on rare occasions. The fact that an armored vehicle was used by the military is not really relevant.
>So I'm outraged as a taxpayer to see my money being wasted.
Why are you outraged at getting free surplus equipment that may be at end of life for military purposes? And what is a 'regular basis'? It doesn't matter if it is once a year - the police still need to handle that situation and need to be able to do it safely.
Modern law enforcement universally has access to those things. But in most countries (and many areas of the US) they're limited to specific, organizationally disjoint departments which are specifically trained to use such force. That's different than what's happening here.
The smaller cities you're thinking of are very large compared to the median sheriff's office, with less than 25 sworn personnel. (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/so07st.pdf) It's hard for a SWAT team to be meaningfully distinct at such a small size, when you're counting on one or two hands the number of times it's needed in a year.
I can't read the article because of GDPR, but do they discuss whether police forces are more likely to request this gear if they are in a high crime area?
> The results paint a troubling picture: The more equipment a department receives, the more people are shot and killed, even after accounting for violent crime, race, income, drug use and population.
Personally my first thought was that police that were already predisposed to kill suspects are more likely to want the military gear. But it wouldn't surprise me if the effect works but ways.
> The newspaper’s analysis used the military’s database and paired it with a database of fatal police shootings from across the state, controlling for statistical variables like community income, rural-urban differences, racial makeup, and violent crime rates.
Yes because systemic racism means they have less chance of getting a good education, less chance of getting good careers, higher chances of ending up in prison and with a criminal record after a cop encounter, and in the end, a higher chance of having a life of crime. Including murder.
But I'm sure you have data to show that America is land of the free and equal...
While I think these finding would hold up to be true, I find it difficult to believe they can sufficiently account for external factors given the sample size is 261 deaths. I wish they could perform the same comparison using police shootings, though I doubt that data would be available to the press.
When I first read this I thought is was going to be a study that concluded that more policed were killed in departments where police have military gear.
That would have been interesting.
At the same time, I wonder if the units that are more likely to ask for military equipment are the ones that need it - meaning there are in a situation where life or death confrontations, given current gun laws in the US, are more common.
I have in the back of my head the idea that less access to firearms for citizens equals less deaths for citizens at the hands of police.
If every encounter a police offer has is blanketed with the idea that, at any moment, a gun could be drawn, they have a seriously different mentality than if worst case is a knife.
That’s why studies like this bother me a bit... I’m biased for sure, but it feels like, if people can have firearms, police need firearms and equipment that severely outclass citizen firearms.
I don’t like that conclusion, which is why gun control laws seems to be a better target for consideration...
It might instead be that the more aggressive police departments are the ones that more seek to purchase military equipment, and the more aggressive police are the ones with more killings. I tend to think that's the case.
Regardless, there is no need, ever, for police to have the automatic weapons, APCs, and "non-lethal" weapons they are buying from the military. If they are facing an opponent like that then call in the FBI, who generally have much better training, or ATF (no idea about their training).