Ferguson |
Fallujah |
As Radley Balco (book author, Washington Post writer) has said quite eloquently, this has gone too far. The only beneficiary is the bloated military industrial complex, where arms suppliers can keep building and selling stuff like MRAPs to the military, which can then pawn the stuff off on the police, making it look like there is not as much waste. Meanwhile, the waste continues, in the form of the people wasted by militarized cops, and the deluge of your tax dollars continuing to fall into a Federal black hole. Indeed, some of these police forces seem to have fallen victim to Maslow's Hammer, i.e., when all you have are warfighters and MRAPs, everything looks like a war.
Data on Transfer of Military Gear to Police Departments (NY Times)
"...Make no mistake, I don’t want to see operators in MRAPs smashing through a front door to serve a No Garage Sale Permit warrant. But I also don’t want an innocent victim to bleed out in front of a house where a lunatic is firing an AK. If an MRAP can be used to rescue that victim, I’m all for it...." --Chris Hernandez, police officer and army vet writing "Cops, MRAPs, and the Heartbreak of Police Operator Syndrome" |
There was a mythical time long ago where Hill Street Precinct Captain Frank Furillo kept SWAT Team Leader Lt. Howard Hunter under a tight leash, only letting the team loose as an absolute last resort; there are times you damn well need them. But it seems to me that old Howard "never saw a situation he couldn't use to deploy a SWAT team" is now running the show. Of course, fiction preceded fact. Recall that episode when Hunter buys the flamethrowing tank?
"...Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear
camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and
beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to
quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the
street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing
of tear gas at people in their own yards? (“‘This my property!’ he
shouted, prompting police to fire a tear gas canister directly at his
face.”) Why would someone identifying himself as an 82nd Airborne Army
veteran, observing the Ferguson police scene, comment that “We rolled
lighter than that in an actual warzone”?
--Walter Olsen writing for theCato Institute, as quoted in a Time article by Rand Paul
1 comment:
Why an MRAP at Ohio State University? I don't like the Big 10 more than anyone else, but an MRAP seems like an extreme way to deal with post game traffic...
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