POLICE WEAPONS - THE BIGGER THE BETTER?

[thetragichippy]

People claim the police do not need tanks, military vehicles or sniper rifles and assualt weapons.  While I don't want to catch my local police using tanks to pull people over for speeding tickets, I really don't have a problem with our police department having military weapons to use in situations that would be benefited by the use of them. I think when you have 500 angry protesters burning down private business and destroying vehicles, the cops may need more than a plexiglass riot sheild and a 6 shot revolver.

 

Is this just more politics ?

 

Thoughts??

[stevenash]

Totally agree and anxiously await Mr. Enlightenment to differ.

[EnlightenedMessiah]

if push comes to shove and the American people ever need to take back the country from the government, the last thing I want is for the local police to have tanks while I have a BB gun

[EnlightenedMessiah]

Let me clarify - my tank example is obviously a hyperbole. I do not expect police to use a tank to arrest ferguson rioter #194

[EnlightenedMessiah]

But what if the people are protesting obama after he (hypothetically) amends the constitution and declares himself emperor of the US for another 50 years. Would you want your local police having military grade equipment? If those police don't comply with executive orders they get jailed for treason.

I think when you have 500 angry protesters burning down private business and destroying vehicles, the cops may need more than a plexiglass riot sheild and a 6 shot revolver.
 
Is this just more politics ?
 
Thoughts??

[thetragichippy]

I would hope the police would rebel with us and use those tanks agianst the military who has more than just tanks😊

[Mr. Buddy Garrity]

I would hope the police would rebel with us and use those tanks agianst the military who has more than just tanks

Lmao!  :D

[SKINS]

I would hope the police would rebel with us and use those tanks agianst the military who has more than just tanks😊

Contrary to popular belief, we in the Military do t serve the president, we serve the constitution, so no worries.

[PN-G bamatex]

All things being equal, I would actually disagree with you, hippy. However, all things are not equal.

 

In an ideal world, the police are a civilian force, not a military one, designed to keep the peace, not protect the country. In an ideal world, they should be armed and equipped as such. In an ideal world, giving the police access to military equipment would lead to abuse. And this has happened before. About a week and a half ago, I toured the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, located across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where four little girls were killed in a bombing carried out by white supremacists in 1963. On display in that institute is an armored vehicle left over from World War II, two of which were purchased by the Birmingham Police Department in military surplus auctions and both of which were used to forcefully suppress peaceful civil rights demonstrations during the social turbulence of the 1960s. That was the doing the infamous Bull Connor - the epitome of a tyrannical elected official who abused his power. That is one of the many examples of why, in an ideal world, local elected officials who administrate a civilian police force shouldn't have access to military grade equipment.

 

The problem is, we don't live in an ideal world.

 

The fact that we live in a world where the threats of terrorism, urban violence and protests gone amok is not, however, a good reason to give local police access to military equipment on its own. We have mechanisms in place by which federal authorities who have proper access to military equipment can counter such threats when necessary. A prime example of this is the LA riot following the Rodney King verdict in 1992. When a massive portion of Los Angeles had to be cordoned off and abandoned by LA police because it was consumed in such extreme violence that normal policing efforts were too dangerous and too ineffective, President Bush became the first (and so far the only) president to activate the insurrection clause of the Stafford Act, which gave him the authority to deploy 3,500 active duty military personnel to Los Angeles to restore order. In an ideal world, this would be the pattern for handling a severe threat as you describe, and any time riots such as those in Los Angeles broke out, the president would step in and take this exact action at the exact point it becomes necessary.

 

That brings us to the second problem: we now live in a world where the national political consequences of something as simple and routine as restoring order are such that no president is willing to do so, rendering that mechanism effectively meaningless.

 

Consider New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Stafford Act places constraints on what the president is capable of doing in response to a natural disaster. It gives primary administrative authority over relief efforts to state governors, whom it also requires to have a natural disaster relief plan in place in case of an emergency, to formally request federal resources from the president should they be needed, and to request a full federalization of the emergency response if the situation has reached a point where the state is no longer capable of effectively administrating those efforts. This is why it took so long to get federal aid to any part of Louisiana afflicted by Hurricane Katrina, when it didn't take long to get those resources to Mississippi or Alabama, or to Texas a month later during the evacuation for Hurricane Rita, or to Florida when it was struck by four separate hurricanes in 2004. The governor of Louisiana at the time, Kathleen Blanco, did not follow her disaster relief plan, did not properly request federal resources, and outright refused to request a federalization of the response despite her abject failure to handle the situation, against the recommendations of her own staff, President Bush and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. When faced with the fact that Governor Blanco wouldn't cooperate, the number of people dying in New Orleans and the destruction which was being inflicted by looters and vagrants, President Bush considered circumventing Governor Blanco via the same insurrection clause his father had activated 13 years prior. He wrote about his eventual decision not to circumvent her and provide immediate relief in his memoir, Decision Points, where he admitted that he couldn't do so because of the controversy and potential litigation that would have ensnared his administration if he effectively declared an open rebellion in New Orleans, relieved a female, Democrat governor of a Deep South state from her duties and deployed active duty military personnel, even if 95% of what those personnel would have been doing was disaster relief and it would have meant getting assistance to people trapped in New Orleans a week sooner.

 

Fast forward to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Regardless of the circumstances regarding the Michael Brown shooting, the fact is, Ferguson was wrapped in violence throughout the entire ordeal. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, repeatedly deployed Missouri National Guard troops to Ferguson in largely unsuccessful attempts to restore order from the days after the shooting right through the grand jury announcement. Unlike New Orleans, the circumstances in this situation were much clearer - from a legal standpoint, Ferguson was much more clearly in a state of insurrection than New Orleans would have been. In fact, the situation in Ferguson was largely analogous to the situation in Los Angeles two decades earlier. Yet we didn't get any formal declaration of open insurrection, and no federal troops were deployed to the area to restore order. Why? To be fair, it's hard to say in this case since President Obama hasn't written a memoir of his presidency in which that decision is discussed. Conventional wisdom, however, tells us that the calculus was probably similar in nature to the the calculus President Bush was forced to use in New Orleans. If he's ever asked, President Obama would probably say that the thought of deploying federal troops to Ferguson never crossed his mind - that a military suppression of "mostly peaceful" protests with some light civil disorder would be entirely out of line. Everyone on this site with any common sense knows that statement would be a farce. The president knows just as well as anyone who's seen pictures from Ferguson in the aftermath of the riot that its scope and violence entirely necessitated a military presence - Governor Nixon wouldn't have deployed the National Guard to Ferguson so many times if it hadn't. The truth is that if President Obama had deployed military forces to Ferguson under that pretense, it would have been all over the national news for the rest of his presidency, and even though it would have been the right decision and anyone close to the situation would know that, the vast majority of the American public who would only ever see media clips of soldiers containing and arresting black protesters would view it as the act of a despot (a racist despot at that, if President Obama were white).

 

That is why we don't live in an ideal world. In an ideal world, the right decision gets made. In this world, the politically savvy decision gets made. Missouri's Governor Nixon was able to deploy the National Guard to Ferguson without political backlash because his voters, the citizens of Missouri, were all close enough to the situation to know its true severity and, thus, that it was the right decision to make. President Obama couldn't because most of the rest of the country wasn't paying close enough attention to Ferguson and all of the rest of the country was too far removed from Ferguson to understand that a decision like that was necessary. He would have suffered backlash for it, just the same as President Bush would have if he did so in New Orleans.

 

The reality of this new world we're trying to live in is that mass media has advanced to the point where it shapes public opinion almost entirely on its own. As a result of this and a convergence of several other factors (most notably higher levels of narcissism manifesting in the political leanings of my generation and historically low levels of trust in government), popular sovereignty's ability to constrain tyranny and abuse of power is itself being abused via the constraints it now places on things as fundamental as the rule of law.

 

Because of this, the only people to whom military force is acceptable as a means of restoring order in 99% of cases are going to be the people whose lives, families and homes are at stake when civil unrest breaks out. Federal force is no longer an appropriate means because the vast majority of the country isn't going to support it except in the most extreme cases. That leaves state and local forces to shoulder that responsibility on their own. If state and local forces now bear that responsibility alone, then they need to be equipped to do so. As a result, whatever my ideological reservations about this issue may be, I have to side with my pragmatic sense and say that it is appropriate for local and state authorities to have access to military equipment.

[EnlightenedMessiah]

During ferguson riots, Katrina lootings etc of course I support whatever police tactics are necessary to get people in line. My concern is the increasingly militarization of the police if the government decides to turn on YOU. They're already spying on literally everything we do via NSA.

I'm just surprised that some of the biggest tin foil wearing hat borderline conspiracists are fine with this while distrusting government on pretty much every other issue

[RETIREDFAN1]

In a free republic, the police are not better armed than the citizenry.......figure THAT one out about where we live now........

[tvc184]

The militarization of police is mostly nonsense. I started on SWAT almost 30 years ago and we had those same weapons. The difference is that the city/county/state had to purchase them outright. I carried a full auto machine gun (Galil) but it was purchased by the city I work for. Now the federal government is giving away or loaning surplus gear which is exactly the same but it saves local taxpayers the expense. 

 

The local police are not getting M1A2 Abrams tanks, not getting Stinger missiles and not getting F-15 Strike Eagle jets. What most people are calling "military" does belong to the military but can be purchased by almost anyone. It is millions of pieces of surplus goods that have to be stored, destroyed or given away. My city has a huge piece of military surplus..... a standard tanker truck that we see dozens of every day on our local streets. We have it on standby in case of another event like a hurricane so we can fill it and have enough fuel to run the city for a few days. Wow, we are almost like the First Armored Division. Better move out of the way!!!