End Times and Current Events

General Category => Police State/NWO => Topic started by: Mark on November 13, 2011, 08:30:36 am



Title: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on November 13, 2011, 08:30:36 am
How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
By Arthur Rizer & Joseph Hartman


Over the past 10 years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers. Here's why we should be alarmed.

At around 9:00 a.m. on May 5, 2011, officers with the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff's Department's Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) team surrounded the home of 26-year-old José Guerena, a former U.S. Marine and veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, to serve a search warrant for narcotics. As the officers approached, Guerena lay sleeping in his bedroom after working the graveyard shift at a local mine. When his wife Vanessa woke him up, screaming that she had seen a man outside the window pointing a gun at her, Guerena grabbed his AR-15 rifle, instructed Vanessa to hide in the closet with their four-year old son, and left the bedroom to investigate.

Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot--or even switching his rifle off of "safety"--he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena's. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.

Sadly, the Guerenas are not alone; in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work? The answer to this question requires a closer examination of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the War on Terror.

Ever since September 14, 2001, when President Bush declared war on terrorism, there has been a crucial, yet often unrecognized, shift in United States policy. Before 9/11, law enforcement possessed the primary responsibility for combating terrorism in the United States. Today, the military is at the tip of the anti-terrorism spear. This shift appears to be permanent: in 2006, the White House's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism confidently announced that the United States had "broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain."

In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on U.S. soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a "soldier's mentality" among their ranks. Though the reasons for this increasing militarization of American police forces seem obvious, the dangerous side effects are somewhat less apparent.

Undoubtedly, American police departments have substantially increased their use of military-grade equipment and weaponry to perform their counterterrorism duties, adopting everything from body armor to, in some cases, attack helicopters.  The logic behind this is understandable. If superior, military-grade equipment helps the police catch more criminals and avert, or at least reduce, the threat of a domestic terror attack, then we ought deem it an instance of positive sharing of technology -- right? Not necessarily. Indeed, experts in the legal community have raised serious concerns that allowing civilian law enforcement to use military technology runs the risk of blurring the distinction between soldiers and peace officers.

This is especially true in cases where, much to the chagrin of civil liberty advocates, police departments have employed their newly acquired military weaponry not only to combat terrorism but also for everyday patrolling. Before 9/11, the usual heavy weaponry available to a small-town police officer consisted of a standard pump-action shot gun, perhaps a high power rifle, and possibly a surplus M-16, which would usually have been kept in the trunk of the supervising officer's vehicle. Now, police officers routinely walk the beat armed with assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms. When one of us, Arthur Rizer, returned from active duty in Iraq, he saw a police officer at the Minneapolis airport armed with a M4 carbine assault rifle -- the very same rifle Arthur carried during his combat tour in Fallujah.

The extent of this weapon "inflation" does not stop with high-powered rifles, either. In recent years, police departments both large and small have acquired bazookas, machine guns, and even armored vehicles (mini-tanks) for use in domestic police work.

To assist them in deploying this new weaponry, police departments have also sought and received extensive military training and tactical instruction. Originally, only the largest of America's big-city police departments maintained S.W.A.T. teams, and they were called upon only when no other peaceful option was available and a truly military-level response was necessary. Today, virtually every police department in the nation has one or more S.W.A.T. teams, the members of whom are often trained by and with United States special operations commandos. Furthermore, with the safety of their officers in mind, these departments now habitually deploy their S.W.A.T. teams for minor operations such as serving warrants. In short, "special" has quietly become "routine."

The most serious consequence of the rapid militarization of American police forces, however, is the subtle evolution in the mentality of the "men in blue" from "peace officer" to soldier. This development is absolutely critical and represents a fundamental change in the nature of law enforcement. The primary mission of a police officer traditionally has been to "keep the peace." Those whom an officer suspects to have committed a crime are treated as just that - suspects. Police officers are expected, under the rule of law, to protect the civil liberties of all citizens, even the "bad guys." For domestic law enforcement, a suspect in custody remains innocent until proven guilty. Moreover, police officers operate among a largely friendly population and have traditionally been trained to solve problems using a complex legal system; the deployment of lethal violence is an absolute last resort.

Soldiers, by contrast, are trained to identify people they encounter as belonging to one of two groups -- the enemy and the non-enemy -- and they often reach this decision while surrounded by a population that considers the soldier an occupying force. Once this identification is made, a soldier's mission is stark and simple: kill the enemy, "try" not to kill the non-enemy. Indeed, the Soldier's Creed declares, "I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat." This is a far cry from the peace officer's creed that expects its adherents "to protect and serve." 

The point here is not to suggest that police officers in the field should not take advantage of every tactic or piece of equipment that makes them safer as they carry out their often challenging and strenuous duties. Nor do I mean to suggest that a police officer, once trained in military tactics, will now seek to kill civilians. It is far too easy for Monday-morning quarterbacks to unfairly second-guess the way police officers perform their jobs while they are out on the streets waging what must, at times, feel like a war.

Notwithstanding this concern, however, Americans should remain mindful bringing military-style training to domestic law enforcement has real consequences. When police officers are dressed like soldiers, armed like soldiers, and trained like soldiers, it's not surprising that they are beginning to act like soldiers. And remember: a soldier's main objective is to kill the enemy.


http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/how-the-war-on-terror-has-militarized-the-police/248047/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on July 16, 2013, 01:33:17 pm
(http://batr.org/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/.pond/swatpolice.jpg.w560h315.jpg)


The Psychotic Militarization of Law Enforcement


How did it ever come down to abandoning peace keeping and accepting law enforcement by any means? Even the New York Times expresses alarm in, When the Police Go Military.
"The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally bars the military from law enforcement activities within the United States. But today, some local and city police forces have rendered the law rather moot. They have tanks - yes, tanks, often from military surplus, for use in hostage situations or drug raids - not to mention the sort of equipment and training one would need to deter a Mumbai-style guerrilla assault."

World Net Daily offers a sad chronicle in the essay, The growing militarization of U.S. police.
"The SWAT concept was popularized by Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates in the late 1960s in response to large-scale incidents for which the police were ill-prepared. But the use of SWAT teams has since exploded. Massive SWAT raids using military-style equipment are becoming routine methods for executing search warrants. One study estimates 40,000 such raids per year nationwide:

"These increasingly frequent raids… are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers."



John W. Whitehead writes in the Huffington Post that "it appears to have less to do with increases in violent crime and more to do with law enforcement bureaucracy and a police state mentality."


Mr. Whitehead is correct as usual. Unfortunately, few other constitutional conservatives seem to have the courage to criticize the thin blue line of establishment regulators.

In a rare moment of real civil liberties concern, the ACLU in The Militarization of Policing in America, initiates a worthwhile project.
"American neighborhoods are increasingly being policed by cops armed with the weapons and tactics of war. Federal funding in the billions of dollars has allowed state and local police departments to gain access to weapons and tactics created for overseas combat theaters - and yet very little is known about exactly how many police departments have military weapons and training, how militarized the police have become, and how extensively federal money is incentivizing this trend. It's time to understand the true scope of the militarization of policing in America and the impact it is having in our neighborhoods. Since March 6th, ACLU affiliates in 25 states filed over 260 public records requests with law enforcement agencies and National Guard offices to determine the extent to which federal funding and support has fueled the militarization of state and local police departments."

One of the "so called" unintended consequences of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is the intentional indoctrination of troops into the culture of excessive force, citizen combatant threats and indiscriminate brutality. The suppression of common law natural rights is the ultimate causality of this deranged and profane mind control.

The study Can a Veteran go into Law Enforcement after a PTSD Diagnosis?, inquiry provides a useful comparison chart of several police agencies. The summary concludes that several agencies stated that they had hired individuals with histories of PTSD and most agencies did not have specific protocols for evaluating PTSD.
If military training becomes instinctive and reactive, treating civilians as expected terrorists, why would society presume that stateside transition into a police academy course will purge the damaging traits of urban warfare?

Behind the curtain of "public safety" the real controllers adopt and practice their perverse version of, The Psychopathic Influence, that dominates the domestic police mentality.
Both the financial elite and their servants who maintain this system, appear to exhibit behavior that is consistent with symptoms associated with a medical disorder known as psychopathy.(*) Psychopaths, also called sociopaths, are categorized as those who exhibit superficial charm and intelligence, and are absent of delusions or nervousness. Their traits include:

- Unreliability

- Frequent lying

- Deceitful and manipulative behavior (either goal-oriented or for the delight of the act itself)

- Lack of remorse or shame

- Antisocial behavior

- Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience

- Incapacity for love

- Poverty of general emotions

- Loss of insight

- Unresponsiveness in personal relations

- A frequent need for excitement

- An inflated self-worth

- An ability to rationalize their behavior

- A need for complete power

- A need to dominate others

Often candidates with such a Napoleonic complex, demonstrate that they really are "little men", when it comes to their desire to become goons. The Police Are Paramilitary Thugs, makes a valid point.
"In America, our cops are becoming less and less distinguishable from the security apparati of 1970s-era petty dictatorships in Central and South America. Where once they wore uniforms which were appropriate to civil servants, albeit ones with guns, they now don the habiliments of what more closely resembles a paramilitary organization, and they have the bullying, menacing, we’re-above-the-law attitudes to go along with them. These attitudes are demonstrated in this video, which unambiguously shows one such paramilitary — what point is there in referring to them any longer as "cops" since that term suggests a civil role? – Seizing a video recording device from an innocuous bystander. The transparently absurd justification for the seizure was that the device contained evidence that the person being arrested was "resisting", and therefore, they were entitled to take it."




The destructive role of federal involvement in local police functions is discussed in How Cops Became Soldiers: An Interview with Police Militarization Expert Radley Balko.
How did 9/11 alter the domestic relationship between the military and police?

"It really just accelerated a process that had already been in motion for 20 years. The main effect of 9/11 on domestic policing is the DHS grant program, which writes huge checks to local police departments across the country to purchase machine guns, helicopters, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. The Pentagon had already been giving away the same weapons and equipment for about a decade, but the DHS grants make that program look tiny.

But probably of more concern is the ancillary effect of those grants. DHS grants are lucrative enough that many defense contractors are now turning their attention to police agencies -- and some companies have sprung up solely to sell military-grade weaponry to police agencies who get those grants. That means we're now building a new industry whose sole function is to militarize domestic police departments. Which means it won't be long before we see pro-militarization lobbying and pressure groups with lots of (taxpayer) money to spend to fight reform. That's a corner it will be difficult to un-turn. We're probably there already. Say hello to the police-industrial complex."

The predictable consequences of the dominance from DC, is that the district of criminals impose a system that inevitably results in Botched Paramilitary Police Raids. An interactive map of botched SWAT and paramilitary police raids, released in conjunction with the Cato policy paper "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids," by Radley Balko, illustrates his contention.
"To Protect and Serve" is now an euphemism for breaking heads. Police Thugs Claim They’re Here to "Serve" wants you to believe that "police are basically the same all over the world: they describe their role of carrying out the force and coercion required by those wanting to control others as being a role of "serving the people." Those who are at the receiving end of the force and coercion are usually submissive and question nothing." Tell that to Adam Kokesh.


The "Code of Silence" enables The Militarization of American Police, to blow smoke on a gullible public. Accountability and recourse is a myth. The SWAT system whacks the public as if they were nuisance flies.

"Police supporters claim the public already has plenty of oversight. But observers always find the same pattern: The internal investigations are not public, and the deputies stay on the force with no obvious punishment. The DA exonerates the deputies. The grand jury only gets involved in the most highly publicized cases, and such juries are controlled by the DA and represent a narrow, conservative demographic. (Around here, it's mostly retired government workers who can afford to spend half their day working at the court for virtually no pay.) When a member of the public files a complaint with a police or sheriff's department, it typically takes months to hear anything back. Then the only legal requirement is for the agency to say whether the complaint was "sustained" or "not sustained." Such complaints are rarely sustained."

The psychotic statists that have no problem with the militarization of law enforcement are enemies of the people. How far has this country fallen . . . Listen to the fateful words of the nature of the police by the original Godfather of the Chicago Gestapo. The demented and mentally deranged oligarchy, who is at war with the American public, is the true terrorist. Police need to examine, recite and act upon the Oath Keepers - Declaration Of Orders We Will Not Obey.

http://batr.org/gulag/071413.html


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on July 16, 2013, 01:34:28 pm
When the Police Go Military


RIOT police officers tear-gassing protesters at the Occupy movement in Oakland, Calif. The surprising nighttime invasion of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, carried out with D-Day-like secrecy by officers deploying klieg lights and a military-style sound machine. And campus police officers in helmets and face shields dousing demonstrators at the University of California, Davis with pepper spray.


Is this the militarization of the American police?

Police forces undeniably share a soldier’s ethos, no matter the size of the city, town or jurisdiction: officers carry deadly weapons and wear uniforms with patches denoting rank. They salute one another and pay homage to a “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” hierarchical culture.

But beyond such symbolic and formal similarities, American law and tradition have tried to draw a clear line between police and military forces. To cast the roles of the two too closely, those in and out of law enforcement say, is to mistake the mission of each. Soldiers, after all, go to war to destroy, and kill the enemy. The police, who are supposed to maintain the peace, “are the citizens, and the citizens are the police,” according to Chief Walter A. McNeil of Quincy, Fla., the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, citing the words of Sir Robert Peel, the father of modern-day policing.

Yet lately images from Occupy protests streamed on the Internet — often in real time — show just how readily police officers can adopt military-style tactics and equipment, and come off more like soldiers as they face down citizens. Some say this adds up to the emergence of a new, more militaristic breed of civilian police officer. Others disagree.

What seems clear is that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and the federal Homeland Security dollars that flowed to police forces in response to them, have further encouraged police forces to embrace paramilitary tactics like those that first emerged in the decades-long “war on drugs.”

Both wars — first on drugs, then terror — have lent police forces across the country justification to acquire the latest technology, equipment and tactical training for newly created specialized units.

“There is behind this, also, I think, a kind of status competition or imitation, that there is positive status in having a sort of ‘big department muscle,’ in smaller departments,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. “And then the problem is, if you have those kinds of specialized units, that you hunt for appropriate settings to use them and, in some of the smaller police departments, notions of the appropriate settings to use them are questionable.”

  Radley Balko, a journalist who has studied the issue, told a House subcommittee on crime in 2007 that one criminologist found a 1,500 percent increase in the use of SWAT (special weapons and tactics) teams in the United States in roughly the last two decades.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally bars the military from law enforcement activities within the United States. But today, some local and city police forces have rendered the law rather moot. They have tanks — yes, tanks, often from military surplus, for use in hostage situations or drug raids — not to mention the sort of equipment and training one would need to deter a Mumbai-style guerrilla assault.

Such tactics are used in New York City, where Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly (whose department has had armored vehicles for decades) has invoked both the 19th-century military strategist Carl von Clausewitz and the television series “24” in talking about the myriad threats his city faces — both conventional and terrorist. After the would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was arrested aboard a plane at Kennedy Airport in 2010, Mr. Kelly calculated the plot-to-capture time: slightly more than 53 hours.

“Jack Bauer may have caught him in 24,” said Mr. Kelly, who served as a Marine commander in Vietnam. “But in the real world, 53’s not bad.”

IN truth, a vast majority of Mr. Kelly’s 35,000-member force are not specialized troops, but rank-and-file beat cops. But that did not stop Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg from sounding like Patton at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week, when he boasted, “I have my own army in the N.Y.P.D.,” suggesting his reasons for preferring City Hall to the White House. More disturbing than riot gear or heavy-duty weapons slung across the backs of American police officers is a “militaristic mind-set” creeping into officers’ approach to their jobs, said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It is in the way they search and raid homes and the way they deal with the public,” he said.

The more the police fail to defuse confrontations but instead help create them — be it with their equipment, tactics or demeanor — the more ties with community members are burned, he said. The effect is a loss of civility, and an erosion of constitutional rights, rather than a building of good will.

“What is most worrisome to us is that the line that has traditionally separated the military from civilian policing is fading away,” Mr. Lynch said. “We see it as one of the most disturbing trends in the criminal justice area — the militarization of police tactics.”

Police officials insist they are not becoming more militarized — in their thinking or actions — but merely improving themselves professionally against evolving threats. This is the way to protect citizens and send officers home alive at the end of shifts in an increasingly dangerous world, they say. Of course, in the event of a terrorist attack, they have to fill the breach until federal or National Guard troops can rush in.

“If we had to take on a terrorist group, we could do that,” said William Lansdowne, the police chief in San Diego and a member of the board of the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Though his force used federal grants to buy one of those fancy armored vehicles — complete with automatic-gun portals — he said the apparatus was more useful for traditional crime-busting than counter-terrorism.

“We are seeing suspects better armed than ever before,” Chief Lansdowne said.

Now the Occupy movement and highly publicized official responses to it are forcing the public to confront what its police forces have become. But analysts say that even here the picture of policing is mixed. While scenes from Oakland were ugly, the police in Los Angeles and Philadelphia last week evacuated Occupy encampments relatively peacefully; Los Angeles officers used a cherry picker to pluck protesters from trees.

Police officers are not at war, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, and cannot imagine themselves as occupying armies. Rather, they must approach any continuing Occupy protests, now or in the spring, with a respect for the First Amendment and a realization that protesters are not enemies but people the police need to engage with up the road.

“You can have all the sophisticated equipment in the world, but it does not replace common sense and discretion and finding ways to defuse situations,” Mr. Wexler said. “You can’t be talking about community policing one day and the next day have an action that is so uncharacteristic to the values of your department.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/sunday-review/have-american-police-become-militarized.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on July 16, 2013, 01:37:09 pm
The growing militarization of U.S. police
 
Thousands of SWAT-type raids changing face of law enforcement


As politicians exploit the Newtown tragedy to promote new laws to restrict firearms and implement universal background checks that could lead to gun registration and confiscation, another parallel trend– namely, the increasing militarization of law enforcement, most visibly demonstrated by the growing use of massive, SWAT-type raids on businesses and individuals, sometimes with federal involvement or authorization – is heightening concerns that America is moving toward a police state.

Mountain Pure SWAT raid: The Movie

Mountain Pure Water, LLC is headquartered on Interstate 30 just outside the town of Little Rock, Arkansas. The company manufactures and distributes beverage containers, spring water, fruit drinks, and teas. In January 2012, about 50 federal agents, led by Small Business Administration Office of Inspector General Special Agent Cynthia Roberts and IRS Special Agent Bobbi Spradlin, swooped in, guns drawn. Without explanation they shut down plant operations, herded employees into the cafeteria, and confined them to the room for hours. They could not so much as use the bathroom without police escort. Cell phones were confiscated and all Internet and company phones were disabled.
 
Plant Manager Court Stacks was at his desk when police burst through his office door, guns drawn and pointed at him—a thoroughly unprofessional violation of basic firearms discipline in this circumstance, and the cause of numerous accidental SWAT killings.
 
According to Mountain Pure CEO John Stacks, the search warrant was related to questions about an SBA loan he secured through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to recover tornado losses to his home, warehouse and associated equipment. Stacks says the SBA apparently doesn’t believe that assets listed as damaged in the storm were actually damaged.
 
The search warrant was extremely vague and some agents’ actions may have been illegal, according to company attorney, Timothy Dudley. Comptroller Jerry Miller was taken to a private room and interrogated for over three hours by SBA Special Agent Cynthia Roberts, the raid leader. He requested an attorney and was told, “That ain’t gonna happen.” According to Miller, the SBA unilaterally changed the terms of Stacks’ loan. He says he asked Roberts what gave the SBA authority to do that, and that she responded, “We’re the federal government, we can do what we want, when we want, and there is nothing you can do about it.” Miller said during the raid Roberts “strutted around the place like she was Napoleon.”
 
Stacks said the company has had three IRS audits in the past three years, including one following the raid, with no problems. The SBA has still not filed any charges, continues to stonewall about the raid’s purpose, and refuses to release most of the property seized during the raid.
 
Quality Assurance Director Katy Depriest, who doubles as the company crisis manager, described agents’ “Gestapo tactics.” She added that they confiscated CDs of college course work and educational materials for a class she had been taking that resulted in her flunking the course. Those materials have not yet been returned.
 
Attempts were made to contact Roberts for this article, but she is no longer employed by the SBA. Questions were directed to the Little Rock, Arkansas U.S. Attorney’s office. The USA’s public affairs officer had no comment; however they have convened a grand jury to evaluate the case.

VIDEO: http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/the-growing-militarization-of-u-s-police/

Because law enforcement refused repeated requests to respond for this article, only Mountain Pure’s side of the story is known, but its representatives make a compelling case:
 •Many company employees were willing to discuss this raid on the record.
 •Mountain Pure and several employees have sued special agents Roberts and Spradlin.
 •Stacks commissioned a video about the raid, reproduced here.
 
The video includes testimony from Henry Juszkiewicz, CEO of famed Gibson Guitar Corp., which suffered two such raids, and another raid target, Duncan Outdoors Inc. The video does not attempt to establish anyone’s guilt or innocence, but rather highlights law enforcement’s heavy-handed tactics in executing SWAT-style search warrants against legitimate businesses. Gibson has settled with the Justice Department in a case fraught with legal ambiguities, while Duncan has been indicted for violations of currency transaction reporting requirements.
 
Stacks claims he has gotten calls from many companies that have suffered similar raids, but they are afraid to speak out. Here are a few examples that have made national news:
 •FDA officials, U.S. Marshals, and the Pennsylvania State Police raided an Amish farm in 2011 for selling raw milk.
 •A Department of Education SWAT team raided a man’s home, “dragged him out in his boxer shorts, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him” in front of his three young children. They were looking for evidence of his estranged wife’s financial aid fraud.
 •Sixty-six-year-old George Norris spent two years in jail following a USFWS raid that nailed him for filing incorrect forms on imported orchids.
 •A Fairfax, Virginia optometrist being served a warrant for illegal gambling was killed by a SWAT team member whose firearm accidentally discharged. He answered the door in his bathrobe, unarmed and unaware that he was even under investigation.
 
War on small business?
 
In 2006, the IRS announced it would shift its focus to audit more small businesses. IRS data on tax audits seems to bear this out. Between the first and second half of the last decade, the audit coverage rate on businesses with assets between $10 and $50 million increased by 42 percent. Between 2001 and 2005, an annual average of 13,549 returns were audited for businesses with assets of less than $10 million. Between 2006 and 2011, the average was 19,289, an increase of over 42 percent.
 
The Sharpsburg Raid
 
This has paid off in increased enforcement revenues, but are massive SWAT raids an essential part of this new strategy? In addition to the potential dangers and the outrage of having company employees treated like drug dealers or terrorists, the cost of these raids is staggering. Agents told Mountain Pure employees they had flown in from all over the country.
 
Sharpsburg, Md., population 706, is a quiet little town bordering the Antietam National Battlefield in rural Washington County. On Thursday, Nov. 29, 2012, at about 12:30 p.m., the quiet was shattered by an invasion of over 150 Maryland State Police (MSP), FBI, State Fire Marshal’s bomb squad and County SWAT teams, complete with two police helicopters, two Bearcat “special response” vehicles, mobile command posts, snipers, police dogs, bomb disposal truck, bomb sniffing robots and a huge excavator. They even brought in food trucks.
 
A heavily armed MSP Special Tactical Assault Team Element (STATE) executed a no-knock search warrant, smashing through the reportedly unlocked door with a battering ram. They worked until after 7:30 p.m., ransacking a modest, 20 ft. by 60 ft. single-family home for weapons, and searching for its owner, one Terry Porter. For hours, neighbors were left worrying and wondering, while countless police blanketed the area.
 
Local resident Tim Franquist described the scene:
 
“The event, or siege as we are calling it, involved convoys of police speeding to the area, two helicopters, armored vehicles, command centers, countless police cruisers and officers. They blocked off the roads and commandeered a campground as their staging area.”
 
Terry Porter is married with three children, has lived in the town all of his life, and owns a modest welding business. He is also a prepper. His preparations include an underground bunker, buried food supplies and surveillance cameras. Porter really doesn’t like Obama and tells anyone who will listen.
 
Unfortunately, one listener was an undercover officer for the Maryland State Police. The police had become interested in Porter through an anonymous caller who claimed that Porter “had been getting crazier and crazier …” and that he had “10 to 15 machine gun-style weapons, six handguns and up to 10,000 rounds of ammunition …” The MSP performed a background check and discovered Porter had a 20-year-old charge for aiding marijuana distribution, a disqualification for firearms ownership.
 
MSP detailed an officer to visit Porter’s shop on Nov. 16posing as a customer. The officer said Porter “openly admitted to being a prepper.” Not a crime. Porter also allegedly claimed to have a Saiga shotgun, and was willing to use it “when people show up unannounced.” Based on the Russian AK-47 design, some Saiga variants are fully automatic. On Nov. 27 MSP obtained a search warrant.
 
Two days later the Maryland State Police appeared at Porter’s door but could not find him. Porter later disclosed he “left out the back door.” Where he went has not been disclosed. However, blogger Ann Corcoran, who lives nearby and followed the issue closely, claims he hid out in fear for his life. Given highly publicized, accidental shootings involving SWAT teams and the overwhelming force present, that’s a reasonable assumption.
 
The following day Porter turned himself in and took the police through his property. The raid produced a total of four shotguns, a 30-30-caliber hunting rifle and two .22-caliber rifles. He was charged with firearms possession violations and released on a $75,000 bond.
 
The raid was one of the largest in recent U.S. history, twice the size of the 1993 Branch Davidian raid in Waco, Texas, which initially involved 76 ATF agents. It almost rivaled the recent 200-strong statewide manhunt for California cop-killing cop, Christopher Dorner. Yet only a few local stories emerged and those presented a hysterical portrait of Porter while largely under-reporting the police presence.
 
Why the raid?
 
The Maryland State Police did not notify town officials or Washington County Sheriff Douglas Mullendore, who learned of the raid after it began, when it requested the use of his SWAT Team and Bearcat. The MSP also set up a command center at a campground within the national park without notifying the Park Police. Bills have since been introduced in the Maryland legislature by Washington County Delegate Neil Parrott (HB 0219) and State Senator Chris Shank (SB 0259) to require notification of local law enforcement before any outside agency serves a warrant.
 
A meeting following the raid attracted 60 concerned Sharpsburg citizens and leaders. Sharpsburg Vice Mayor Bryan Gabriel characterized the raid as “overwhelming” and said it “could have put a lot of people at risk.” Erin Moshier, a citizen who attended the meeting, added, “We all felt there was excessive force involved, and we felt that a member of our community was victimized and we wanted to get to the bottom of it and get some answers.” Both Gabriel and Sheriff Mullendore have issued statements of support for Porter, who they know personally. Citizens created a “Friends for Terry” website to help with his legal costs.
 
When asked why the police did not simply detain Porter in town or at a traffic stop, MSP Hagerstown Barracks Commander, Lt. Thomas Woodward, said the police only had a property search warrant and had no authority to arrest Porter. However, police do have authority to “detain the property owner for 24 hours” when executing a search warrant, so Porter could have been intercepted elsewhere, but police chose to execute that authority as part of the raid.
 
Lt. Woodward said the state police have a good working relationship with Sheriff Mullendore. If that is the case, why didn’t they consult the sheriff first? If Porter were really that dangerous, wouldn’t it be helpful to get more information from a trusted source better acquainted with him? Mullendore said they usually do give notice. Reportedly several state police who personally know Porter reside in Sharpsburg. Why were they not consulted?
 
Does the Maryland State Police detail SWAT automatically for gun search warrants? Some other police forces do. For example, in one fatal Florida SWAT shooting, a 21-man SWAT team was called in merely because the target had a concealed-carry permit. Are SWAT raids to become the order of the day for gun owners?
 
If Porter is indeed adjudicated a felon in possession of firearms, then he was in violation of the law. He didn’t help his case by bragging to the undercover officer about his doomsday preparations, especially the Saiga—which turned out to be nonexistent.
 
There is nothing wrong with being prepared, or even describing the actions you might take in a hypothetical “doomsday” situation, but in fairness to police, with all the lunatics coming out of the woodwork these days and the heightened atmosphere of mutual distrust between law enforcement and citizens, the MSP might be excused for presuming the worst. But 150 police?
 
Recent events such as the kidnapping/bunker standoff in Alabama, and cop-killer Dorner, provide apt examples. Police never know what to expect. Still, in this case at least, it seems a little more investigation and consultation with local authorities could have resolved this issue quietly and with much less risk and cost.
 
Cost of the operation
 
Neither the FBI nor the MSP have publicly disclosed how many of their officers were involved in the raid. However, Senator Shank and Delegate Parrott were told in a meeting with top MSP officials that the total, including federal, state, and local police, exceeded 150. From public information requests it is known that the Washington County Special Response Team (SRT) sent 17, including four snipers, two medics and their Bearcat driver. Only two of these actually participated, the driver and a sniper who accompanied him.
 
The FBI personnel were training nearby and when their assistance was requested, many, if not all, chose to participate. A witness on the scene guessed there were approximately 40 officers at the campground where the FBI staged. Assuming a total of 150, that would leave 93 MSP. The following table, based on police salaries gleaned from public sources, provides a rough estimate of the personnel cost for this operation.
 
The MSP argued that only variable costs—those directly related to the operation—are relevant. By this logic, the operation cost very little, as salaries and other fixed costs are incurred anyway. But the personnel and resources involved would otherwise have been engaged elsewhere: tracking down criminals, enforcing other laws, and assisting in emergencies. There are clearly other, potentially more beneficial activities they could not simultaneously perform. This is called opportunity cost and must be considered.
 
This raid cost approximately $11,000 per hour, which dramatically illustrates one reason government spending is so wildly out of control. If agency managers considered the true cost of their decisions, they might work harder to prioritize their activities and not waste valuable resources on errands of questionable value.
 
High visibility events like the Sharpsburg raid present a one-sided picture of police as out-of-control, wasting time on seeming trifles. But their daily efforts, which go largely unreported, paint a much more balanced picture. For example, the MSP Gang Enforcement Unit has aggressively investigated violent street gangs, one of the largest sources of gun violence.
 
Between 2010 and 2012 alone, the Gang Unit made 621 gang arrests and seized 94 firearms. This does not include their extensive work with multi-agency task forces. Here, they have participated in successful operations against such violent gangs as the Crips and Bloods, Wise Guyz, B-6, the Black Guerrilla Family, Juggalos, the Dead Man Incorporated crime syndicate and others, and have brought many of these offenders to justice.
 
Militarization of police
 
The SWAT concept was popularized by Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates in the late 1960s in response to large-scale incidents for which the police were ill-prepared. But the use of SWAT teams has since exploded. Massive SWAT raids using military-style equipment are becoming routine methods for executing search warrants. One study estimates 40,000 such raids per year nationwide:
 
“These increasingly frequent raids… are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers.”
 
John W. Whitehead writes in the Huffington Post that “it appears to have less to do with increases in violent crime and more to do with law enforcement bureaucracy and a police state mentality.”
 
The ACLU recently announced its intention to investigate the militarization of law enforcement. Ironically, despite the perception of heightened gun violence due to incidents like Newtown, ACLU points out that both crime rates and law enforcement gun deaths have been declining for decades (see chart).
 
Yet police forces are becoming increasingly militarized due to huge subsidies provided by the federal government:
 
“Through its little-known “1033 program,” the Department of Defense gave away nearly $500 million worth of leftover military gear to law enforcement in fiscal year 2011 … The surplus equipment includes grenade launchers, helicopters, military robots, M-16 assault rifles and armored vehicles … Orders in fiscal year 2012 are up 400 percent over the same period in 2011 … .”
 
Congress created this provision in 1997 for drug and anti-terrorism efforts. It has since provided over 17,000 agencies $2.6 billion worth of equipment at no charge. One local agency now owns an amphibious tank, while another obtained a machine-gun-equipped APC.
 
Additionally, Department of Homeland Security grants have allowed state and local agencies nationwide to purchase Bearcats. These 16,000-pound vehicles are bulletproof and can be equipped with all kinds of extra features.
 
Ironically, while SWAT teams probably got their biggest boost initially from conservatives, many fear law enforcement is becoming a tool to enforce leftist ideology. University criminal justice programs turn out graduates indoctrinated in liberal ideology which carries into modern law enforcement bureaucratic culture.
 
Today this trend is reflected in reports coming out of the Department of Homeland Security, the military and various law enforcement “fusion” centers that identify gun-owners, patriots, ex-military, Christians, pro-life activists and tea party members as “potential domestic terrorists.”
 
The perpetrator of last summer’s attempted mass shooting at the Family Research Council headquarters now admits he was prompted by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Watch” list. The radical leftist SPLC is now “consulting” with the FBI and DHS regarding “rightwing hate groups.” The group labeled AIM’s Cliff Kincaid a member of a sinister group of “Patriots” for writing critically of the United Nations, President Obama and the homosexual activist lobby, among other things. Ironically, the SPLC “Teaching Tolerance” project ran an article praising unrepentant communist terrorist bomber Bill Ayers as a “civil rights organizer, radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author,” with an “editor’s note” going so far as to say that Ayers “has become a highly respected figure in the field of multicultural education.”
 
Ammo, military equipment and domestic drone use
 
The Internet is abuzz with news that the Department of Homeland Security is purchasing over 1.6 billion rounds of pistol and rifle ammunition, 2,700 Mine Resistant Armored Vehicles (MRAP), and 7,000 fully-automatic “personal defense weapons.” Some of this is worthy of concern, some maybe not so much. Meanwhile, the expanded use of aerial drones within the continental U.S. has created anxiety among the public and political leaders alike.
 
Ammo
 
Reportedly, the order for 1.6 billion rounds of pistol and rifle ammunition would fulfill DHS requirements for the next five years, or 320 million rounds per year. DHS has 55,471 employees authorized to carry firearms, which comes to about 5,800 rounds per year per employee. For perspective, during the first year of the war on terror, approximately 72 million rounds were expended in Iraq and another 21 million in Afghanistan by an estimated 45,000 combat troops. This amounts to about 2,000 rounds per war fighter.
 
Yet the requisition may not be unreasonable. The largest order, 750 million rounds, came from DHS’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) for training. FLETC Public Affairs Director Peggy Dixon said that the purchase request was “a ceiling. It does not mean that we will buy, or require, the full amounts of either contract.” Another 650 million rounds are being purchased by Inspections and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to cover the next five years.
 
Since these are maximum figures, it is difficult to conclusively evaluate the purchase. Some have asserted that the practical effect—if not the deliberate intent—is to dry up the private market for ammunition. Congressmen are now demanding answers from DHS regarding these purchases. But most ammunition shortages are likely due to civilian demands. Obama and the Democrats’ palpable hostility to gun owners has caused ammunition and firearms purchases to skyrocket.
 
There are 80 million gun owners in the U.S. If each just purchased 100 rounds of ammo—enough for one afternoon at the range—that would equal 8-billion rounds. Many are purchasing significantly more.
 
Instead of asking why DHS needs 1.6 billion rounds of ammo, the real question is, “Why does DHS need 55,000 law enforcement officers?”
 
MRAPs and submachine guns
 
The original story regarding a purchase of 2,700 MRAPs s was in error. The confusion centers on a 2011 order from the U.S. Marines to retrofit 2,717 of its MRAPs with upgraded chassis.
 
DHS has been using MRAPs since 2008 and currently has a fleet of 16 received from the Army at no cost. They are used by DHS special response teams in executing “high-risk warrants.”
 
Similarly, the purchase of 7,000 “Personal Defense Weapons” is not extraordinary for an agency of this size.
 
Drones
 
DHS’s Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) has been operating Predator drones since 2005, with a current fleet of nine. Some in Congress seek to expand their use. In February 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, which includes a provision for commercial drone regulations. The FAA projects that up to 30,000 drones could be flying by 2020. A requisition memo describes these requirements for drones operated by CBP against border incursions by frequently armed drug traffickers and coyotes, but concern exists that this use will extend to U.S. citizens inside the border.
 
Sen. Rand Paul, R.-Ky., filibustered the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director in order to obtain answers about lethal drone use against American citizens within the U.S. Holder finally sent Paul a letter, which said:
 

“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: ‘Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’ The answer to that question is no.”
 
Paul said they had been asking Holder for about six weeks. But Holder didn’t answer the question at all. Paul did not specify Americans “engaged in combat on American soil.” He asked about attacks against any Americans on U.S. soil. Holder had said in earlier testimony that the President did have the authority to kill Americans on American soil in certain circumstances.
 
Given the Obama administration’s contempt for the Constitution and its broad definition of “domestic terrorists” to include pretty much anyone they don’t like, there is cause for genuine concern.
 
Gun control
 
The Sharpsburg raid occurred prior to the Newtown tragedy, but nonetheless reinforced the widespread impression that the Maryland State Police is an anti-gun organization. Did the MSP decide to make an example of Porter to send a message to Maryland gun owners, or were they genuinely afraid that Porter was about to go postal? That question is unclear, but a Maryland law enforcement source who has attended briefings on the subject said state police are “gearing up for confiscation.”
 
In 1989, Patrick O’Carroll of the Centers for Disease Control stated:
 
“We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities.”
 
The CDC further revealed its strategy in 1994:
 
“We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. Now it [sic] is dirty, deadly, and banned.” Dr. Mark Rosenberg, Director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Control and Prevention. (Washington Post, 1994)
 
Do these themes sound familiar? They represent a single component of a vast effort by media, politicians, Hollywood, educational institutions and professionals to vilify gun ownership. One left-wing organization, Third Way, created a “messaging strategy,” encouraging the term “gun safety” because “gun control has become a loaded term that leads voters to believe that the candidate supports the most restrictive laws.”
 
Since Newtown, however, gun-control proponents have pretty much dropped any pretense. Here is a small sampling of recent anti-gun actions:
 •Florida Democratic state Senator Audrey Gibson has proposed a bill requiring anger management classes for would-be ammo purchasers.
 •Colorado State Senator Evie Hudak told a **** victim testifying against gun control that having a gun was a waste of time as the rapist would have killed her with it.
 •A Democrat activist says we should train rapists not to ****, rather than using guns to stop them.
 •A Baltimore, Md., seven-year-old was suspended from school for two days for biting a pastry into a shape that looked like a gun.
 •A five-year-old was suspended from school and branded a “terrorist threat” for telling a classmate she was going to shoot her with her Princess “bubble gun.”
 •A Philadelphia 5th grader was called “murderer” by classmates and yelled at by her teacher for having a piece of paper cut into a shape that looked vaguely like a pistol.
 •A New Jersey family was visited by police and the Department of Youth and Family Services because of a photo of their 11-year-old son posing with a rifle.
 
In an unguarded moment recently, U.S. Rep Jan Schakowsky, D.-Ill., revealed the intentions of some Democrats:
 
“We want everything on the table … This is a moment of opportunity. There’s no question about it … We’re on a roll now, and I think we’ve got to take the—you know, we’re gonna push as hard as we can and as far as we can.”
 
Conclusion
 
The increased militarization of police forces and the associated use of SWAT teams for routine law enforcement are a dangerous trend. Given President Obama’s seeming willingness to abuse the power of his office on so many fronts, it is reasonable to expect more, not less, of the kind of abusive police overreach described in this report, while police forces and capabilities will continue to grow.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/the-growing-militarization-of-u-s-police/#IIDmRcEVXbJXA4WW.99


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on September 14, 2013, 08:47:29 am
Militarization of police more widespread than previously thought, especially in small towns

While the trend of police forces becoming increasingly militarized across the United States, thanks in large part to programs like the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, is pretty much common knowledge at this point, it actually goes much further than most realize.
 
Indeed, as a new detailed Associated Press report shows, it is not only Georgia – which acquired a whopping $200 million worth of military-grade weapons and vehicles – where rural areas are getting equipment they clearly don’t need.
 
Yet the many cities and towns also acquire equipment through federal grant funds, not just the 1033 Program, which can allow agencies to acquire everything from deep fryers to military robots.
 
The AP investigation found that a “disproportionate share of the $4.2 billion worth of property distributed since 1990 has been obtained by police departments and sheriff’s offices in rural areas with few officers and little crime.”
 
Some of the equipment is quite obviously not needed and will not be used by the departments. One of the examples is, oddly enough, from Georgia, where the police department in the tiny farming community of Morven, Georgia has acquired “three boats, scuba gear, rescue rafts and a couple of dozen life preservers.”
 
Now, you might be thinking that this is justified, because they’re probably located near a large body of water. In reality, the 1.7-square-mile, 700-resident town’s deepest body of water is an ankle-deep creek.
 
Morven Police Chief Lynwood Yates didn’t stop there. He also acquired a decontamination machine originally valued at $200,000, though it is missing most of its parts and would require $100,000 worth of repairs.
 
Yates also acquired an unknown number of bayonets which have yet to make it out of his storage facility.
 
“That was one of those things in the old days you got it because you thought it was cool,” Yates said, referring to his shipment of bayonets. “Then, after you get it, you’re like, ‘What the hell am I going to do with this?’”
 
I’m sure many readers are asking the same question.
 
Morven has clearly enjoyed the benefits of the Department of Defense program, acquiring some $4 million worth of goods over the past ten years or so. Yet Yates acknowledged that his town sees little crime and that the police spend most of their time on traffic enforcement.
 
In the small town of Rising Star, Texas, population 835, the police chief acquired over $3.2 million worth of goods with a mere 14 months. The only full-time officer on the entire force was the police chief.
 
Some of the equipment the police chief go this hands on before being fired over an unrelated issue earlier this year included three deep-fat fryers, two meat slicers, a pool table, playground equipment, nine televisions, 11 computers, 25 sleeping bags and 22 large space heaters worth $55,000 when new.
 
Rising Star was suspended from the program in March after federal officials unsurprisingly discovered that many items, including 12 pairs of binoculars, had gone missing from police facilities.
 
Why this program is distributing deep-fat fryers, meat slicers, pool tables and playground equipment is still not clear.
 
Other “general property items” that agencies can acquire include, “bookcases, hedge trimmers, telescopes, brassieres, golf carts [and] coffee makers.”
 
In the case of Morven, Yates clearly has a lot of imagination. Despite the fact that the town, by his own admission, sees little in terms of crime, Yates said he plans to use the aquatic equipment to form a dive team.
 
Yates claims that the dive team is needed because his county doesn’t have one.
 
Major Joe Wheeler, of the Brooks County Sherriff’s Department, said that they don’t need a dive team and if they did, they’d create one. Instead, they just call the adjacent Lowndes County for water rescues and the George Department of Natural Resources if a corpse needs to be retrieved from a body of water.
 
He also said he has formed a SWAT team armed with surplus military rifles, an armored personnel carrier and a Humvee.
 
He added that he wants the decontamination machine, despite the costs associated with fixing it, in case he has to respond to a “nuclear, chemical, biological” incident.
 
Yates said that he could “take my guys and the training they have, the equipment we have, and we could shut this town down” and “completely control everything.”
 
Why he would want to do that, especially when he admits, “Even my worst drug dealer here, if I was broke down on the side of the road, they would stop and help,” is unclear.
 
“They’ve got a bunch of damn junk is what it looks like to me,” said Gary Randall, manager of the only grocery store in Morven.
 
“This is a little, itty bitty town. His mentality is, ‘If I don’t get it, someone else will,’” Randall said, adding that the stockpiling seems like “big-time” overkill.
 
Still, Yates claims that he only requests equipment he needs, though he acknowledges that the bayonets may not have been all that necessary.
 
The equipment received isn’t necessarily what is requested in some cases.
 
Yates asked for a handheld laser range finder for a gun, instead, he received a range finder that used to be mounted on the tank-busting A-10 Warthog jet worth some $28,000.
 
The most troubling part of their investigation is that the use of the 1033 Program is increasing like never before.
 
A record $546 million worth of military property was transferred to agencies in fiscal year 2012 alone.
 
While agencies who receive the equipment aren’t supposed to sell or lease the equipment without permission or stockpile it, some agencies have been busted for doing just that.
 
Some have been found to be selling property for a profit, failing to notify officials about stolen or lost weapons or transferring weapons without permission.
 
The problem was apparently o serious that the Defense Logistics Agency’s “Law Enforcement Support Office suspended the transfer of firearms to police forces more than a year ago because of concerns that state coordinators weren’t keeping adequate inventory records,” according to the AP.
 
Critics say it’s also creating a much larger problem.
 
“The harm for me is that it further militarizes American law enforcement,” said Norm Stamper, a retired Seattle police chief.
 
“We make a serious mistake, I’m convinced, in equipping domestic law enforcement, particularly in smaller, rural communities, with this much military equipment,” Stamper said.
 
While Navy Vice Adm. Mark Harnitchek, the director of the Defense Logistics Agency, claimed that his agency’s support office and state coordinators conduct a “sanity check” on requests, there are some clearly insane requests.
 
The Oxford, Alabama police department, for example, has received over $10.4 million worth of equipment, including an infrared surveillance system worth $1.5 million for a helicopter it doesn’t even own.
 
The police chief said they tried to get night-vision goggles for their SWAT team, but instead received the $1.5 million surveillance apparatus it can’t use.
 
The oversight of the program is, by all metrics, atrocious.
 
While the Department of Defense is required to conduct reviews of state programs every two years, Mississippi’s program went six years without being reviewed.
 
In March 2012, federal reviewers found that the Mississippi Office of Surplus Property, which coordinates the state’s use of the 1033 Program, acquired over $8 million in property. The problem is that the agency is not a law enforcement organization and is thus should not be participating in the program.
 
However, the AP reports that staffing at the federal office tasked with direct supervision of the program has increased by 50 percent to 18 employees. They also now have a new computer system aimed at improving the tracking of inventory.
 
A spokeswoman for the office also said that they have new rules which “limit distribution of most items to one per law enforcement officer, except for consumables like clothing and batteries.”
 
One can only hope that the new efforts will stop towns like Rising Star and Morven from going hog-wild with the program.
 
Still, the problem of federal grant money funding similar programs will remain.
 
I’d love to hear your opinion, take a look at your story tips and even your original writing if you would like to get it published. I am also available for interviews on radio, television or any other format. Please email me at Admin@EndtheLie.com


More at EndtheLie.com - http://EndtheLie.com/2013/08/01/militarization-of-police-more-widespread-than-previously-thought-especially-in-small-towns/#ixzz2esID4mDL


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on September 14, 2013, 08:51:31 am
Police in Concord, NH apply for armored vehicle to fight ‘Free Staters,’ occupiers, sovereign citizens

Concord, New Hampshire police may soon accept $258,000 in federal money to purchase an armored vehicle, citing the need to protect police and others from threats including “the Sovereign Citizens, Free Staters and Occupy New Hampshire.”
 
Concord would be one of countless police departments across America that is being militarized through federal funding and programs like the 1033 program.
 
In Georgia alone, police acquired some $200 million worth of military-grade weaponry and equipment.
 
A public hearing will be held about the proposed purchase of a BearCat G3 armored vehicle on August 12. The vehicle would be paid for by a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant, according to New Hampshire Union Leader.
 
While the grant was filed by the Concord Police Department, the department filed it on behalf of a group of 20 local communities, the Merrimack County Sheriff’s Office and Plymouth State University, under the umbrella of the Central New Hampshire Special Operations Unit.
 
The grant application was unanimously approved last fall by the Concord City Council, according to Concord Police Chief John Duval, but since that time people have been raising concerns about the vehicle.
 
Some of those concerns are being raised by the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union (NHCLU).
 
After all, the application stated, “Groups such as the Sovereign Citizens, Free Staters and Occupy New Hampshire are active and present daily challenges.”
 
It also cited “several homegrown clusters that are anti-government and pose problems for law enforcement agencies.”
 
Devon Chaffee of NHCLU called the language used in the application “alarming.”
 
“It’s far from clear to us why an armored vehicle would be necessary to address what are generally, by and large, non-violent movements that in fact provide little or no threat to the security of our state,” Chaffee said.
 
However, the police do not consider it the vehicle to be any different than a Kevlar vest, since it is not directly equipped with offensive weapons.
 
Lt. Mark Sanclemente of the SWAT unit in Manchester, New Hampshire which has had a BearCat since 2007 said, “We use it as a protective vehicle. It protects our officers, it’s there to protect the public.”
 
He said they’ve used it to serve drug search warrants, when responding to incidents involving weapons and it has been deployed to surrounding towns when requested.
 
Sanclemente also said that their BearCat is parked in a “low profile location” during political events like presidential appearances.
 
“It’s nearby, it’s not out so that everyone can see it, but it’s still close if it’s needed,” he said.
 
“I think the majority of the public likes knowing that we have that vehicle as an option,” Sanclemente continued. “It’s there to protect the community, and that’s all it is.”
 
Chaffee disagrees, noting, “You see that type of vehicle operating in your community, and it has a real impact on the sense of security.”
 
“That’s part of why there needs to be real careful consideration of how this equipment is used,” Chaffee said.
 
“As a police chief, I don’t want our citizens to feel that their police department is becoming a quasi-military unit,” Duval said. “We pride ourselves on community policing.”
 
Yet it seems that at least some of the citizens feel that is precisely what their police department, like so many others, is doing.
 
Hey, at least they’re not one of the countless police departments across the country getting or attempting to get drones, right?


More at EndtheLie.com - http://EndtheLie.com/2013/07/30/police-in-concord-nh-apply-for-armored-vehicle-to-fight-free-staters-occupiers-sovereign-citizens/#ixzz2esJBUTEM


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Kilika on September 15, 2013, 05:32:15 am
Yet another one of those articles that reads like a piece from The Onion. This article is so full of rhetoric and misrepresentations, it's not even laughable.


Quote
Concord, New Hampshire police may soon accept $258,000 in federal money to purchase an armored vehicle, citing the need to protect police and others from threats including “the Sovereign Citizens, Free Staters and Occupy New Hampshire.”

Accountability of government agencies. They are more than welcome to make a request for equipment, but there is also what is called "fiscal responsibility" that is expected of government. Here we have the US in it's worst financial situation ever, cities literally falling apart, and these local councils want to take "FEDERAL grants"? Where do they suppose that grant money is coming from?

I've heard it said,"That money was already budgeted for...". What kind of excuse is that? If it makes better financial sense to not spend money, who cares if that amount is already part of some budget.

Just because you have money, that doesn't mean you have to spend it!  ::)

But THAT is the problem with government funds. If you don't use up your annual budget, it gets cut the next year down to the amount you in fact spent. The idea is that money won't be doled out if it's not being used. But reality is that in practice, agencies do everything they can to use all their annual funds so their amount won't be cut the next time, effectively not saving anything, but actually increasing costs to the system.

Quote
However, the police do not consider it the vehicle to be any different than a Kevlar vest, since it is not directly equipped with offensive weapons.
 
Lt. Mark Sanclemente of the SWAT unit in Manchester, New Hampshire which has had a BearCat since 2007 said, “We use it as a protective vehicle. It protects our officers, it’s there to protect the public.”
 
He said they’ve used it to serve drug search warrants, when responding to incidents involving weapons and it has been deployed to surrounding towns when requested.

Who does this guy think he's talking to? Does he really think people believe that? He knows exactly how they use those things. Just watch the SWAT team videos of how they deal with an alleged threat of weapons! The vehicle itself IS the OFFENSIVE weapon of choice for SWAT teams!

They are not about protecting the public at all. They are a tool designed to give entry teams a quick, offensive moving barricade as the teams move in to "secure" a location.

Quote
“As a police chief, I don’t want our citizens to feel that their police department is becoming a quasi-military unit,” Duval said.

Did he really say that? Civilian police departments across the country are in fact becoming "militarized" as we speak, all out of "federal grants".

Just stop taking federal grant money, and tell the feds you don't need their "assistance" in local matters.


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on September 28, 2013, 08:28:50 am
Police Department Acquires $600k Military Tank ‘Built to Withstand Arms Fire, Mine Blasts, IEDs, and Other Emerging Threats’

The Dallas County Sheriffs Department acquired a military tank designed for overseas combat earlier this month.
 
Dallas County sheriff’s deputies traveled to Fort Hood earlier this month to pick up a MaxxPro MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicle, according to the Dallas Observer.
 
“The International® MaxxPro is Navistar Defence’s Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle and incorporates the latest design in armoring technology,” according to the Navistar website. “Extensively tested by the military and used in theater today, the MaxxPro features a V-shaped hull and other design features that greatly improve survivability.”
 
“The MaxxPro MRAP is built to withstand ballistic arms fire, mine blasts, IEDs, and other emerging threats,” the website continues. “Its V-shaped hull helps deflect blasts out and away from the crew and its armoring can be customized to meet any mission requirement.”
 
WATCH: The MaxxPro Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mAkjvQuVIqU

“With so much protection, it’s the vehicle that every crew wants when they’re out in the field,” it adds.
 
The police department was able to get their hands on the $600,000 vehicle with 10,000 miles for nothing. According to the Dallas Observer, the Department of Defense was had no use for the vehicles and has given them to local police departments instead of letting them collect dust in warehouses.
 
A spokesperson for the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department was not immediately available for comment to TheBlaze Saturday morning. However, Chief Deputy Marlin Suell did comment on how his department will theoretically use the tank.
 
“Having a tactical vehicle will not only provide warrants execution with the equipment to assist in performing their jobs but will provide an overall safety arch,” Suell reportedly wrote to commissioners.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/28/police-department-acquires-tank-built-to-withstand-arms-fire-mine-blasts-ieds-and-other-emerging-threats/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Kilika on September 29, 2013, 04:18:22 am
Quote
had no use for the vehicles and has given them to local police departments

Uh, they COULD have placed those things on the open market through the surplus auction system and actually recover some of the outrageous costs of those things.  ::)


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Kilika on September 30, 2013, 07:55:57 am
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/09/30/us-police-obtaining-military-vehicles-to-aid-hunt-for-criminals/ (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/09/30/us-police-obtaining-military-vehicles-to-aid-hunt-for-criminals/)

Quote
The vehicle costs about $600,000, but the county obtained it solely for the cost of transporting it from Fort Hood

Quote
...The Murfreesboro Post in Murfreesboro, Tenn., reports the city police department acquired its own MRAP in August, prompting City Councilman Toby Gilley to reassure concerned citizens at a council meeting that it will be used to confront, “threats from armed gunmen.”

And don’t look now, but Ohio State University also counts an MRAP among its service fleet.

The college reportedly obtained one of the armored vehicles through the same means as Murfreesboro and Dallas County in mid-September...

I know Murfeesboro, TN, and there is NO WAY they can justify that thing there! It's a really small town. What are they going to do, use it to confront the town drunk?

This tossing out of military surplus to law enforcement is out of hand. There is no way these agencies should be getting such equipment. It's a gross mishandling of US taxpayer funds. Military surplus is SUPPOSE to go through the surplus auction system, which is open to the general public.


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on November 24, 2013, 08:39:42 am
Drones, Tanks, And Grenade Launchers: Coming Soon To A Police Department Near You


“The argument for up-armoring is always based on the least likely of terrorist scenarios. Anyone can get a gun and shoot up stuff. No amount of SWAT equipment can stop that.”—Mark Randol, former terrorism expert with the Congressional Research Service
 
Why does a police department which hasn’t had an officer killed in the line of duty in over 125 years in a town of less than 20,000 people need tactical military vests like those used by soldiers in Afghanistan?  For that matter, why does a police department in a city of 35,000 people need a military-grade helicopter? And what possible use could police at Ohio State University have for acquiring a heavily-armored vehicle intended to withstand IED blasts?
 
Why are police departments across the country acquiring heavy-duty military equipment and weaponry? For the same reason that perfectly good roads get repaved, perfectly good equipment gets retired and replaced, and perfectly good employees spend their days twiddling their thumbs—and all of it at taxpayer expense. It’s called make-work programs, except in this case, instead of unnecessary busy work to keep people employed, communities across America are finding themselves “gifted” with drones, tanks, grenade launchers and other military equipment better suited to the battlefield. And as I document in my book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, it’s all being done through federal programs that allow the military to “gift” battlefield-appropriate weapons, vehicles and equipment to domestic police departments across the country.
 
It’s a Trojan Horse, of course, one that is sold to communities as a benefit, all the while the real purpose is to keep the defense industry churning out profits, bring police departments in line with the military, and establish a standing army. As journalists Andrew Becker and G. W. Schulz report in their insightful piece, “Local Cops Ready for War With Homeland Security-Funded Military Weapons,” federal grants provided by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have “transformed local police departments into small, army-like forces, and put intimidating equipment into the hands of civilian officers. And that is raising questions about whether the strategy has gone too far, creating a culture and capability that jeopardizes public safety and civil rights while creating an expensive false sense of security.” For example, note Becker and Schulz:
 

In Montgomery County, Texas, the sheriff’s department owns a $300,000 pilotless surveillance drone, like those used to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists in the remote tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Augusta, Maine, with fewer than 20,000 people and where an officer hasn’t died from gunfire in the line of duty in more than 125 years, police bought eight $1,500 tactical vests. Police in Des Moines, Iowa, bought two $180,000 bomb-disarming robots, while an Arizona sheriff is now the proud owner of a surplus Army tank.
 
Small counties and cities throughout the country are now being “gifted” with 20-ton Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles. MRAPs are built to withstand IED blasts, a function which seems unnecessary for any form of domestic policing, yet police in Jefferson County, New York, Boise and Nampa, Idaho, as well as High Springs, Florida, have all acquired MRAPs. Police in West Lafayette, Indiana also have an MRAP, valued at half a million dollars.
 
Universities are getting in on the program as well. In September 2013, the Ohio State University Department of Public Safety acquired an MRAP, which a university spokesperson said will be used for “officer rescue, hostage scenarios, bomb evaluation,” situations which are not increasingly common on OSU’s campus. In reality, it will be used for crowd control at football games.
 
Almost 13,000 agencies in all 50 states and four U.S. territories participate in the military “recycling” program, and the share of equipment and weaponry gifted each year continues to expand. In 2011, $500 million worth of military equipment was distributed to law enforcement agencies throughout the country. That number jumped to $546 million in 2012. Since 1990, $4.2 billion worth of equipment has been transferred from the Defense Department to domestic police agencies through the 1033 program, in addition to various other programs supposedly aimed at fighting the so-called War on Drugs and War on Terror. For example, the Department of Homeland Security has delivered roughly $34 billion to police departments throughout the country since 9/11, ostensibly to purchase more gear for their steady growing arsenals of military weapons and equipment.
 
While police departments like to frame the acquisition of military surplus as a money-saving method, in a twisted sort of double jeopardy, the taxpayer ends up footing a bigger bill. First, taxpayers are forced to pay millions of dollars for equipment which the Defense Department purchases from megacorporations only to abandon after a few years. Then taxpayers find themselves footing the bill to maintain the costly equipment once it has been acquired by the local police. It didn’t take the residents of Tupelo, Mississippi, long to discover that nothing comes free. Although the Tupelo police department was “gifted” with a free military helicopter, residents quickly learned that it required “$100,000 worth of upgrades and $20,000 each year in maintenance.”
 
Police departments are also receiving grants for extensive surveillance systems in order to create microcosms of the extensive surveillance systems put in place by the federal government in the years since 9/11. For example, using a $2.6 million grant from the DHS, police in Seattle purchased and setup a “mesh network” throughout the city capable of tracking every Wi-Fi enabled device within range. Police claim it won’t be used for surveillance, but the devices are capable of determining “the IP address, device type, downloaded applications, current location, and historical location of any device that searches for a Wi-Fi signal.” Police have already been testing the network.
 
It doesn’t look like this trend towards the militarization of domestic police forces will be slowing down anytime soon, either. In fact, it seems to have opened up a new market for military contractors. According to a December 2011 report, “the homeland security market for state and local agencies is projected to reach $19.2 billion by 2014, up from an estimated $15.8 billion in fiscal 2009.”
 
In addition to being an astounding waste of taxpayer money, this equipping of police with military-grade equipment and weapons also gives rise to a dangerous mindset in which police feel compelled to put their newly high-power toys and weapons to use. The results are deadly, as can be seen in the growing numbers of unarmed civilians shot by police during relatively routine encounters and in the use of SWAT teams to carry out relatively routine tasks. For example, a team of police in Austin, Texas broke into a home in order to search for a stolen koi fish. In Florida, over 50 barbershops were raided by police donning masks and guns in order to enforce barber licensing laws.
 
Thus, while recycling unused military equipment might sound thrifty and practical, the ramifications are proving to be far more dangerous and deadly. This is what happens when you have police not only acquiring the gear of American soldiers, but also the mindset of an army occupying hostile territory. In this way, the American citizen is no longer seen as an employer or master to be served by public servants like police officers. With police playing the part of soldiers on the battlefield and the American citizen left to play the part of an enemy combatant, it’s a pretty safe bet that this particular exercise in the absurd will not have a happy ending.

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/drones_tanks_and_grenade_launchers_coming_soon_to_a_police_department_


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Kilika on November 24, 2013, 11:15:18 am
Quote
Anyone can get a gun and shoot up stuff. No amount of SWAT equipment can stop that.”—Mark Randol

No kidding. Just take one look at poor third world countries that are total police states. They have more violence than anybody. So the question becomes, how did militarizing their police force help with crimes and violence? It didn't, it makes it worse.

Typically, the poor tend to cower in fear from their oppressors, so the thugs get away with it. In America, while I question what resolve remains with the public, usually, you bow up on an American, they bow up right back. That's not the attitude the handlers want from a compliant public, so you can see why they want all that hardware, because they know Americans have a rather long history of not backing down. They just reload!


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on November 24, 2013, 06:17:18 pm
Spoils of war: Police getting leftover Iraq trucks

Coming soon to your local sheriff: 18-ton, armor-protected military fighting vehicles with gun turrets and bulletproof glass that were once the U.S. answer to roadside bombs during the Iraq war.

The hulking vehicles, built for about $500,000 each at the height of the war, are among the biggest pieces of equipment that the Defense Department is giving to law enforcement agencies under a national military surplus program.

For police and sheriff's departments, which have scooped up 165 of the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPS, since they became available this summer, the price and the ability to deliver shock and awe while serving warrants or dealing with hostage standoffs was just too good to pass up.

"It's armored. It's heavy. It's intimidating. And it's free," said Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple, among five county sheriff's departments and three other police agencies in New York that have taken delivery of an MRAP.

But the trucks have limits. They are too big to travel on some bridges and roads and have a tendency to be tippy on uneven ground. And then there's some cost of retrofitting them for civilian use and fueling the 36,000-pound behemoths that get about 5 miles to the gallon.

The American Civil Liberties Union is criticizing what it sees as the increasing militarization of the nation's police. ACLU affiliates have been collecting 2012 records to determine the extent of military hardware and tactics acquired by police, planning to issue a report early next year.

"One of our concerns with this is it has a tendency to escalate violence," said ACLU Center for Justice senior counsel Kara Dansky.

An Associated Press investigation of the Defense Department military surplus program this year found that a disproportionate share of the $4.2 billion worth of property distributed since 1990 - everything from blankets to bayonets and Humvees - has been obtained by police and sheriff's departments in rural areas with few officers and little crime.

After the initial 165 of the MRAP trucks were distributed this year, military officials say police have requests in for 731 more, but none are available.

Ohio State University campus police got one, saying they would use it in large-scale emergencies and to provide a police presence on football game days. Others went to police in High Springs, Fla., and the sheriff's office in Dallas County, Texas.

In Boise, Idaho, police reported using their MRAP two weeks ago to serve a warrant, saying they had evidence the suspect might be heavily armed and have explosives. Authorities said they found 100 pounds of bomb-making material and two guns. A second MRAP from nearby Nampa's police department was used to shield officers and neighbors from a possible explosion.

In New York, the Albany County sheriff's department already had four smaller military-surplus Humvees, which have been used for storm evacuations and to pull trees out of roadways. The new MRAP truck will go into service after technicians remove the gun turret and change the paint from military sand to civilian black.

Sheriff Apple rejected the idea that the nation's police forces are becoming too militaristic.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he said. "Our problem is we have to make sure we are prepared to respond to every type of crisis."

For example, he said, if SWAT teams need to get close to a shooter or get bystanders safely away from one, the MRAP would be the vehicle of choice.

In Warren County, at the southern edge of the Adirondack Mountains, Undersheriff Shawn Lamouree said its MRAP, which can hold six people and reach 65 mph, will have its turret closed up except for a small slot, the only place to fire a gun. Its bulletproof windows don't open. The proposed retrofit, including new seating, loudspeakers and emergency lights, would cost an estimated $70,000. The department has applied for grants.

"We have no plans of mounting a machine gun," he said. "The whole idea is to protect the occupants."

While Warren County's Lamouree acknowledged the MRAP will likely spend most of its time in a heated garage, with "minimal" maintenance costs, it could be used occasionally by the emergency response team, which has used armored vehicles to serve drug warrants.

"We live in the North Country," he said. "It's very common for people to have high-powered hunting rifles."

In one recent incident, a team used its armored military-surplus Humvee to approach a barricaded suspect, similar to a circumstance in which it might use the MRAP.

"We rolled the Humvee in the front yard, gave a couple of commands and he said, `OK, I'm coming out," said investigator Jeff Gildersleeve. "That's the way we like them to end."

Others in New York that got big armored trucks included sheriff's departments in Jefferson County, Steuben County and Sullivan County, and police in Nassau County, Plattsburgh and Hamburg Village. Police departments statewide have also acquired almost 150 other trucks and Humvees, a dozen of them armored, over the past two years.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SURPLUS_ARMORED_TRUCKS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-11-24-11-42-57


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on November 27, 2013, 10:55:09 am
Defense Department gives local police equipment designed for a war zone

From war zones to city streets, some military vehicles are getting a new life -- and not everyone is happy about the recycling.

The Defense Department recently announced it would be giving domestic law enforcement forces hulking vehicles designed to efficiently maneuver in a war zone for use in thwarting any potential high-scale activity.

This did not sit well with those who see a troubling trend: the militarization of local police departments, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which has criticized the Defense Department for giving 18-ton, $500,000 armor-protected military fighting vehicles to local forces.

ACLU affiliates have been collecting 2012 records to determine the extent of military hardware and tactics sent to police and plan to issue a report early next year.

"One of our concerns with this is it has a tendency to escalate violence," said ACLU Center for Justice senior counsel Kara Dansky.

An Associated Press investigation of the Defense Department military surplus program this year found that a disproportionate share of the $4.2 billion worth of property distributed since 1990 — everything from blankets to bayonets and Humvees — has been obtained by police and sheriff's departments in rural areas with few officers and little crime.

Ohio State University campus police got one vehicle, saying they would use it in large-scale emergencies and to provide a police presence on football game days. Others went to police in High Springs, Fla., and the sheriff's office in Dallas County, Texas.

In New York, the Albany County sheriff's department already had four smaller military-surplus Humvees, which have been used for storm evacuations and to pull trees out of roadways. Their new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle will go into service after technicians remove the gun turret and change the paint from military sand to civilian black.

Sheriff Craig Apple rejected the idea that the nation's police forces are becoming too militaristic.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he said. "Our problem is we have to make sure we are prepared to respond to every type of crisis."

To be sure, there has been some concerns raised in the past.

Radley Balko, the author of "The Rise of the Warrior Cop," argues that the police mind set in the country is to be like a soldier.

"Instead of bringing soldiers in to do domestic law enforcement, we have allowed, and even encouraged, police officers to basically be armed like, police like, use the tactics of, be dressed like and adopt the mind set of these soldiers," he said at a CSPAN forum last summer. "And the outcome is just as troubling, I think, as if the military were actually doing domestic police themselves."

In October, Reuters ran a column by Michael Shank and Elizabeth Beavers called "The Militarization of U.S. Police Forces" in which the authors called for Congress to permanently ban the transfer of all military-grade equipment to U.S. cities.

The column noted the Pentagon's 1033 Program that allows the Defense Department to donate its surplus equipment. It pointed out allegations of fraud and abuse and called some of the machinery donated "impractical."

"Shocking, almost comical, examples of abuse have been well-documented — from the officer who sold his weapons on eBay, to the one who lent his weapons to unauthorized friends and the police departments that lost the military weapons or tried to auction them off," the column said.

For police and sheriff's departments, which have scooped up 165 of the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPS, since they became available this summer, the price and the ability to deliver shock and awe while serving warrants or dealing with hostage standoffs was, however, just too good to pass up.

"It's armored. It's heavy. It's intimidating. And it's free," said Apple.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/11/26/defense-department-gives-local-police-equipment-designed-for-warzone/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Kilika on November 27, 2013, 01:15:35 pm
Quote
...And it's free," said Apple.

No it's not free! The American public paid private corporations for those vehicles at a half a million each.


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on December 23, 2013, 01:24:59 pm
New armored tank for town police sparks fear, war of words

A war of words has broken out over police force in California getting a new armored vehicle built more for a state of war than patrolling in the Golden State.
 
The Salinas Police Department recently issued a news release proudly announcing the arrival of the armored truck built to survive minefield explosions, which it got compliments of federal taxpayers as part of a program to convert military equipment to law-enforcement use.

(http://www.bizpacreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/califmwrap1222-300x211.jpg)

“That vehicle is made for war. Do not use my safety to justify that vehicle,” one wrote. “The Salinas Police Department is just a bunch of cowards that want to use that vehicle as intimidation and to terrorize the citizens of this city.”
 
‘To stop gang members?” another wrote. “Hmmm gang members don’t riot in mass numbers. It’s right in front of our faces and we don’t see it. Why would the ARMY!!! give something like that for FREE!!! Let’s think for once people.”
 
Police Chief Kelly McMillin said he doesn’t understand the problem.
 
“I knew this was going to come up,” he said in an interview with the Salinas Californian. “It’s the militarization-of-the-police issue. People are like, ‘Why do you need this?’”
 
He said it’s not what the department has, it’s what it does that’s the point.
 
“An allegation that we are militarizing has to be that we were patrolling the streets in platoons in greater numbers, that we were setting up checkpoints and searching people in and out of neighborhoods,” he told the interviewer.
 
The Salinas PD isn’t doing any of that, he said.
 
Maybe not. And maybe it never will under Kelly McMillin. But that’s not the point, and it’s hard to believe McMillin and the reporter from the Salinas Californian don’t know that.
 
This country only two months ago saw rangers for the National Park Service – National Park rangers, for God’s sake – turn into a bunch of storm troopers keeping World War II vets out of their own monument, and visitors from “recreating” at Yosemite.
 
And Chief McMillin doesn’t understand why citizens don’t trust the government with ever-greater weaponry in the hands of a “civilian” police force?
 
Just ask the commenters on the Salinas Californian article.
 
“It could be used to deliver a whole bunch of shut the hell up to the citizens of this fair town,” one wrote.
 
Another agreed.
 
“And Obama said we don’t need military weapons in hands of citizens”

http://www.infowars.com/new-armored-tank-for-town-police-sparks-fear-war-of-words/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Kilika on December 23, 2013, 02:16:07 pm
Quote
“An allegation that we are militarizing has to be that we were patrolling the streets in platoons in greater numbers, that we were setting up checkpoints and searching people in and out of neighborhoods,” he told the interviewer.

Typical law enforcement double-speak. It's no allegation, it's a fact.

And his definition of "platoons in great numbers" suggests that platoons of small numbers is okay! And yes, in fact they do set up check points all the time. They call them "DUI Task Force". They also have what they call "VIPER" teams that also set up check points.

In other words, the guy is lying and trying to mislead the public. THAT is your "law enforcement" America.


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on December 27, 2013, 10:29:15 am
The Next Step in Mass Casualty Response? Austin FD Looking at Buying Bulletproof Vests After New FEMA Guidelines

The Austin Fire Department in Texas is considering buying bulletproof vests for its first responders after a new federal report said emergency medical personnel should be ready to go in and treat the wounded even in situations that are still potentially dangerous.

Guidelines on mass casualty incidents from the Federal Emergency Management Agency say emergency medical personnel should be prepared to go into “warm zones” — areas not yet secured, where there still could be a gunman on the loose — in order to provide fast care. The FEMA report, released in September, said trained medical tactical teams wearing ballistic protective equipment should go in with law enforcement to quickly treat, stabilize and evacuate victims during an emergency situation.
 
“There’s always an inherent amount of risk going into those scenes, you know, and when you’re not protected with the best safety equipment out there, that risk kind of goes up,” Randy Denzer with the Austin Firefighters Association told Austin’s KVUE-TV.
 
No formal decision has been made in Austin; a fire department spokesman told KVUE they are considering financing options for the vests, which can run between $300 and $3,000.
 
Officials who studied the Boston Marathon bombings and mass shootings like at Sandy Hook Elementary agree that “aggressive” medical responses, like sending in paramedics with police, can be critical in saving lives, The New York Times reported.
 
“The Austin Firefighters Association is all for changing those protocols just like the Obama administration is now asking us to do. We’re all for it. The one thing we’re also for though is we want to make sure that if there’s any safety equipment that can help us do our job better, help us get to the patients sooner than that’s all worth looking into very well,” Denzer told KVUE.

Paramedics with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services have had bulletproof vests for the last decade.
 
“What we’re trying to teach people now is to push forward, even though the scene may not be totally secure,” Captain Matt Clark told KTBC-TV. “If there’s a section that is secure then we’ll start sending medics, start sending firefighters in to start evacuating and start treating immediately the wounded and so hopefully they’ll have better outcomes in the end.”

Austin-Travis County EMS Commander Jonathan Mudge told KVUE he last wore his vest on a call several months ago.
 
“At the end of the day, our goal is to go home to our families and keep serving our community,” Mudge said.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/27/the-next-step-in-mass-casualty-response-austin-fd-looking-at-buying-bulletproof-vests-after-new-fema-guidelines/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Kilika on December 27, 2013, 03:17:58 pm
Quote
The Austin Fire Department in Texas is considering buying bulletproof vests for its first responders after a new federal report said emergency medical personnel should be ready to go in and treat the wounded even in situations that are still potentially dangerous.

Now THAT is military-think. "treat the wounded"?  ::)

Current emergency personnel policy is that they will not enter a location, and are even prevented by police, till the location is "secured" by law enforcement to make sure there are no potential risks from somebody with a weapon, etc. But this only happens when there is an event at a location, and say EMT's are called by somebody OTHER than the suspect or property resident, usually police. If a resident calls for an ambulance, they will enter without police unless they see a problem, or are prevented by law enforcement.

Emergency personnel are not trained to deal with violent people. They are trained to stabilize a medical malady, and transport to a medical facility, that's it. They are not combat medics, though many have served as medics or corpsmen. They are civilian EMT's and paramedics.
the Obama
Quote
“The Austin Firefighters Association is all for changing those protocols just like administration is now asking us to do. We’re all for it.

There you go. More "federalism".


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on January 22, 2014, 08:53:41 am
Utah Police Obtain Grenade Launchers, Riot Gear From Feds
Like FEMA, local police are also preparing for mass panic
.

Police departments across Utah have been receiving surplus military gear well-suited for riot control, such as grenade launchers and armored vehicles, through a U.S. Department of Defense program that is far more prevalent than what was previously known, according to recently released documents.

For the past five years, the Pentagon has equipped dozens of Utah police departments with a wide variety of military equipment commonly used in riot response such as the aforementioned grenade launchers, M14s, M16s and mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles through the Excess Property 1033 Program, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

In total, over 2,240 pieces of military equipment valued at nearly $3 million have been sent to Utah since 2009, an amount far more staggering than what was revealed before.

Several of the sheriffs indicated that the equipment would only be used in worst-case scenarios.

“Are they absolutely necessary? Well, you never know,” Wasatch County Sheriff Todd Bonner said. “It’s good to be prepared.”

Iron Co. Sheriff Mark Gower also said that his department’s MRAP will only be used in “very, very limited situations where we anticipate the possibility of someone shooting at us.”

Another sheriff, Lynn Yeates with Box Elder Co., stated that his department’s grenade launchers will be used to fire non-lethal rounds, which are commonly deployed in riot response.

It is no coincidence that the Pentagon is purposely equipping these departments with military gear for civil unrest.

Currently, America is in worse shape economically than it was prior to the 2008 financial crisis. For one thing, America’s manufacturing might has disappeared due to the myriad of government regulations.

To satisfy consumer demand in spite of this, the U.S. has relied on foreign demand for the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which has ensured that countries around the world would accept fiat dollars for their manufactured goods.

But eventually, as the Federal Reserve continues to create more dollars, the value of the already weak dollar will decline to the point where foreign countries will no longer accept them for their goods, destroying the American economy as it finally sinks under its heavy trade deficit.

The Fed’s only response to this and the still lingering recession is to print even more dollars.

“On top of the trillions in dollars already printed thus far, the Fed continues quantitative easing to the tune of about $80 billion per month,” Marc Slavo wrote on the subject. “It’s the only arrow left in the Fed’s quiver, because failing to inject these billions into stock markets and banks will lead to an almost instant collapse of the U.S. financial system.”

“Unfortunately, the current strategy is chock full of its own pitfalls, the least of which being the real possibility of a hyper-inflationary environment developing over coming months and years.”

In essence, by propping up the U.S. “house of cards” economy with the current round of quantitative easing, the Fed is only advancing the collapse of the dollar and the mass chaos that will ensue.

Other federal agencies are also making preparations for this mass rioting and panic.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is currently looking for contractors that can collect and remove bio-medical waste during national emergencies, as reported earlier by Paul Joseph Watson.

Previously, FEMA unsuccessfully sought a contractor that could supply 100,000 medical scrubs to be delivered to 1,000 make-shift “tent hospitals” within 48 hours of a declared emergency.

Last fall, FEMA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, spent $500,000 on automatic pepper spray launchers complete with 240,000 projectiles.

The government knows that a collapse is coming.

http://www.infowars.com/utah-police-obtain-grenade-launchers-riot-gear-from-feds/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on February 10, 2014, 11:18:53 am
DoD Program 1033: Militarizing America’s Cops

• Disturbing trend: D.C. ramps up militarization of police forces across nation

By John Friend

Recent reports emerging from Utah have traditional American conservatives, nationalists and civil libertarians in an outrage at the extent of the militarization of domestic United States law enforcement agencies, including their practices, tactics and equipment.

And while the military-industrial-banking complex may be slavering over the profits it sees from programs like Utah’s, regular citizens are increasingly in the crosshairs of these new soldier-cops, a dangerous prospect for anyone who may find themselves at the mercy of U.S. law enforcement.

A January 19, 2014 article in The Salt Lake Tribune exposed the DoD Excess Property Program, or “1033 program,” run by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) “to transfer leftover military materiel (supplies and equipment) to U.S. state and local civilian law enforcement agencies,” including “grenade launchers, helicopters, military robots, M-16 assault rifles, armored vehicles, riverboats, Battle Dress Uniform clothing, and information technology equipment.”

This past year, the Utah Highway Patrol—totaling about 500 troopers—received a mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, known as an MRAP, typically reserved for war zones. According to The Tribune, law enforcement agencies in Utah also received 1,230 rifles, four grenade launchers, 17 .45-caliber pistols and a variety of magazines and accessories through the 1033 program.

Congress initiated the 1033 program in 1997, which “has transferred more than $4.3 billion worth of property to law enforcement,” according to the Law Enforcement Support Office section of DLA’s website.

The increasingly militarized nature of domestic American law enforcement has led to widespread abuses of American citizens and consistent violations of their basic civil and human rights. As AMERICAN FREE PRESS’s own Dave Gahary recently reported, many American citizens have tragically seen their own family pets shot and killed as a result of out-of-control police tactics across the country. The American people, including women, young adults and the elderly, have been viciously abused by thuggish cops in recent years, with many of these incidents being filmed and uploaded to the Internet.

Many attribute these types of abuses to the militarization of American police forces.

According to a video from “TheLipTV,” “Over the last decade we have seen over 5,000 people killed by police in the United States,” when “4,489 solders have been killed since the beginning of the Iraq war. Since 9-11,  you are 29 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than you are by a terrorist.”

The events of 9-11 have been used to justify not only the fraudulent and disastrous wars America and her North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies currently find themselves involved in, but also to justify the tyrannical abuses of the Constitution and the rise and establishment of the militarized police state, epitomized by the Department of Homeland Security.

Philip Giraldi, a former counter-terrorism specialist with the Central Intelligence Agency and current executive director of the Council for the National Interest, believes that since the events of 9-11, “the United States has abandoned many liberties, constitutional constraints, and its rule of law to become more like Israel”—which includes the increasing militarization of domestic law enforcement agencies and organizations—in order to combat perceived terrorist threats.

Even basic law enforcement practices in the U.S., such as serving arrest warrants and policing the streets, are becoming more and more militarized.

“When police use military-style tactics and weapons to serve warrants on people’s homes,” said Kara Dansky in The Tribune article, a senior lawyer investigating the 1033 program on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, “what we’ve seen is violence ensue.”

- See more at: http://americanfreepress.net/?p=15289#sthash.6wvxqQjy.dpuf



Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on March 11, 2014, 07:51:23 am
Homeland Security Pre-Staging A Domestic Military Force

During the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the U.S. Army built 28,000 MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected Trucks). Now the U.S. Army has announced that it is giving 13,000 of them away, for free. Who’s receiving the trucks? Homeland Security and U.S. Law Enforcement.

Instead of mothballing these MRAPs, Homeland Security is evidently pre-staging a domestic army of militarized agencies, police and law enforcement.

While Police and agencies say that all this military equipment from DHS grants will only be used against crime, the trust in many American alphabet agencies has been broken – now that we know some of the extent at which they are using technology to monitor and probe its own citizenry. DHS and many others, they’re stockpiling.

What we have here is a paranoid government, and one which is apparently and evidently ramping up for something…

    The U.S. Army is giving away 13,000 armored trucks, worth about $500,000 each.

    The 20-ton MRAPs, or Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected trucks, were built specifically to save U.S. soldiers from roadside bombs in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

    Now the trucks are patrolling U.S. city streets. U.S. law enforcement agencies have received the lion’s share of this high-powered military surplus.

    -Bloomberg

Recently, retired Marine Colonel Pete Martino spoke plainly during a Concord (NH) city council public hearing over the cities intent to procure a armored attack truck (the manufacturer’s description, although the police prefer “rescue vehicle”).

He said:

What’s happening here is we’re building a domestic military, because its unlawful or unconstitutional to use American troops on American soil.

My best friend who’s a SWAT officer in Nashua (NH) who came to Iraq with me to train the Iraqi police, sent me an email with a picture of him on the streets of Watertown Mass (Massachusetts) wearing the exact same combat gear that we had in Iraq – only it was a different color.

The way we do things in the military, it’s called task organization. You take a command and then you attach units to it in order to accomplish the mission.

What’s happening is Homeland Security is pre-staging their equipment – it’s consistent. What they’re trying to do is use standardized vehicles, standardized equipment.

I saw a picture in the Boston Globe after the Marathon bombing where there was a state police officer – actually there were two officers – both had identical helmets, flak jackets, weapons, everything I wore in Iraq – only it was all blue.

The officer on one side had a big patch on his back that said Massachusetts State Police. Another officer next to him, his patch said Boston Police.

So what we’re doing here, and let’s not kid ourselves about it, we’re building a domestic army and we’re shrinking the military because the government is afraid of its own citizens.

The last time more than 10 terrorists were in the same place at one time was September 11, and all these vehicles in the world wouldn’t have prevented it, and it wouldn’t have helped anybody. So I don’t know where we’re going to use this many vehicles and this many troops. Concord is just one little cog in the wheel.

We’re building an army over here and I can’t believe people aren’t seeing it. Is everybody blind?

rest: http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/homeland-security-pre-staging-a-domestic-military-force_03102014


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on June 09, 2014, 10:36:58 am
War Gear Flows to Police Departments

Inside the municipal garage of this small lakefront city, parked next to the hefty orange snowplow, sits an even larger truck, this one painted in desert khaki. Weighing 30 tons and built to withstand land mines, the armored combat vehicle is one of hundreds showing up across the country, in police departments big and small.

The 9-foot-tall armored truck was intended for an overseas battlefield. But as President Obama ushers in the end of what he called America’s “long season of war,” the former tools of combat — M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more — are ending up in local police departments, often with little public notice.

During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.

The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look and act like military units. Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of “barbering without a license.”
Continue reading the main story
Military Equipment for Local Police

As the nation’s wars abroad wind down, many of the military’s surplus tools of combat have ended up in the hands of state and local law enforcement. Totals below are the minimum number of pieces acquired since 2006 in a selection of categories.

MRAPS BY STATE

click for map http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-police-departments.html?hp&_r=2

When the military’s mine-resistant trucks began arriving in large numbers last year, Neenah and places like it were plunged into the middle of a debate over whether the post-9/11 era had obscured the lines between soldier and police officer.

“It just seems like ramping up a police department for a problem we don’t have,” said Shay Korittnig, a father of two who spoke against getting the armored truck at a recent public meeting in Neenah. “This is not what I was looking for when I moved here, that my children would view their local police officer as an M-16-toting, SWAT-apparel-wearing officer.”

A quiet city of about 25,000 people, Neenah has a violent crime rate that is far below the national average. Neenah has not had a homicide in more than five years.

“Somebody has to be the first person to say ‘Why are we doing this?’ ” said William Pollnow Jr., a Neenah city councilman who opposed getting the new police truck.

Neenah’s police chief, Kevin E. Wilkinson, said he understood the concern. At first, he thought the anti-mine truck was too big. But the department’s old armored car could not withstand high-powered gunfire, he said.

“I don’t like it. I wish it were the way it was when I was a kid,” he said. But he said the possibility of violence, however remote, required taking precautions. “We’re not going to go out there as Officer Friendly with no body armor and just a handgun and say ‘Good enough.’ ”

Congress created the military-transfer program in the early 1990s, when violent crime plagued America’s cities and the police felt outgunned by drug gangs. Today, crime has fallen to its lowest levels in a generation, the wars have wound down, and despite current fears, the number of domestic terrorist attacks has declined sharply from the 1960s and 1970s.
Continue reading the main story

Police departments, though, are adding more firepower and military gear than ever. Some, especially in larger cities, have used federal grant money to buy armored cars and other tactical gear. And the free surplus program remains a favorite of many police chiefs who say they could otherwise not afford such equipment. Chief Wilkinson said he expects the police to use the new truck rarely, when the department’s SWAT team faces an armed standoff or serves a warrant on someone believed to be dangerous.

Today, Chief Wilkinson said, the police are trained to move in and save lives during a shooting or standoff, in contrast to a generation ago — before the Columbine High School massacre and others that followed it — when they responded by setting up a perimeter and either negotiating with, or waiting out, the suspect.

The number of SWAT teams has skyrocketed since the 1980s, according to studies by Peter B. Kraska, an Eastern Kentucky University professor who has been researching the issue for decades.

The ubiquity of SWAT teams has changed not only the way officers look, but also the way departments view themselves. Recruiting videos feature clips of officers storming into homes with smoke grenades and firing automatic weapons. In Springdale, Ark., a police recruiting video is dominated by SWAT clips, including officers throwing a flash grenade into a house and creeping through a field in camouflage.

In South Carolina, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department’s website features its SWAT team, dressed in black with guns drawn, flanking an armored vehicle that looks like a tank and has a mounted .50-caliber gun. Capt. Chris Cowan, a department spokesman, said the vehicle “allows the department to stay in step with the criminals who are arming themselves more heavily every day.” He said police officers had taken it to schools and community events, where it was a conversation starter.
Photo
Kevin Wilkinson, the police chief of Neenah, Wis., said having a vehicle built for combat would help protect his officers. Credit Darren Hauck for The New York Times

“All of a sudden, we start relationships with people,” he said.

Not everyone agrees that there is a need for such vehicles. Ronald E. Teachman, the police chief in South Bend, Ind., said he decided not to request a mine-resistant vehicle for his city. "I go to schools,” he said. “But I bring ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’ ”

The Pentagon program does not push equipment onto local departments. The pace of transfers depends on how much unneeded equipment the military has, and how much the police request. Equipment that goes unclaimed typically is destroyed. So police chiefs say their choice is often easy: Ask for free equipment that would otherwise be scrapped, or look for money in their budgets to prepare for an unlikely scenario. Most people understand, police officers say.

"When you explain that you’re preparing for something that may never happen, they get it,” said Capt. Tiger Parsons of the Buchanan County Sheriff’s Office in northwest Missouri, which recently received a mine-resistant truck.
Continue reading the main story
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This is totally ridiculous. The sheriff in our small community got a tank through this program and there was no public notice until after...
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How far we have come from the kindly officer in Norman Rockwell's "The Runaway," depicting a burly policeman at a lunch counter, counseling...
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Key question, does police require this? or can police deal effectively with this war gear? Need to assess professionally the mismatch....

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Pentagon data suggest how the police are arming themselves for such worst-case scenarios. Since 2006, the police in six states have received magazines that carry 100 rounds of M-16 ammunition, allowing officers to fire continuously for three times longer than normal. Twenty-two states obtained equipment to detect buried land mines.

In the Indianapolis suburbs, officers said they needed a mine-resistant vehicle to protect against a possible attack by veterans returning from war.

“You have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build I.E.D.’s and to defeat law enforcement techniques,” Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department told the local Fox affiliate, referring to improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs. Sergeant Downing did not return a message seeking comment.
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The police in 38 states have received silencers, which soldiers use to muffle gunfire during raids and sniper attacks. Lauren Wild, the sheriff in rural Walsh County, N.D., said he saw no need for silencers. When told he had 40 of them for his county of 11,000 people, Sheriff Wild confirmed it with a colleague and said he would look into it. "I don’t recall approving them,” he said.

Some officials are reconsidering their eagerness to take the gear. Last year, the sheriff’s office in Oxford County, Maine, told county officials that it wanted a mine-resistant vehicle because Maine’s western foothills “face a previously unimaginable threat from terrorist activities.”

County commissioners approved the request, but recently rescinded it at the sheriff’s request. Scott Cole, the county administrator, said some people expressed concerns about the truck, and the police were comfortable that a neighboring community could offer its vehicle in an emergency.

At the Neenah City Council, Mr. Pollnow is pushing for a requirement that the council vote on all equipment transfers. When he asks about the need for military equipment, he said the answer is always the same: It protects police officers.

“Who’s going to be against that? You’re against the police coming home safe at night?” he said. “But you can always present a worst-case scenario. You can use that as a framework to get anything.”

Chief Wilkinson said he was not interested in militarizing Neenah. But officers are shot, even in small towns. If there were an affordable way to protect his people without the new truck, he would do it.

“I hate having our community divided over a law enforcement issue like this. But we are,” he said. “It drives me to my knees in prayer for the safety of this community every day. And it convinced me that this was the right thing for our community.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-police-departments.html?hp&_r=2


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on June 26, 2014, 06:51:48 pm
‘Virtually Crime Free’ County in Florida Gets MRAP Armored Vehicle
Residents express outrage at "intimidation tactic" used to "strike fear"


(http://hw.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/260614mrap.jpg)

Really? They need that? come on man...

Residents of a virtually crime free county in Florida are expressing outrage over a decision by the Walton County Sheriff’s Office to purchase an MRAP armored vehicle normally used to hunt insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The Walton County Sheriff’s Office got the mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle for the cost of transporting it. The vehicle, for which the department paid $2,500, was a surplus military vehicle that was demilitarized for law enforcement use,” reports NWF Daily News.

Walton County Sheriff’s Officer Mike Adkinson denied that the purchase of the vehicle was an attempt to militarize the police department, adding that he wouldn’t let public opinion get in the way of the “safety” of his colleagues.

“This is not the federal government intruding on your civil liberties,” wrote Adkinson in a Facebook post. “Would you really want them sent into harm’s way without the best protection available, simply because the military originally purchased this vehicle?”

This didn’t stop residents expressing their anger at the decision to buy the vehicle, with one commenting that the purchase represented “an offensive intimidation method used to controll [sic] and strike fear.”

Another respondent agreed, remarking, “This doesn’t make the officers safer. All studies show that the more militarized a department becomes, the more often officers get hurt. This is Walton County, Florida, not Iraq, not Afghanistan.”

As Justin King points out, despite Adkinson’s effort to justify the purchase by pointing to examples where cops have had to deal with suspects barricaded inside their homes, Walton is such a peaceful and virtually crime free neighborhood that it was used to represent an idyllic American town in the 1998 movie The Truman Show.

“Walton County is a part of Florida that is so crime free you can leave your doors unlocked. When Hollywood location scouts were looking for a community so perfect that it appeared to be fake, they came to Walton County. The Truman Show, staring Jim Carey, was filmed on location in a small Walton County community,” writes King, accusing the Sheriff’s department of abandoning common sense by purchasing the vehicle and pointing out that it is only likely to spur additional violence.

“This vehicle is an implement of war. It has no place in this county. The decision to bring this to a small community will only increase violence against citizens by creating a combat mindset in deputies. This violence will be returned, and deputies will face violence on a level not seen before in Walton County,” writes King.

The purchase of armored vehicles formerly used in anti-terror operations overseas has prompted widespread concern that domestic law enforcement in the United States is becoming increasingly militarized and violent. A recent ACLU investigation into the issue decried the fact that American neighborhoods are turning into warzones as SWAT tactics become more brutal, causing an increase in deaths, injuries and property damage.

Former Marine Corps Colonel Peter Martino, who was stationed in Fallujah and trained Iraqi soldiers, warned last year that the Department of Homeland Security is working with law enforcement to build a “domestic army,” because the federal government is afraid of its own citizens.

Martino was speaking at a council meeting concerning a decision to purchase a BearCat armored vehicle. The purchase of the vehicle was mired in controversy after the city’s Police Chief wrote in an application filing to the DHS that the vehicle was needed to deal with the “threat” posed by libertarians, sovereign citizen adherents, and Occupy activists in the region.

Since the winding down of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Department of Defense has been donating armored vehicles to the Department of Homeland Security which in turn has been selling them to police departments across the country.

Last month we reported on how police in the Wisconsin town of Neenah had to resort to reassuring residents that military trucks obtained from the U.S. Army now being deployed for domestic law enforcement duties won’t be used to fire on the locals.

In another report last month, Indiana Police Sergeant Dan Downing admitted that the militarization of domestic law enforcement was partly to deal with returning veterans who are now seen as a homegrown terror threat. A local Fox affiliate reported that the cops were now “armed for war” against such threats.

http://www.infowars.com/virtually-crime-free-county-in-florida-gets-mrap-armored-vehicle/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on June 28, 2014, 03:20:55 pm
10 Facts About The SWATification Of America That Everyone Should Know

The number of SWAT team raids in the United States every year is now more than 25 times higher than it was back in 1980.  As America has conducted wars overseas in recent years, our police forces have become increasingly militarized as well.  And without a doubt, many of our cities have become much more dangerous places.  Thanks to relentless illegal immigration, drug cartels are thriving and there are now at least 1.4 million gang members living in the United States.  But there are many that believe that the militarization of our police forces has gone way too far.  Almost weekly, SWAT team brutality somewhere in America makes national headlines.  You are about to read about a couple of horrific examples of this below.  Once upon a time, police in America were helpful and friendly and the public generally trusted them.  But now our police forces are being transformed into military-style units that often act like they are in the middle of Iraq or Afghanistan.  The following are 10 facts about the SWATification of America that everyone should know…

#1 In 1980, there were approximately 3,000 SWAT raids in the United States.  Now, there are more than 80,000 SWAT raids per year in this country.

#2 79 percent of the time, SWAT teams are deployed to private homes.

#3 50 percent of the victims of SWAT raids are either black or Latino.

#4 In 65 percent of SWAT deployments, “a battering ram, boot, or some sort of explosive device” is used to gain forced entry to a home.

#5 62 percent of all SWAT raids involve a search for drugs.

#6 In at least 36 percent of all SWAT raids, “no contraband of any kind” is found by the police.

#7 In cases where it is suspected that there is a weapon in the home, police only find a weapon 35 percent of the time.

#8 More than 100 American families have their homes raided by SWAT teams every single day.

#9 Only 7 percent of all SWAT deployments are for “hostage, barricade or active-shooter scenarios”.

#10 Even small towns are getting SWAT teams now.  30 years ago, only 25.6 percent of communities with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team.  Now, that number has increased to 80 percent.

And thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, police forces all over the nation are being showered with billions of dollars of military equipment that is coming home from overseas.  The following is what a recent Time Magazine article had to say about this phenomenon…

    As the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have wound down, police departments have been obtaining military equipment, vehicles and uniforms that have flowed directly from the Department of Defense. According to a new report by the ACLU, the federal government has funneled $4.3 billion of military property to law enforcement agencies since the late 1990s, including $450 million worth in 2013. Five hundred law enforcement agencies have received Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, built to withstand bomb blasts. More than 15,000 items of military protective equipment and “battle dress uniforms,” or fatigues worn by the U.S. Army, have been transferred. The report includes details of police agencies in towns like North Little Rock, Ark., (pop: 62,000), which has 34 automatic and semi-automatic rifles, a Mamba tactical vehicle and two MARCbots, which are armed robots designed for use in Afghanistan.

But when you start arming the police like military units and your start training them like military units, eventually they start acting like military units and the results are often quite frightening.

For example, just check out what happened when a SWAT team in Florida raided the home of one young couple earlier this month…

    At approximately 6:16 am on June 10th, 2014, Kari Edwards and her live-in boyfriend were seized upon by a SWAT team who smashed in the door and using flashbangs and armed to the teeth, swarmed upon the couple and even stripped Ms. Edwards naked in the process.

    The couple says that the group entailed personnel from DHS, for whom Edwards once worked. After smashing in the door, the tactical team threw in flashbang grenades, traumatizing their cat and swarmed upon Edwards’s boyfriend and Edwards who had just gotten out of the shower.

    “They busted in like I was a terrorist or something,” Edwards said.

    “[An officer] demanded that I drop the towel I was covering my naked body with before snatching it off me physically and throwing me to the ground.”

    “While I lay naked, I was cuffed so tightly I could not feel my hands. For no reason, at gunpoint,” Edwards said. “[Agents] refused to cover me, no matter how many times I asked.”

That is the kind of thing that I would expect to happen in Nazi Germany, not the United States of America.

But this next example is even more horrifying.  The following is what one mother says happened to her 2-year-old son when a SWAT team raided her home…

    After the SWAT team broke down the door, they threw a flashbang grenade inside. It landed in my son’s crib.

    Flashbang grenades were created for soldiers to use during battle. When they explode, the noise is so loud and the flash is so bright that anyone close by is temporarily blinded and deafened. It’s been three weeks since the flashbang exploded next to my sleeping baby, and he’s still covered in burns.

    There’s still a hole in his chest that exposes his ribs. At least that’s what I’ve been told; I’m afraid to look.

    My husband’s nephew, the one they were looking for, wasn’t there. He doesn’t even live in that house. After breaking down the door, throwing my husband to the ground, and screaming at my children, the officers – armed with M16s – filed through the house like they were playing war. They searched for drugs and never found any.

    I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him. He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn’t see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he’d just lost a tooth.

Does that make you angry?

It should.

That young child is probably going to be disfigured for the rest of his life because of the brutality and the carelessness of that SWAT team.

Yes, we live in perilous times and many of our communities would rapidly descend into anarchy if there were no police.

But that does not mean that they have to act like Nazis.  They should be able to protect us while treating us with dignity and respect at the same time.

So what do you think?

Please share your opinion by posting a comment below…

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/10-facts-about-the-swatification-of-america-that-everyone-should-know


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on August 15, 2014, 07:25:05 am
Name of Officer Involved in Shooting to be Released...
http://abcnews.go.com/US/ferguson-missouri-police-release-officer-fatal-shooting/story?id=24992945

RAND PAUL: WE MUST DEMILITARIZE POLICE...

http://time.com/3111474/rand-paul-ferguson-police/

PENTAGON WEAPONRY CONFIRMED IN ST. LOUIS COUNTY...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/08/13/ferguson-police-michael-brown-militarization-column/14006383/

Half a billion dollars of military gear given to local law enforcement -- last year...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/14/the-pentagon-gave-nearly-half-a-billion-dollars-of-military-gear-to-local-law-enforcement-last-year/

400 armored vehicles, 500 aircraft...
http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/how-congress-helped-create-ferguson-s-militarized-police-20140814

93,763 new machine guns...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-police-armed-with-93763-new-machine-guns-9670107.html

Libertarian, Liberal Lawmakers Share Concerns...
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/08/14/conservative-liberal-lawmakers-share-concerns-about-police-tactics-in-ferguson/?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_news

MO COPS GAS NEWS CREW...
http://boingboing.net/2014/08/14/video-of-ferguson-police-gassi.html

VIDEO...
http://boingboing.net/2014/08/14/video-of-ferguson-police-gassi.html

Patrol captain tapped for Ferguson duty 'understands urban'...

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/patrol-captain-tapped-for-ferguson-duty-understands-urban-policing/article_c2d38428-b5a4-590d-973f-d9d814e1ba97.html

Congressman calls for martial law...
http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/14/john-lewis-calls-on-obama-to-declare-martial-law-in-ferguson-missouri/

NAACP appeals to UN...
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/08/13/NAACP-Michael-Brown-Shooting-Front-and-Center-at-the-United-Nations

POLICE CHIEF RIPS OBAMA...

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/215178-police-chief-hits-obama-for-ferguson-remarks

'DISCUSSING TACTICS FROM MARTHA'S VINEYARD NOT HELPFUL'...
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/215178-police-chief-hits-obama-for-ferguson-remarks


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on August 19, 2014, 08:56:09 am
‘Thunderstruck?’: Missouri Governor Helped Ferguson Get Surplus Military Equipment

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, who yesterday said he was “thunderstruck” to learn how militarized police in Ferguson had become, signed off  as recently as January on statewide participation in a Pentagon program providing local police departments with surplus equipment.

In authorizing Ferguson police and other local law enforcement agencies to apply for firearms and other equipment, Nixon also directed his administration to “conduct management and oversight of the program,” documents show.

Should Nixon, a Democrat elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012, have been surprised? Participating jurisdictions, including agencies in St. Louis County, received weapons and equipment as early as 2010 and again in 2012, 2013 and this summer. Ferguson is a St. Louis suburb.

In an interview yesterday on ABC’s “This Week,” Nixon commented on the images of the Ferguson Police Department using military-style equipment and tactics following protests and riots in the St. Louis suburb after an officer fatally shot Michael Brown, 18, who was black. Nixon said:

    I, all of us, were thunderstruck by the pictures we saw. I mean, the overmilitarization, the MRAPs rolling in, the guns pointed at kids in the street. All of that, I think, instead of ratcheting down, brought emotion up.

Nixon,  the state’s attorney general for 15 years, later called in the National Guard to counter renewed violence, looting, and unrest in Ferguson.

Missouri participates in the Department of Defense Excess Property Program (1033), which allows local and state law enforcement agencies to obtain surplus equipment.

To apply, police chiefs and sheriffs must complete a 1033 application, shown below.  The Missouri application, which has Nixon’s name and title at the top left, is the same for local and state departments, Mike O’Connell, communications director for the Missouri Department of Public Safety, told The Daily Signal.

Included in the application, which was revised last month, is a “State Plan of Operation” between the state and law enforcement agencies. It states:

    The Governor of the State of MISSOURI has designated in writing with an effective date of January to implement this program statewide as well as conduct management and oversight of this program.

Once an application receives approval, the Defense Department’s Law Enforcement Support Office gives a “screening authorization letter” to the local drug law enforcement agency.

When a local police chief or sheriff receives the equipment, the application states, they “will be held accountable for their inventory and see the property obtained through this program is used within the guidelines of the program.”

The Missouri Department of Public Safety can make random visits to ensure the property is being used correctly by local law enforcement.

Police departments obtain the equipment, which includes armored personnel carriers, ballistics helmets, ballistics vests, weapons, and aircraft, “for use in counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism operations,” the state agency’s website states.

The Pentagon began the 1033 program — then under a different name — in 1990, when transferred military equipment was authorized for use in drug-enforcement-related activities. In 1996, its use expanded to include terrorism-related events.

Since 2006, the Defense Department has distributed 432 mine-resistant armored vehicles, 400 other armored vehicles, 500 aircraft and 93,000 machine guns to local police departments, National Journal reported.

President Obama addressed the Pentagon’s 1033 program late this afternoon during comments on Ferguson in a White House press conference. The president acknowledged that following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many local law enforcement agencies were  “ill-equipped for a potential catastrophic terrorist attack” and needed better equipment to respond to potential threats. However, Obama said it was time for a review of the program:

     I think it’s probably useful for us to review how the funding has gone, how local law enforcement has used grant dollars, to make sure that what they’re – what they’re purchasing is stuff that they actually need. Because, you know, there is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement, and we don’t want those lines blurred. That would be contrary to our traditions.

Tensions in Ferguson escalated after a town officer, identified six days later as six-year veteran Darren Wilson, shot and killed Brown on Aug. 9. Witnesses said Brown was not armed.

Newsweek reported that St. Louis County law enforcement agencies received tactical equipment, including utility trucks, night vision devices, and sight reflexes, from the Pentagon. O’Connell told Newsweek the agencies also received a dozen 5.56 mm rifles and six .45-caliber pistols through the 1033 program.

Some onlookers said police officers in Ferguson look as if they’re in a war zone, and the scene sparked debate over the need for small police agencies to have military equipment in their arsenals.

Obama also announced today that Attorney General Eric Holder would travel to Ferguson on Wednesday to meet with the FBI and Department of Justice personnel doing their own investigation of the shooting.

Read the application for surplus Pentagon weaponry and equipment approved by Nixon:

http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/18/thunderstruck-gov-jay-nixon-implemented-defense-department-excess-equipment-program-missouri/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on August 22, 2014, 11:38:30 am
Rural CA Town Police Acquire Mine-Resistant War Truck...
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-California/2014/08/21/Rural-Davis-CA-Police-Acquire-Mine-Resistant-War-Vehicle

CO Cops Brag of Armor-Plated MRAP: 'You Want That Intimidation Factor'...
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2014/08/18/colorado-law-enforcement-agencies-obtain-unwanted-military-equipment

Miami Acquires 250 Assault Rifles, 2 Military Choppers, 4 Mine-Resistant Tanks, 5 Grenade Launchers...
http://miami.cbslocal.com/2014/08/18/cbs4-investigates-military-gear-handed-over-to-s-florida-police


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on August 24, 2014, 07:27:23 am
Pentagon struggles to defend 'militarization' of police forces

When local police responded to protesters in Ferguson, Mo., wearing camouflaged fatigues and riding atop turreted armored vehicles – pointing heavy weapons at their fellow US citizens who were angry at the shooting death of an African American teenager – many troops at the Pentagon shook their heads in a mixture of alarm and frustration.   

rest: http://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-struggles-defend-militarization-police-forces-190945389.html


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on August 24, 2014, 07:28:02 am
Not Just Ferguson: 11 Eye-Opening Facts About America’s Militarized Police Forces

The “war on terror” has come home — and it’s wreaking havoc on innocent American lives. The culprit is the militarization of the police.

The weapons that destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq have made their way to local law enforcement. While police forces across the country began a process of militarization — complete with SWAT teams and flash-bang grenades — when President Reagan intensified the “war on drugs,” the post-9/11 “war on terror” has added fuel to the fire.

Through laws and regulations like a provision in defense budgets that authorizes the Pentagon to transfer surplus military gear to police forces, local law enforcement agencies are using weapons found on the battlefields of South Asia and the Middle East.

A recent New York Times article by Matt Apuzzo reported that in the Obama era, “police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” The result is that police agencies around the nation possess military-grade equipment, turning officers who are supposed to fight crime and protect communities into what looks like an invading army. And military-style police raids have increased in recent years, with one count putting the number at 80,000 such raids last year.

In June, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought more attention to police militarization when it issued a comprehensive, nearly 100-page report titled, War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing. Based on public records requests to more than 260 law enforcement agencies in 26 states, the ACLU concluded that this police militarization “unfairly impacts people of color and undermines individual liberties, and it has been allowed to happen in the absence of any meaningful public discussion.”

The information contained in the ACLU report — and in other investigations into the phenomenon — is sobering. From the killing of innocent people to the almost complete lack of debate on these policies, police militarization has turned into a key issue for Americans. It is harming civil liberties, ramping up the “war on drugs,” impacting the most marginalized members of society and transforming neighborhoods into war zones. Here are 11 important — and horrifying — things you should know about the militarization of police.

1. It harms, and sometimes kills, innocent people. When you have heavily armed police officers using flash-bang grenades and armored personnel carriers, innocent people are bound to be hurt. The likelihood of people being killed is raised by the practice of SWAT teams busting down doors with no warning, which leads some people to think it may be a burglary and try to defend themselves. The ACLU documented seven cases of civilians dying in these kinds of raids, and 46 people being injured. That’s only in the cases the civil liberties group looked at, so the true number is actually higher.

Take the case of Tarika Wilson, which the ACLU summarizes. The 26-year-old biracial mother lived in Lima, Ohio. Her boyfriend, Anthony Terry, was wanted by the police on suspicion of drug dealing. So on January 4, 2008, a SWAT team busted down Wilson’s door and opened fire. A SWAT officer killed Wilson and injured her one-year-old baby, Sincere Wilson. The killing sparked rage in Lima and accusations of a racist police department, but the officer who shot Wilson, Sgt. Joe Chavalia, was found not guilty on all charges.

2. Children are impacted. As the case of Wilson shows, the police busting down doors care little about whether there’s a child in the home. Another case profiled by the ACLU shows how children can be caught in the crossfire — with devastating consequences.

In May, after their Wisconsin home had burned down, the Phonesavanh family was staying with relatives in Georgia. One night, a SWAT team with assault rifles invaded the home and threw a flash-bang grenade — despite the presence of kids’ toys in the front yard. The police were looking for the father’s nephew on drug charges. He wasn’t there. But a 19-month-old named Bou Bou was — and the grenade landed in his crib.

Bou Bou was wounded in the chest and had third-degree burns. He was put in a medically induced coma.

Another high-profile instance of a child being killed by paramilitary police tactics occurred in 2010, when seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones died in Detroit. The city’s Special Response Team (Detroit’s SWAT) was looking for Chauncey Owens, a suspect in the killing of a teenager who lived on the second floor of the apartment Jones lived in.

Officers raided the home, threw a flash-bang grenade, and fired one shot that struck Jones in the head. The police agent who fired the fatal shot, Joseph Weekley, has so far gotten off easy: a jury trial ended in deadlock last year, though he will face charges of involuntary manslaughter in September. As The Nation’s Mychal Denzel Smith wrote last year after Weekley was acquitted: “What happened to Aiyana is the result of the militarization of police in this country…Part of what it means to be black in America now is watching your neighborhood become the training ground for our increasingly militarized police units.”

Bou Bou and Jones aren’t the only cases of children being impacted.

According to the ACLU, “of the 818 deployments studied, 14 percent involved the presence of children and 13 percent did not.” It was impossible to determine whether children were present in the rest of the cases studied.

3. The use of SWAT teams is often unnecessary. In many cases, using militarized teams of police is not needed. The ACLU report notes that the vast majority of cases where SWAT teams are deployed are in situations where a search warrant is being executed to look for drugs. In other words, it’s not even 100 percent clear whether there are drugs at the place the police are going to. These situations are not why SWAT was created.

Furthermore, even when SWAT teams think there are weapons, they are often wrong. The ACLU report shows that in the cases where police thought weapons would be there, they were right only a third of the time.

4. The “war on terror” is fueling militarization. A growing number of agencies have taken advantage of the Department of Defense’s “1033” program, which is passed every year as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. The number of police agencies obtaining military equipment like mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles (MRAPs) has increased since 2009, according to USA Today, which notes that this “surplus military equipment” is “left over from U.S. military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.” This equipment is largely cost-free for the police agencies that receive them.

In addition to the Pentagon budget provision, another agency created in the aftermath of 9/11 is helping militarize the police. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) grants funnel military-style equipment to local police departments nationwide. According to a 2011 Center for Investigative Reporting story published by The Daily Beast, at least $34 billion in DHS grants have gone to police agencies to buy military-style equipment. This money has gone to purchase drones, tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, tanks and more.

5. It’s a boon to contractor profits. The trend towards police militarization has given military contractors another lucrative market where they can shop their products. Companies like Lockheed Martin and Blackhawk Industries are making big bucks by selling their equipment to agencies flush with Department of Homeland Security grants.

In addition to selling equipment, contractors also sponsor training events for SWAT teams, like Urban Shield, a major arms expo that has attracted increasing attention from activists in recent years. SWAT teams, police agencies and military contractors converge on Urban Shield, which was held in California last year, to train SWAT teams and promote the equipment.

6. Border militarization and police militarization go hand in hand. The “war on terror” and “war on drugs” aren’t the only wars helping police militarization. There’s also the war on undocumented immigrants.

The notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio, infamous for brutal crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, is the paradigmatic example of this trend. According to the ACLU, Arpaio’s Maricopa County department has acquired a machine gun so powerful it could tear through buildings on multiple city blocks. In addition, he has 120 assault rifles, five armored vehicles and ten helicopters. Other law enforcement agencies in Arizona have obtained equipment like bomb suits and night-vision goggles.

Then there’s a non-local law enforcement agency on the border: the Border Patrol, which has obtained drones and attack helicopters. And Border Patrol agents are acting like they’re at war. A recent Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that the Border Patrol killed 19 people from January 2010-October 2012 — including some incidents in which the agents were under no lethal, direct threat.

7. Police are cracking down on dissent. In 1999, massive protests rocked Seattle during the World Trade Organization meeting. The police cracked down hard on the demonstrators using paramilitary tactics. Police fired tear gas at protesters, causing all hell to break loose.

Norm Stamper, the Seattle police chief at the time, criticized the militarized policing he presided over in a Nation article in 2011. “Rocks, bottles and newspaper racks went flying. Windows were smashed, stores were looted, fires lighted; and more gas filled the streets, with some cops clearly overreacting, escalating and prolonging the conflict,” wrote Stamper.

More than a decade after the Seattle protests, militarized policing to crack down on dissent returned with a vengeance during the wave of Occupy protests in 2011. Tear gas and rubber bullets were used to break up protests in Oakland. Scott Olsen, an Occupy Oakland protester and war veteran, was struck in the head by a police projectile, causing a fractured skull, broken vertebrae and brain swelling.

8. Asset forfeitures are funding police militarization. In June, AlterNet’s Aaron Cantú outlined how civil asset forfeiture laws work.

“It’s a legal fiction spun up hundreds of years ago to give the state the power to convict a person’s property of a crime, or at least, implicate its involvement in the committing of a crime. When that happened, the property was to be legally seized by the state,” wrote Cantú. He went on to explain that law enforcement justifies the seizure of property and cash as a way to break up narcotics rings’ infrastructure. But it can also be used in cases where a person is not convicted, or even charged with a crime.

Asset forfeitures bring in millions of dollars for police agencies, who then spend the money for their own uses. And for some police departments, it goes to militarizing their personnel.

New Yorker reporter Sarah Stillman, who penned a deeply reported piece on asset forfeitures, wrote in August 2013 that “thousands of police departments nationwide have recently acquired stun grenades, armored tanks, counterattack vehicles, and other paramilitary equipment, much of it purchased with asset-forfeiture funds.” So SWAT teams have an incentive to conduct raids where they seize property and cash that then goes into their budgets for more weapons.

9. Dubious informants are used for raids. As The New Yorker’s Stillman wrote in another piece, informants are “the foot soldiers in the government’s war on drugs. By some estimates, up to eighty percent of all drug cases in America involve them.” Given SWAT teams’ focus on finding drugs, it’s no surprise that informants are used to gather information that lead to military-style police raids.

A 2006 policy paper by investigative journalist Radley Balko, who has done the most reporting on militarized policing, highlighted the negative impact of using informants for these raids have. Most often, informants are “people who regularly seek out drug users and dealers and tip off the police in exchange for cash rewards,” and other drug dealers who inform to gain leniency or cash from the police. But these informants are quite unreliable — and the wrong information can lead to tragic consequences.

10. There’s been little debate or oversight. Despite the galloping march towards militarization, the ACLU report notes that “there does not appear to be much, if any, local oversight of law enforcement agency receipt of equipment transfers.” One of the group’s recommendations is for states and local municipalities to enact laws encouraging transparency and oversight of SWAT teams.

11. Communities of color bear the brunt. Across the country, communities of color are the people most targeted by police practices. In recent years, the abuse of “stop and frisk” tactics has attracted widespread attention because of the racially discriminatory way it has been applied.

Militarized policing has also targeted communities of color. According to the ACLU report, “of all the incidents studied where the number and race of the people impacted were known, 39 percent were Black, 11 percent were Latino, 20 were white.” The majority of raids that targeted blacks and Latinos were related to drugs — another metric exposing how the “war on drugs” is racist to the core.

http://billmoyers.com/2014/08/13/not-just-ferguson-11-eye-opening-facts-about-americas-militarized-police-forces/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on August 24, 2014, 07:29:48 am
Pentagon struggles to defend 'militarization' of police forces

When local police responded to protesters in Ferguson, Mo., wearing camouflaged fatigues and riding atop turreted armored vehicles – pointing heavy weapons at their fellow US citizens who were angry at the shooting death of an African American teenager – many troops at the Pentagon shook their heads in a mixture of alarm and frustration.   

rest: http://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-struggles-defend-militarization-police-forces-190945389.html

Document: Army Preparing to Use Lethal Force Against “Unarmed Civilians” During “Full Scale Riots” in U.S.
Training manual outlines "sniper response" during crowd control operations


A document released by the U.S. Army details preparations for “full scale riots” within the United States during which troops may be forced to engage in a “lethal response” to deal with unruly crowds of demonstrators.

The appearance of the document amidst growing unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, with the National Guard now being called in to deal with the disorder, is an ominous coincidence.

The 132-page document, titled U.S. Army Techniques Publication 3-39.33: Civil Disturbances (PDF), was written in April 2014 and recently obtained by Public Intelligence.

The document makes it clear that the techniques detailed therein are to be applied both outside and inside the “continental United States (CONUS)” in the event of “unruly and violent crowds” where it is “necessary to quell riots and restore public order.”

The training manual outlines scenarios under which, “Civil unrest may range from simple, nonviolent protests that address specific issues, to events that turn into full-scale riots.”

The most shocking aspect of the document is the fact that it describes the deployment of a “lethal response” directed against “unarmed civilians,” including “sniper response” and “small arms direct fire.”

Under the heading “sniper response,” the document states, “Ensure that target leaders or troublemakers are targeted,” in addition to a passage which states, “Exploit the psychological effect of an attack.”

(http://hw.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/180814sam1.jpg)

Under the heading “small arms direct fire,” the manual states, “Escalate gradually, starting with a small caliber, single round and work up to a large caliber, automatic.”

Another graphic which depicts “escalation of trauma” directs soldiers how to use “riot batons” in order to cause the necessary level of injury or death to the subject. “Deadly force final target areas” include the back of the neck, the solar plexus, the neck, the spine and the head.

In light of events in Ferguson, where a predominantly black community has faced off with militarized police, it’s interesting to note that the manual makes reference to civil unrest that can arise out of “ethnic hatred” and, “Community unrest (that) results in urban conflicts that arise from highly emotional social and economic issues.” The document also mentions how rioters target “retail stores,” as happened during the looting in Ferguson.

“Significant ethnic differences in a community can create an atmosphere of distrust, even hatred…… (and) can cause an eruption of civil disorder that can lead to full riots,” states the document.

Although the document makes reference to the Constitutional rights of American citizens it goes on to stress that such protections are null and void under a state of emergency, asserting that Posse Comitatus, which is supposed to limit the power of the federal government to use military personnel domestically, “does not apply” under declared “emergency authority” or “When the need for the protection of federal property or federal functions exists.”

It is important to stress that this training manual applies to U.S. Army operations in foreign countries as well as domestically on U.S. soil. Indeed, section 2-18 of the document goes into detail about domestic protests such as the 1999 anti-WTO demonstration in Seattle.

The emergence of the document as National Guard troops prepare to descend on Ferguson, Missouri to deal with looting and civil unrest follows a report we published just a few weeks before the outbreak of the Ferguson riots which documented how National Guard troops were training to detain unruly African-American citizens in prison camps before handing them over to police.

In a special video report, Alex Jones documented how the story was part of wider preparations by the government for domestic disorder that have been ongoing for years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LUbDW3d_pIc

We have reported previously on similar documents that outline how the U.S. Army would be forced to resort to lethal measures in order to deal with unruly Americans during times of emergency within the United States.

In 2012 we covered FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations, a U.S. Army manual that describes how political activists in prison camps will be indoctrinated by specially assigned psychological operations officers. The document makes numerous references to how government agencies like the DHS, ICE and FEMA will be involved in the domestic internment of U.S. citizens during “civil support operations.”

A second US Army Military Police manual that was leaked months later also outlined how military assets would be used domestically to quell riots, confiscate firearms and even kill Americans on U.S. soil during mass civil unrest.

U.S. troops and National Guard also worked with local police to incarcerate Americans in detention camps during drills Alex Jones covered in 1999 in Oakland, California.

A report produced in 2008 by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Institute warned that the United States may experience massive civil unrest in the wake of a series of crises which it termed “strategic shock.”

“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” stated the report, authored by [Ret.] Lt. Col. Nathan Freir, adding that the military may be needed to quell “purposeful domestic resistance”.

Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984, was established under the pretext of a “mass exodus” of illegal aliens crossing the Mexican/US border.

During the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987, however, it was revealed that the program was a secretive “scenario and drill” developed by the federal government to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, assign military commanders to take over state and local governments, and detain large numbers of American citizens determined by the government to be “national security threats.”

http://www.infowars.com/document-army-preparing-to-use-lethal-force-against-unarmed-americans-during-full-scale-riots-in-u-s/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on August 27, 2014, 11:26:21 am
Davis City Council Tells Police To Have Plan For Getting Rid Of MRAP Military Vehicle In Next 60 Days

The Davis City Council has told the police department it must get rid of a military vehicle it received in the next 60 days.

The controversy over the mine-resistant, ambush protected vehicle attracted a large crowd on Tuesday that was largely against it.

The council adopted the resolution to come up with a plan to get rid of the vehicle. A petition is circulating asking the council to press the police to either get rid of or destroy the vehicle.

“I would like to say I do not suggest you take this vehicle and send it out of Davis, I demand it. I demand it!” shouted a man dressed in a “Tank The Tank” T-shirt.

The vehicle, worth nearly $700,000 didn’t cost the Davis Police Department a dime, as it was acquired through a federal government surplus program. The MRAP was developed by the military for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After Pentagon budget cuts, the vehicle has been making its way to local law enforcement.

Davis Police Chief Landry Black made the department’s case for the acquisition, showing high-power weapons his officers have confiscated this year.

A big concern for protesters is the vehicle could be used to quash peaceful protests and demonstrations, especially in light of clashes between heavily-armored police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting death of Michael Brown.

Some suggested other uses for it .

“Since you can’t give it back it should be repurposed for for you can put a water cannon on it,” one person suggested.

The chief promised specific guidelines for its use, and said like many police forces who now have the armored vehicles, it’s a necessary piece of safety equipment.

“We enjoy a certain quality of life but none the less the real world intrudes upon us from time to time,” Black said.

The military has essentially handed down equipment to law enforcement for years. That’s how the Sacramento Police Department received its two helicopters, and Vallejo Police received their own military vehicle—complete with bulletproof tires.

http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/08/26/davis-city-council-tells-police-to-get-rid-of-mrap-military-vehicle-in-next-60-days/


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Psalm 51:17 on September 10, 2014, 06:14:13 pm
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/sep/10/tp-sd-schools-get-armored-vehicle-for-emergencies/
9/10/14
S.D. SCHOOLS GET ARMORED VEHICLE FOR EMERGENCIES

 San Diego

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.

“We recognize the public concern over perceived ‘militarization of law enforcement,’ but nothing could be further from the truth for School Police,” Capt. Joe Florentino said in an email.

Much of that public concern erupted last month in the wake of unrest in Ferguson, Mo., where heavily militarized police squads reacted to crowds protesting the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. The White House is reviewing whether programs that equip local police departments with military gear are appropriate and will study how the equipment is being used.

Florentino describes the district’s MRAP as the county’s only specifically designated victim rescue vehicle. It will be clearly marked “rescue,” as well as display a large red cross on all sides, similar to an ambulance. It is able to climb up rapid floodwaters, pull down walls or ram through buildings to rescue trapped victims, Florentino said.

Schools police will train with firefighters and paramedics on how to insert medical teams into high-risk zones. Such techniques were borne out of the 1999 Columbine school massacre, the captain said. Officers had to wait outside for tactical teams while the shooters continued to kill students and teachers inside the Colorado school, he said.

“We can actually fit an entire classroom of elementary students inside our Rescue Vehicle; that’s 30-40 students evacuated with armor protection during every trip into a danger zone,” he noted.

The MRAP will also be made available to other law enforcement agencies in emergencies.


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on January 04, 2015, 07:00:39 am
Police Continue Militarization Amid Disarmament of Citizens

The Washington Times published two news stories December 30 in which America's Founding Fathers would have seen as a disturbing pattern.

The paper reported that the pace of military-grade shipments to police stations has accelerated in the wake of the Ferguson, Missouri riots and that Maryland State Police have been targeting out-of-state handgun owners on highways for technical violations of state gun control laws.

The Times noted that the federal Law Enforcement Support Office sent nearly 4,000 automatic weapons to local police agencies in just the last three months:

The 3,879 rifles the Pentagon shipped was an astronomical increase over the dozen rifles shipped during the same three-month period in 2013, with several police agencies taking delivery of hundreds of rifles soon after the Ferguson riots.

Armored vehicles, which drew particular scrutiny in the riots in Ferguson and other cities, were less popular in the aftermath. The Pentagon shipped just 11 mine-resistant vehicles, or MRAPs, from Aug. 15 through Nov. 14, compared to nearly 180 in the same time period a year earlier.

One of the recipients of the federal government largesse was the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, which received 415 M-16 automatic rifles, more than one for every one of their 256 officers. “They all work in pretty remote locations out of their homes, so that’s why they would each be outfitted with a rifle,” a spokesman for the Michigan DNR told the Washington Times, adding that the weapons would be able to fire only on semi-automatic once modified.

So much for the leftist slogan that one does not need an “assault weapon” to go hunting.

The concept of a militarized police force coupled with disarmed citizens flies in the face of the attitude of the Founding Fathers, who advocated the reverse: a disarmed government and a heavily armed citizenry. The 1780 Massachusetts state constitution, written by President John Adams, states in Article XVII:

The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence [sic]. And as, in time of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the civil authority, and be governed by it.

Meanwhile, the Maryland State Police have been targeting legal out-of-state gun owners for disarmament. “My wife’s hysterical, shaking and crying,” Florida resident John Filippidis told the Washington Times, after having his car searched on a speeding stop. Filippidis noted that his family was made to stand out in the cold winter weather for 90 minutes, and police officers called him a “liar” for truthfully saying that his legal firearm was at his Florida home. Maryland's strict citizen gun control laws don't recognize out-of-state permits and have unnecessarily technical storage regulations almost guaranteeing out-of-state non-compliance. Filippidis stated,

I don’t have a criminal record. I own a business. I’m a family man, and I tried to explain that to [the officer]. But he had a bad attitude; didn’t want to hear my story. He just wanted to find that gun and take me away from my family. That was his goal, but he couldn’t do it, because I didn’t have a gun, like I told him.

A spokesman for the Maryland State Police didn't deny targeting out-of-state concealed carry permit holders, and asserted that the procedure was perfectly legal.

The Maryland State Declaration of Rights, adopted in 1867, echoes the Massachusetts Constitution by strongly supporting a state citizen militia and calling a standing army “dangerous to liberty.”

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/19823-police-continue-militarization-amid-disarmament-of-citizens


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on May 18, 2015, 02:20:54 pm
I would never ever ever ever think that i would ever agree with Obama on anything.

Obama restricts police military gear, says it can alienate

President Barack Obama says the use of militarized gear by local police departments can give the public the feeling that law enforcement is like "an occupying force."

He says such an image can "alienate and intimidate" people and send the wrong message to the community the police is trying to protect.

Obama is cutting back on shipments of military equipment to local police because he says some equipment made for the battlefield is not appropriate for policing.

Obama made his announcement in Camden, New Jersey, where he praised police efforts to improve their relationship with a poor community struggling with violence.

The announcement came nine months after complaints about officers using riot gear and armored vehicles to confront protesters in Ferguson, Missouri.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

President Barack Obama is cutting back on shipments of military equipment to local police, nine months after complaints about officers using riot gear and armored vehicles to confront protesters in Ferguson, Missouri.

Before announcing his new policies to counter the "militarization" of local law enforcement, Obama visited Camden police headquarters Monday to commend the way officers have improved their relationship with a poor community struggling with violence. He also stopped briefly in nearby Philadelphia to praise its police and fire officials for their quick response to last week's deadly Amtrak wreck.

Obama is banning the Pentagon and other federal agencies from providing police with certain military-style equipment, such as grenade launchers. Other types of military gear will only be sent to local departments under new, stricter guidelines.

The surprise announcement comes after the White House cited public safety issues in suggesting last year that Obama would maintain programs that provide military-style equipment like that used to respond to racially charged demonstrations in Ferguson.

But an interagency group found "substantial risk of misusing or overusing" items like tracked armored vehicles, high-powered firearms and camouflage uniforms, and said that could undermine trust in police.

With police under increased scrutiny over highly publicized deaths of black suspects nationwide, Obama also is unveiling the final report of a task force he created to help build confidence between police and minority communities.

In Camden, Obama visited the police Real-Time Tactical Operational Intelligence Center and watched live video displays of city neighborhoods being monitored by officers.

"It's to address things before they become problems," Chief John Scott Thomson told the president.

Obama also planned to visit a community center to meet with youth and law enforcement before giving a speech on policing.

"I'll highlight steps all cities can take to maintain trust between the brave law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line, and the communities they're sworn to serve and protect," Obama said in his weekly radio address Saturday.

In previewing the president's trip, the White House said that effective immediately, the federal government will no longer fund or provide armored vehicles that run on a tracked system instead of wheels, weaponized aircraft or vehicles, firearms or ammunition of .50-caliber or higher, grenade launchers, bayonets or camouflage uniforms. The federal government also is exploring ways to recall prohibited equipment already distributed.

In addition, a longer list of equipment the federal government provides will come under tighter control, including wheeled armored vehicles like Humvees, manned aircraft, drones, specialized firearms, explosives, battering rams and riot batons, helmets and shields. Starting in October, police will have to get approval from their city council, mayor or some other local governing body to obtain it, provide a persuasive explanation of why it is needed and have more training and data collection on the use of the equipment.

Programs that transfer surplus military-style equipment from the Pentagon and other federal agencies have been around for decades, but Congress increased spending to help departments acquire the gear in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

The issue of police militarization rose to prominence last year after a white police officer in Ferguson fatally shot unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown, sparking protests. Critics questioned why police in full body armor with armored trucks responded to dispel demonstrators, and Obama seemed to sympathize when ordering a review of the programs that provide the equipment.

"There is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement and we don't want those lines blurred," Obama last in August.

But he did not announce a ban in December with the publication of the review, which showed five federal agencies spent $18 billion on programs that provided equipment including 92,442 small arms, 44,275 night-vision devices, 5,235 Humvees, 617 mine-resistant vehicles and 616 aircraft. At the time, the White House defended the programs as proving to be useful in many cases, such as the response to the Boston Marathon bombing. Instead of repealing the programs, Obama issued an executive order that required federal agencies that run the programs to consult with law enforcement and civil rights and civil liberties organizations to recommend changes that make sure they are accountable and transparent.

The report from the 21st Century Policing task force has a long list of recommendations to improve trust in police, including encouraging more transparency about interactions with the public. The White House said 21 police agencies nationwide, including Camden and nearby Philadelphia, have agreed to start putting out never-before released data on citizen interactions like use of force, stops, citations and officer-involved shootings. The administration also is launching an online toolkit to encourage the use of body cameras to record police interactions. And the Justice Department is giving $163 million in grants to incentivize police departments to adopt the report's recommendations.

Ron Davis, director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the Justice Department, told reporters he hoped the report could be a "key transformational document" in rebuilding trust that has been destroyed in recent years between police and minority communities.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-05-18-09-11-51


Title: Re: How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Post by: Mark on August 27, 2017, 10:13:24 pm
Trump to overturn Obama’s ban on military equipment for police

The Trump administration is considering overturning an Obama administration policy that banned surplus military equipment being used by local police departments, USA Today reported.

This policy change would allow police departments around the country to utilize excess military equipment, such as armored vehicles, “high-caliber weapons,” bayonets and grenade launchers.

“Assets that would otherwise be scrapped can be re-purposed to help state, local and tribal law enforcement better protect public safety and reduce crime,” a document obtained by USA Today said.

The Fraternal Order of Police have advocated for a policy reversal, saying communities that are tight on funds could benefit from the surplus equipment.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is expected to address the FOP on Monday.
Why the equipment sharing began

The equipment sharing program, known as “1033 program,” was created under the National Defense Authorization Act in 1997 and was designed to help local law enforcement agencies with drug investigations, USA Today reported.

The program was later expanded to include all local law enforcement operations. Since then, more than $5 million in military equipment has been transferred to state and local police agencies.

“Much of the equipment provided through the 1033 program is entirely defensive in nature … that protect officers in active shooter scenarios and other dangerous situations,” the Trump administration proposal says.
Behind the equipment ban

The Obama administration implemented the policy two years ago after police responded in a “paramilitary” way to riots in St. Louis following the death of Michael Brown, USA Today reported in 2015.

“We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like they’re an occupying force, as opposed to a force that’s part of the community that’s protecting them and serving them,” Obama said in announcing the ban in 2015.

http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/08/27/report-trump-to-overturn-obamas-ban-on-military-equipment-for-police/