Loading cops with military gear doesn’t save lives if the cops stand around in the parking lot trying not to get shot. But police militarization sure helps quash protest, says the socialist Jacobin:
…What’s the point of loading local police forces up with menacing war-fighting equipment if they’re still going to be fatally intimidated by one teenager with an assault rifle?
The answer, sadly, may be more or less the same. Like the various forms of privacy-shredding mass surveillance we’ve been told to accept as the price of physical security, these military transfers ultimately may not actually be that helpful for stopping what we’re told they exist to stop — namely, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and the like.
What they have proven remarkably useful for, though, is to intimidate and repress protesters and angry local populations, and so help quell and control civil unrest, especially when that unrest takes the form of angry protests demanding an end to the nonstop onslaught of police violence that has especially devastated black communities. Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, suggested as much in his speech on the repeal of Obama’s executive order, charging it would “send a strong message that we will not allow criminal activity, violence and lawlessness to become the new normal.”
Critics of police militarization have been warning about this for a while: that maybe the most useful thing about all this military equipment isn’t so much to stop terrorism as it is to keep an unruly public under the government’s thumb, as is the case with militarized security forces in other countries. Maybe there was a time when this hypothesis could be easily dismissed. But seeing the fully kitted-out warrior cops of Uvalde standing by as an eighteen-year-old shot little kids to death makes it harder to do so [Branko Marcetic, “The Uvalde Massacre Has Exposed the Lies That Once Justified Police Militarization,” Jacobin, 2022.06.07].
Giving cops bigger guns and thicker suits of armor may help them confront armed murderers, but it also bulks up the state for war against dissent. Copying effective weapons restrictions from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and other civilized nations can save lives without putting the police state on steroids and imperiling peaceful protestors.
You really are on to a concept here. “Like seems to get like”. Only in our country’s current case the militarized police
“FEEL” so much more powerful and impotent that they exude that aura of invincibility around them to create fear of their very presence. The short-comings they showed in Uvalde were bound to happen sooner or later, I think.
To me, it’s like when some of us boys at Mark Twain Elementary School pretended to be “26 Men,” which itself was fictional TV series that featured 26 cowboys riding back and forth across the TV screen. We picked up sticks to be our rifles, ran around the playground pretending to save damsels and prevent carnage. The fact that we were pretending to be a pretend group of pretend lawmen.
You know what happened? One of the boys fell down as we were galloping to one disaster or another, fell on his stick, and nearly, as the cliche goes, “poked his eye out.”
One thing about our group of pretend lawmen was we didn’t chicken out like the highly armed Uvalde police did. Maybe that was because we only had sticks for guns.
By the way, the real authorities (Mr Simons, our principal) made us lawmen drop our sticks and not run so fast across the playground.
Curios, can you print an example of a law enforcement agency that uses the term “militarization” in their written polices under equipment?
Most have the phrase “tactical” but I would be curious if the former word is used. Thank you.
we’ll be under the GQP jackboot soon so it’s sorta like a dress rehearsal…”This is the story of 26 men who rode the Arizona territory, brave and bold, their story’s seldom told…ride on! ride on! ride on!”
The law enforcement industry is the militarized, tactical arm of Lee Atwater’s Republican Party.
The United States has a label for non-white men: felons.
Anyone believing that African-Americans, Latino-Americans, or American Indians are imprisoned disproportionately because they are more often criminals is wrong. In fact, white people per capita commit at least as many drug-related crimes as their non-white brethren o amigas.
How do you expect magats to control terrorists when they refuse to name white scumacysts terrorists? You realize every Muslim who made the news was an Islamic terrorist to magats. I suspect it is the same with POC.
Kim, law enforcement probably doesn’t often use the word militarization, but that does not negate the broadly recognized and well-documented fact that we have been transferring military equipment to police through the 1033 program since 1996.
But the Bay Area Transit Authority has a Military Equipment Use Policy. The Hayward city PD, Union City PD and other California law enforcement agencies are drafting similar Military Equipment Use Policies under a new state law.
Go into the military, become a policeman. Why trade uniforms and equipment?
Police are under no moral or legal obligation to throw away their lives to protect yours. Remember that the next time you see a situation requiring a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy.
Exactly, MFI. One of the “big lies” deals with “good guys with guns”. Millions of gun owners in America consider themselves to be “good guys with guns” yet the mass murder rates are skyrocketing. If “good guys with guns” were the answer to the crisis, it would have helped even a little by now.
The ‘Good Guys With Guns’ Keep Failing to Stop Mass Shootings
BY SANYA MANSOOR
MAY 31, 2022 8:09 PM EDT
Within hours of the school shooting in Uvalde that left 19 students and two teachers dead, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said armed police need to be stationed in elementary schools. Former President Donald Trump advocated for armed teachers and metal detectors days later in a speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton dismissed the idea of stronger gun laws in lieu of arming and training citizens.
The political talking point of increasing the presence of police and armed teachers to deter mass shootings traces its origins to 2012—having been famously proposed by NRA head Wayne LaPierre following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 children and six staff members were killed. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he said, as the nation debated tougher gun control measures.
But in the 10 years since, “good guys with guns” have been present or quickly arrived at the scene of nearly every major mass shooting and failed to stop the gunman before he was able to take multiple lives. “Good guys with guns don’t always win gunfights,” says David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center.
In the May 14 mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York supermarket, Aaron Salter—an armed security guard and former police officer—was hailed for his efforts at trying to protect others. At least one of his bullets hit the shooter, but the gunman was protected by an armor-plated vest and he fatally shot Salter—one of 10 victims.
Armed individuals have also been present at the site of major several mass shootings since Sandy Hook. Police and security guards were present at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in 2017, and in the Mandalay Bay Hotel where the gunman was located. Sixty people were killed, and more than 400 wounded. At the Pulse nightclub shooting in June 2016, an armed security guard shot at the gunman, who killed 49 people. (Although initially lauded as a hero, some victims’ family members sued the off-duty officer, alleging he remained outside of the establishment to protect himself.)
Armed guards have also failed to stop shooters in schools. In 2018, a shooter killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School in Texas even though two officers were on site and one was wounded trying to stop the gunman. Earlier that year, a school resource officer was on campus at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.—although he was accused of hiding during the mass shooting, rather than rushing in.
The situation is even more complicated in Uvalde, where conflicting accounts of events have emerged and the police response is being widely criticized. Local police waited for more than an hour before a U.S. Border Patrol tactical team arrived and stormed the classrooms where the gunman barricaded himself—killing him. Texas Department of Public Safety head Steven McCraw said waiting was “the wrong decision, period,” and police conduct is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department.
However, the first police officer responded to Robb Elementary School within one minute of the initial reports of a gunman with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—before the shooter had even entered the school.
“Sometimes having a gun is useful but a lot of times it makes things worse, even when there’s a clear bad guy,” says Hemenway. Perpetrators of mass shootings are more likely to be armed with semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, which make them capable of firing dozens of rounds. Some—like the gunman in Buffalo—also wear body armor. “Bad guys get such military-style weapons, and now wear protection so that even if you shoot them, they may not get hurt,” Hemenway adds.
Research disputes recent assertions from Cruz and others that armed law enforcement on campus is “the most effective tool for keeping kids safe.” A 2021 JAMA Network Open study analyzed every documented incident from 1980-2019 in which “one or more people was intentionally shot in a school building during the school day, or where a perpetrator came to school heavily armed with the intent of firing indiscriminately.” It found “no association between having an armed officer and deterrence of violence.” “When there’s more guns, more people die,” says Jillian Peterson, one of the author’s of the JAMA study.
A 2015 Harvard University study Hemenway worked on that analyzed data from 2007 to 2011 found that of more than 14,000 crimes in which a victim was present, just under 1% involved a gun used in self defense. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center also found that self-defense gun use is “rare and not more effective at preventing injury than other protective actions.”
Moreover, perpetrators are often at a strong advantage in mass shootings; it’s extremely hard to intervene once a killer is on site. Experts say that’s partly because shooters can afford to be much more unpredictable, since they are expecting to either die or be caught. Victims of a shooting attack, meanwhile, often respond in understandably chaotic and panicked ways. “The shooter is not necessarily worried about getting out of the situation alive. The average person or responding officer is concerned about surviving. You have something to lose. So that’s a huge disadvantage,” says Emma Fridel, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University. ”
https://time.com/6182970/good-guys-guns-mass-shootings-uvalde/
Oh, let’s go there. Moscow Thune equated plinking prairie dogs as a higher value than protecting school kids, grocery shoppers, movie theater, concert attendees, or folks at a construction site.
WTF is wrong with Moscow Thune’s values? 638k things are wrong with Moscow Thune’s values. (His NRA contributions for the uninquisitive.)
The magazine capacity allowed to hunt ducks is 3 rounds. That makes sense for all domestic weapons. It’s long past the time to adopt a “a well regulated militia” – using the rules of the US military, the Swiss, Australians, etc. Background checks, training-training-training-certification, local police input, triple lock security, electronic monitoring, And hello McFly, there is NO REASON for civilians to possess weapons of war like AR-15s, AK-47s, or variants easily convertible to full automatic. The US learned this lesson in the 1920-30 gangster era. Why the F are we re-learning it now?!
The incident that kicked off the proclivity for militarizing the police occurred just a few blocks from my house in North Hollywood, CA in 1997. Two heavily armed and armored bank robbers engaged in a running gun battle with the local constabulary for about three hours. This demonstrated that private citizens had access to weapons and armor that police could not match. So, the first “blow” in the battle of escalating police militarization was struck by NRA enabled/empowered citizens – not the cops, not the military.
Recall that mercenaries, some from South Dakota, and National Guard troops brutalized many of the thousands of demonstrators opposed to the Dakota Excess pipeline who camped on federal land near Cannon Ball, North Dakota. In its aftermath some 761 people were arrested between early August, 2016 and late February, 2017. Trump apparatchiks even referred to the American Indians and their compatriots as jihadists and insurgents.
We all know cops’ lives suck because they reliably abuse the rule of law, their families, alcohol, drugs, food, power, detainees and occasionally murder their wives; but police unions are showered with cash while teachers’ unions get the shaft.