Militarized Police Forces

There has been a lot of discussion about militarized police forces, both in the media and here. I wanted to start a discussion on this, both on the pros and cons, and also on what exactly defines a militarized police force.

From my personal and professional (at least trying to be) viewpoint, I am for having the tools available to do my job and to make it home safe each night or morning. So from that perspective, I say the more the better. That being said, I can see where some people might find a problem with that. I also know there are instances where they have not been utilized properly.

There have also been a few key instances which have caused nationwide changes in policy shifts.
The L.A. bank robbery.
Columbine.
9/11.

And of course the rise in homegrown groups like the sovereign citizens movement. I have dealt with a couple of these assholes, to put it nicely.

So, what are your thoughts?

 

This isn't Mayberry anymore (if it ever was in the first place) and police do need different tools now. I would think at least that bodycams should be strongly considered these days. They do help with some potentially problematic situations or just routine traffic stops where some idiot driving 18 over the limit wants to claim they were "perfectly behaved" and the officer was a total a**hole to them when the opposite is true.

 

Police need different tools. Key word being "different". What they don't need is more weapons and gear than people used to patrol bad sections of Iraq and Afghanistan without anything even remotely pretending to approach the level of training and discipline the military has. If the situation is so bad that the police need rifles, tanks, and automatic weapons then professionals need to be called in, not Officer's Fife and Cartman. Which leads to the core of the problem: Culture. There's possibly no three greater examples of what plagues american police forces than the Blue Wall, the invention "Excited Delirium", and the near universal use of agents provacateur and pre-emptive violence against peaceful protestors.

The militarization of american police forces isn't just an issue of equipment, it's an issue of culture. People talk about the Bundy ranch and other sovereign citizen types but I don't see a single difference between their behavior and the behavior of US police forces as a whole. They're both xenophobic, believe they're above the law, violent, paranoid, and extremely prone to using force and violence as a first resort. Just look at how police react to being videotaped, most commonly the person recording them is threatened, arrested, and often outright attacked.

People are afraid of and hostile towards the police as a direct consequence of the continued escalation of police misconduct and near universal coverup thereof. The justification that all of this is needed to keep officers safe is a reflection of an astounding lack of self-awareness.

 

I do understand that the world has changed.
When I see pictures from the stand off at the Bundy Ranch it makes my skin crawl to think what kind of a cluster that would have been if something had gone wrong and shooting had started.
The police needed to have the best possible equipment in that situation and I don't blame them for a minute for getting armored up after all they had people with snipers rifles siting in on them.

Then there's the case of the guy with the toy gun they shot full of holes outside of Walmart.
Somehow I can't help but wonder if we need to spend a lot more money on training to go with all the wonderful toys.
I remember all the interviews with soldiers who were incredulous at the way the cops were holding their rifles, pointed towards the demonstrators.
They all said that they would only be standing like that in a hot battle situation and only if they were about to start killing people.

It used to be that SWAT teams were specially trained officers.
In England the only police who use guns are specially trained.
The other problem is how often horrible things happen and nobody has to pay it.

Crowd control is not something that comes naturally, it is often counter intuitive and requires people who can keep their cool to an nth degree.
If an officer can't take being called names or being spit on, he probably shouldn't try handling crowd control.
Maybe go make coffee for the people who can keep their shit together.
Sorry if that sounds condescending but screaming at protesters, calling them animals, smashing their heads against the sidewalk or spraying someone,who is just sitting on the sidewalk, directly in face with pepper spray shows signs of instability.

tl;dr The police should have whatever tools they need to be safe but the training is more important and they need to be held accountable.

 

It's theater, really. One can barely ride the train here without seeing huge men in tactical gear pretending to perform bag searches. It's an incredibly wasteful display of force masking an obvious inability to do much of anything but respond as, if not after something has already happened. Why any of it makes people feel safe is beyond me but I imagine it explains at least some of the disconnect between the election of hawkish politicians and the expectation that everything continue here as normal, as if we aren't at war abroad. You've gotta pay to play and I imagine that what's currently happening in Missouri is but an example of the myriad ways those costs are coming to bear.

That said, police violence has been used to silence dissenters, quash occupations, break union action and generally beat the shit out of constitutionally protected citizens since time immemorial. Doesn't the use of all this new-fangled technology and questionably legal chemical weapons ruin the sport of it all?

 

In car cameras are being phased in through my agency. But it's taking a while. My agency does have a wireless mic so the audio is available at all times.
Keeping cool is very important. You can't react to name calling. Obviously, some people can't handle it. I personally find ut amusing, because when they are at that point they are pissed off and want me to sink to that level. I get to be cool and keep my demeanor and give them a citation. I win. But not everyone can do that
There is a guy on the other side of the schedule that no one wants to be around on calls because he riles people up. He can't talk to people and just pisses them off. It's a damn shame because I know he likes what he does. I also know he's been talked to about it.

 

It is grand security theater and few are held accountable for their fuck-ups, no different than the disgruntled clowns at the airport that are somehow preventing Mooslems from kablooeying the cramped sky torpedo I take to work.

The problem with giving law enforcement military equipment is not the equipment per se, but the extreme adversarial mindset that goes along with it. It isn't "serve and protect," it's "close with and destroy."

When Deputy Snuffy puts on a camouflage uniform like a Marine, he's adopting that KILL! mindset. There is absolutely zero reason police should wear camouflage. Patrol, SWAT, whatever. None.

Now combine that mindset with a total lack of experience with said equipment. There is no master trainer, the qualification program is less than the XX yearly hours recommended, etc.

Out of the half dozen officers I spent a year riding around with in college, only one dude actually practiced with his patrol rifle more than the required qual twice a year.

Everybody gets an M4... Because Terrorism (TM)... but nobody can be bothered to train to a decent level of proficiency to make it better than a liability.

The sad truth is that nobody wants to spend money on training. They don't. It's super expensive and its difficult to quantify and accountants and politicians hate both of those. Gear, on the other hand, is cheap and easy: just pass guns out at roll call and everybody looks the part, subsequent warm 'n fuzzy at all levels of leadership from the patrol officer ("I'm a badass now simply because I have this new widget") to local government ("All our guys have these new widgets so they gotta be badasses").

The other issue is that it has created a climate of apathy for most people and those that go, "Hey, how is X-raying my girlfriend's tits 12 times a year stopping bad guys?" are seen as dangerous radicals. The 4th Amendment has taken the proverbial broomstick up the ass at all levels of government and the SCOTUS doesn't seem inclined to grab the reigns. Terms like "cattle" and "sheeple" are merely slurs used when directed at a specific group, but what about how we're being conditioned as whole?

Not only do people not have redress when they question things, but they've just stopped questioning things because it "seems reasonable" given the constant yet nebulous Threat.

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Extremely rare incident. No need to tool up every swinging dick in a turtle suit for something that happens once in a blue moon. Instead of fat guys in SWAT gear, how about a individual officer program with rigorous physical fitness and marksmanship fundamentals. A handful of line cops hot on a basic M4 could have easily stopped that situation. Law enforcement has gone full retard today because they're drinking the mass media Kool-Aid that says every small town in the US is a potential war zone.

Failure to act. Tactics, not gear. Obviously today's "active shooter" (stupid name) policy addresses this. Again, a stack of say four competent patrol officers versed in room clearing could have easily moved to the hot spot and probably ended the situation quickly and with a significantly fewer casualties. Statistics have shown that most rampage killers commit suicide when they come up against armed resistance, so it seems all you really have to do is show up and look mean and they'll, uh, skip the trial.

9/11 was a failure of the intelligence community and shouldn't be used as an example to turn the US into Israel or some dystopian "Papers, please." citizen fortress.

So. Much. Kneejerk.

 

Some very good points here. I agree that police presence needs to be visible. Distinctive uniforms. For general patrolling, marked patrol cars. From my own agency, we have several policies tied with that. Patrol officers only wear class A uniforms. Special teams can wear class B uniforms. These are dark blue bdus with sewn on shoulder patches, name tags, and badges. If an unmarked is involved in a pursuit, it moves to secondary position when a marked unit arrives. Also, for general patrolling at night, lights stay on. The idea is a visible deterrence. Unless it's a safety situation. We arrive to a house that a drunk driver fled to after crashing, we aren't going to park right in front with lights on to ring his doorbell.

 

@omega what do you think of the wearing camo, carrying military grade rifles (especially during crowd control), and taking your name tags off (because hackers can track you down, that was the excuse used)?
These have gotten to be standard practice and are some of the main complaints.

 

See previous post. As far as rifles or even handguns, they probably should not be carried for a protest. But that can't mean that a reserve team isn't ready. As far as the name tags, I can see both sides. Yes, we should not be hiding. But then some group like 4chan or anon comes along and decides to start hacking your bank account, or filing false liens against your property. Wasn't there an issue with crowdsourcing identifying an innocent person and accusing him of being a boston bomber?

 

Same with the first Anonymous reveal of the "shooter" in Ferguson. Officer Go Fuck Yourself, however, had it coming.

 

That guy was an asshole. Otoh, calling someone names is not a crime. Otherwise a lot of people would be in jail. But what he did is policy violations. And vigilantism is not the way to go.

 

Anonymous wouldn't have gotten involved if the Chief had done his job and released the information in a timely fashion.
When there was the shooting of the man with a knife not far away, they released the names of the officers that day.

Not only that but the insult of releasing a video that had little or nothing to do with the shooting at the same time was just adding fuel to the fire.

 

Sometimes police officers aren't that stupid and learn from other's mistakes.

I disagree that the video had nothing to do with the shooting. I think it demonstrated what Brown was capable of. Brown also didn't know that Wilson wasn't there to arrest him, so he may have acted assuming he was going to be arrested and didn't want to be.

 

Okay, maybe I should reword that.
It had nothing to do with releasing the name except as a power ploy to try and make Micheal look bad.
If they had put out the video the next day, the next week, people wouldn't have reacted with the kind of anger that the chief badly conceived bit of theatrics caused.

 

Thing is, there are processes and procedures for how and when information is released.

I know we've all got the attention span of retarded toddlers, but things take a reasonable amount of time.

If you were involved in some debacle, you too would likely want time for your support network to make sure they know what happened.

...

And what did everybody expect as far as the how and when? How did they envision the police handling this incident?

This dude to shoot this other dude and then immediately throw down his pistol and go, "My name is Officer Darren Wilson and I just caused a national incident by shooting someone of a different age/race/socioeconomic background!" just like that?

Don't get me wrong, these guys suck more than usual... but people are always so irrationally impatient with the same local government that can barely operate a goddamn DMV on a Saturday morning.

 

@redravin, possible so.

On another note, I finally watched a couple videos recorded of the police response to protesters in Ferguson. I generally try not to watch too much news because the news reporting is so shitty on local and national levels that it just irritates me. Plus it's a huge country and there is so much bad shit that to try to keep up with it all is just depressing. But I did watch a couple videos. One was of about 20-30 officers and an MRAP vs a single guy in the street in a neighborhood. With more people a good 20-30 yards behind. He's pissed off, yelling stuff at the cops. But no weapons. After a short time, they open up with rubber bullets. Another one was a collection of videos for an internet news story. It showed rubber bullets being fired at night at a group. Also tear gas canisters shot near the news media. And lots of cops in a lot of gear with a lot of rifles.

I have to say, I think it was too much. First of all, the rubber bullets into a crowd is shit. Serious injuries are potential. Someone loses an eye, or receives a disfiguring scar on their face. Tear gas launched indiscriminately. And close enough to the media to not be an accident. And a fuckload of faceless guys with rifles behind helmets yelling commands at everyone.

I'm fine with targeted use. Someone is spotted lighting up a molotov cocktail, take him down with rubber bullets or bean bags. Then if a bystander gets hit, probably won't kill him. Though if the guy drops the molotov cocktail and ignites himself and the people around him that's a problem. Crowd starts chucking objects, tear gas or pepper spray. But it has to be in response, it can't be preemptive. And you don't point guns at random people. A single point or three point harness keeps the weapon in a ready position for immediate response without actually menacing someone. A coordinated group of officers should be enough of a presence to handle most situations.

@plan9 talks about uniforms and presence. I agree that a uniform is a symbol of power and authority. And I don't mean dominance. But it shows that the person is operating (or should be operating) with the weight of the legal system and the authority of the general populace. My smokey the bear hat is one of the things that separates me from local law enforcement officers. People know that my jurisdiction runs throughout the entire state. And when shit hits the fan, the troopers are called in. (Yeah, I'm bragging a little, so what).

One last thing, a little education for everyone. Police is derived from the word polis, which is latin for of the people. I see myself as a citizen, trusted with enforcing the laws that our elected representatives have voted on. It's a little noble, but when you are used to dealing with people who are sad, mad, or bad, you need to feel a higher purpose for what you do. Because you don't have people telling you "good job", and you don't get paid enough.

 

Relevant - "Less Lethal = Less Survivable" - Mike McDaniel - The Truth About Guns Blog