Free Republic

Police have a tough and dangerous job. Armored military vehicles and military-grade body armor aren’t just useful for soldiers, they make it possible for police to protect Americans. During his address Monday to the annual meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union with 330,000 members, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that President Trump is overturning Obama’s ban on supplying surplus military equipment to police. It is an issue that the Fraternal Order of Police and other police organizations cared about deeply during the campaign last year. Indeed, they based their endorsement of Trump during the...

Dashcam footage captured the horrifying moment two police officers drew their guns on a husband and wife after pulling them over while they were rushing to the hospital to give birth. James Reiner was driving his wife Dana to the hospital after her water broke in January 2012 in Hebron, Indiana when they passed a police car that suddenly turned on its lights and pulled them over, despite the fact that they were not speeding. That is when James got out to tell Sgt. Anthony Dandurand that his wife was pregnant and they needed to get to the hospital. He...

While the widely reported de-militarization edicts were issued last week by the federal government, the real agenda surrounds empowering Washington, D.C. to have even more control over local police departments. ---- Obama Usurps Local Police With Fake “Ban” on Militarization The New American 25 May 2015 After having drastically accelerated the militarization of local police forces by the federal government, Obama is now having second thoughts about it — or so the administration and the establishment press would have you believe based on widely reported “de-militarization” edicts issued last week. But while the decrees were framed by virtually all of...

It’s a phrase few Americans ever have the occasion to say: “I’m really getting pulled over by a tank right now.” The reasons why the Florida man said it are just as eyebrow-raising as the fact that he was pulled over by a “tank” in the first place. The whole encounter was captured on video. The Gainesville Sun reported Monday on the story of 23-year-old Lucas Jewell, a self-professed Navy veteran and Gainesville City Commission candidate, who was pulled over by sheriff’s deputies in an armored personnel vehicle after a University of Florida football game Saturday. At first, Jewell thought...

Sheriff's officials in Goshen County are touting a grenade launcher as a useful tool for keeping the peace, even though they have never used it. The Casper Star-Tribune reported Sunday that officials bought the weapon for use in the county jail, which houses 25 inmates and has not had a large fight in the past year. Lt. Jeremy Wardell says the grenade launcher, one of three the county has owned, is a less-lethal option for controlling riots. He compared it to pepper spray or a Taser. "We would use it in situations when less-lethal force is justified to get the...

(Phoenix, AZ) Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio says his deputies have identified the old military equipment issued to his agency as part of what is now called the Pentagon’s ‘1033 Program’ and his Office is more than willing to relinquish the vintage equipment to the federal government now that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has been terminated from the program. The Sheriff has 120 days to return the gear.

City schools police have obtained their own military-grade Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle through a federal grant. Known as an MRAP, the armored vehicle will be converted into a victim rescue vehicle that will be stocked with thousands of dollars in advanced medical supplies and be able to take heavy fire in case of an attack on campus, the San Diego Unified School District Police Department said Tuesday. The MRAP, valued at more than $700,000, was acquired at no cost to the district. The vehicle is expected to be operational in October.

Images showing high-powered military rifles in the hands of law enforcement in Ferguson, Mo., after the police shooting of an unarmed black man focused attention on a controversial Pentagon program that supplies that kind of weaponry to local police departments. Now reports reveal how some of those guns have been lost by law enforcement officials who received the weapons.

BREAKING NEWS: President Obama orders a review of federal programs and funding that allow state and local law-enforcement agencies to buy military equipment, a senior administration official confirms to Fox News. The review will include whether the programs are appropriate; whether such police agencies are getting the necessary training and guidance to use the equipment and whether the federal government is sufficiently auditing the use of the equipment obtained through federal programs and funding.

President Obama opened the door Monday to reevaluating a massive Defense Department program that sends military equipment to local police forces, in the wake of concerns about the St. Louis Police Department's response to riots and protests in Ferguson, Mo. "There is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement, and we don't want those lines blurred," Obama said. The president spoke at the White House briefing room late Monday, during a pause in the capital from his vacation in Martha's Vineyard. As he has before, Obama walked a fine line in addressing the sustained violence and...

State and local police departments obtain some of their military-style equipment through a free Defense Department program created in the early 1990s. ..... detailed data from the Pentagon illustrates how ubiquitous such equipment has become. Highlighted counties have received guns, grenade launchers, vehicles, night vision or body armor through the program since 2006. (Interactive Map at the linked source)

Anyone who thinks race does not skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention, Sen. Rand Paul writes for TIME, amid violence in Ferguson, Mo. over the police shooting death of Michael Brown The shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown is an awful tragedy that continues to send shockwaves through the community of Ferguson, Missouri and across the nation. If I had been told to get out of the street as a teenager, there would have been a distinct possibility that I might have smarted off. But, I wouldn’t have expected to be...

The outrage over the shooting death of Michael Brown escalated in part because of a sense that nothing had changed, that police officers were still operating in minority communities with a wantonness and brutality that belonged to another era. But over the past two days — as the police in Ferguson have responded to very angry protests with an alarmingly heavy hand, looking and reacting as if they were not the community's own peace officers but an invading army — something remarkable has happened. The longstanding liberal concerns about police racial hostility has seemed to merge with the longstanding libertarian...

The Pentagon has given 400 armored vehicles, 500 aircraft, 93,000 machine guns to local police This is despite the fact that violent crime in the U.S. has steadily plummeted since 1993. Between 1993 and 2012, the violent-crime rate dropped by nearly

The increase in police brutality in this country is a frightening reality. In the last decade alone the number of people murdered by police has reached 5,000. The number of soldiers killed since the inception of the Iraq war, 4489. What went wrong? In the 19070’s SWAT teams were estimated to be used just a few hundred times per year, now we are looking at over 40,000 military style “knock and announce” police raids a year. The police presence in this country is being turned into a military with a clearly defined enemy, anyone who questions the establishment. If we...

Florida sheriff defends acquisition of surplus MRAP Published June 30, 2014 Associated Press DEFUNIAK SPRINGS, Fla. – A decision by one Panhandle sheriff's office to purchase a military surplus MRAP is being criticized by some residents. The Northwest Florida Daily News reports that the Walton County Sheriff's office bought the mine-resistant and ambush-resistant MRAP for just the $2,500 cost of delivery. Sheriff Mike Adkinson says the heavy-duty vehicle will protect his officers in dangerous situations. But some residents told the newspaper that the military vehicle is an unnecessary show of force in their largely rural county.

The Pentagon has donated hundreds of MRAP vehicles to police departments nationwide. Snip: Historians looking back at this period in America’s development will consider it to be profoundly odd that at the exact moment when violent crime hit a 50-year low, the nation’s police departments began to gear up as if the country were expecting invasion — and, on occasion, to behave as if one were underway. The ACLU reported recently that SWAT teams in the United States conduct around 45,000 raids each year, only 7 percent of which have anything whatsoever to do with the hostage situations with...

As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments -------------- Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not government agencies.

Local police departments are beginning to look more like branches of the military as surplus equipment such as Mine Resistant Vehicles are seen on the streets of small towns across the country. A report on Infowars.com ties the purchases to what police see as a growing domestic terror threat, specifically war veterans with the knowledge of how to make improvised explosive devices. "When I first started we really didn’t have the violence that we see today," Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department told Fox 59 in Indianapolis for a story titled "Armed for War." Story continues below...

Twenty people have been shot and killed by police in New Hampshire since 2000; 19 others have been wounded. Eleven of those fatal shootings were in the past three years. And in nearly all of the cases, investigators found the shootings to have involved justified use of deadly force by the officers involved. That's typical, according to Charles Reynolds, a retired New Hampshire police chief who is a national expert in the use of deadly force by police. The standard for determining whether the use of deadly force by police is justified is not based on hindsight or the officer's...