Posted on 05/21/2015 8:41:58 AM PDT by all the best
“If we’re training cops as soldiers, giving them equipment like soldiers, dressing them up as soldiers, when are they going to pick up the mentality of soldiers? If you look at the police department, their creed is to protect and to serve. A soldier’s mission is to engage his enemy in close combat and kill him. Do we want police officers to have that mentality? Of course not.”— Arthur Rizer, former civilian police officer and member of the military
Only now—after the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense have passed off billions of dollars worth of military equipment to local police forces, after police agencies have been trained in the fine art of war, after SWAT team raids have swelled in number to more than 80,000 a year, after it has become second nature for local police to look and act like soldiers, after communities have become acclimated to the presence of militarized police patrolling their streets, after Americans have been taught compliance at the end of a police gun or taser, after lower income neighborhoods have been transformed into war zones, after hundreds if not thousands of unarmed Americans have lost their lives at the hands of police who shoot first and ask questions later, after a whole generation of young Americans has learned to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates—only now does President Obama lift a hand to limit the number of military weapons being passed along to local police departments.
Not all, mind, just some.
Talk about too little, too late.
Months after the White House defended a federal program that distributed $18 billion worth of military equipment to local police, Obama has announced that he will ban the federal government from providing local police departments with tracked armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft and vehicles....
(Excerpt) Read more at rutherford.org ...
This is the sad reality of life in the American police state.
Second it.
This just 40 years of Drug War chickens coming home to roost. Good luck turning the tide.
Yep - steal a few million from taxpayers and get a fake slap on the wrist; be in arrears for $50 in parking tickets (payable to the local government) and get SWATed...
Thanks for the article, spot on.
They don’t have the mentality of soldiers.
That is the problem.
There is little sense of protecting freedom as a way of life.
A soldier’s mission is to engage his enemy in close combat and kill him. That’s what they do-kill.
I agree that the police forces should not have and deploy patently military attack and destroy equipment. It has been given out so freely as a prepositioning of equipment tactic for the central government with an eye to later use. The Texas reaction to Jade Helm apparently induced a doubt in Hussein’s head that local police forces can be relied on to automatically accept orders from Washington and might even resist federal operations against a state. Now he thinks it better to minimize that prepositioning. I suspecthe will cut off southern states and states like the Dakotas which seem likety to show some resistance to federal encroachments
SWAT wasn’t created for drugs, it was created for politics and revolutionaries.
Notice this:
If you look at the poilce department, their creed is to protect and to serve
WRONG!
According to the SCOTUS decision in 2006, the mission of the police is to ENFORCE THE LAWS.
Whatever those laws happen to be - and against whoever those laws are written.
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This is like a reverse Atockholm syndrome. The population is hostage of criminals, so cops see mo compulsion in SWATing around even if it is the wrong house (ie population hostage). So they hate the hostages and loot around.
It is unbelievable. They must really not care at all.
Indeed, I cannot stand this BS of Serve and Protect.
Besides what? People? Or the truth?
There is little sense of protecting freedom as a way of life.
They protect pensions as a way of life.
“According to the SCOTUS decision in 2006, the mission of the police is to ENFORCE THE LAWS.”
Absolutely right. The police are the government’s armed enforcers. As government has grown and gotten out of hand so have the police. Unavoidable. They are no longer Andy and Barney.
Prepositioning assets for them means prepositioning for whoever can grab it via simple intel & the will to do so. someone in the administration just figured that out.
Let me simplify:
-The guys running the equipment have to go home sometime
-Those guys have wives and kiddies and parents and relatives, and they love their Twitter, Facebook & Ancestry sharing and violating personal OPSEC. (Thank you!)
-The equipment must be serviced by:
-guys who have to go home sometime
-guys who have wives and kiddies, with similar OPSEC standards (none)
Now apply the same standards to your local politicos and enforcers. I promise you will be overwhelmed with info to be saved/used for later.
Watching the Watchers...two can play that game.
That is very true - but when does that threshold get reached, where the police realize it’s more than their pension’s worth, circle the wagons at the precinct and leave the citizenry to their own?
Article is 100% spot on.
The “thin blue line” mentality is the source of the problem. Cops are taught by other cops to consider non-cops the enemy, that only the thin blue line is protecting society from total collapse. At this point the difference between good cops and bad cops is that good cops think the enemy can be reasoned with, but even the good cops don’t like you.
The locations of the military arms and equipment that is out of the immediate control and protection of the national army has surely been noted by those who might profit from that knowledge.
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