To Terrify and Occupy: How the Excessive Militarization of the Police is Turning Cops Into .........

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:


To Terrify and Occupy
How the Excessive Militarization of the Police is Turning Cops Into Counterinsurgents

By Matthew Harwood



Jason Westcott was afraid.

One night last fall, he discovered via Facebook that a friend of a friend was planning with some co-conspirators to break in to his home. They were intent on stealing Wescott's handgun and a couple of TV sets. According to the Facebook message, the suspect was planning on “burning” Westcott, who promptly called the Tampa Bay police and reported the plot.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the investigating officers responding to Westcott’s call had a simple message for him: “If anyone breaks into this house, grab your gun and shoot to kill.”

Around 7:30 pm on May 27th, the intruders arrived. Westcott followed the officers’ advice, grabbed his gun to defend his home, and died pointing it at the intruders. They used a semiautomatic shotgun and handgun to shoot down the 29-year-old motorcycle mechanic. He was hit three times, once in the arm and twice in his side, and pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital.

The intruders, however, weren’t small-time crooks looking to make a small score. Rather they were members of the Tampa Police Department’s SWAT team, which was executing a search warrant on suspicion that Westcott and his partner were marijuana dealers. They had been tipped off by a confidential informant, whom they drove to Westcott’s home four times between February and May to purchase small amounts of marijuana, at $20-$60 a pop. The informer notified police that he saw two handguns in the home, which was why the Tampa police deployed a SWAT team to execute the search warrant. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175881/tomgram%3A_matthew_harwood%2C_one_nation_under_swat/#more

[WillyT]

1. K & R !!!

[malaise]

2. 1,000 a week? Are you freaking serious?

These former policemen and law enforcement officials understand that police officers shouldn't be breaking down any citizen's door at 3 a.m. armed with AR-15s and flashbang grenades in search of a small amount of drugs, while an MRAP idles in the driveway. The anti-militarists, however, are in the minority right now. And until that changes, violent paramilitary police raids will continue to break down the doors of nearly 1,000 American households a week.

War, once started, can rarely be contained.

----------------------------

[NYC_SKP]

6. LINK to story here. This guy had 0.2 grams of mary jane. So, yanno, war on drugs, right?

I read the fuller story, filled with more sadness here:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/informer-not-neighbor-complaints-led-up-to-fatal-tampa-pot-raid/2187316

I suspect most of these 1,000 per week raids are based on bad informants.

And most are related to the war on drugs.

And I refuse to live in a city where you can be innocent AND be broken into by Ninja Hood wearing armed invaders who think they can shoot me if I don't cooperate.

We had a rash of these about 20 years ago: People can't get police to help when home invaders attack, and they can't defend themselves either because they don't know if the next invaders will be the police themselves.

It's a vicious cycle.

I'm moving to a different community, by the ocean, but need to sell this place and a lot of stuff first.

It all makes me so sad and angry.

[indepat]

10. Senator Levin had thought SWAT teams with militarized weapons would be used against

terraists and the likes of heavily armed drug gangs. As it's worked out, suspicion of a teeny-weeny bit of grass is sufficient for busting the door down and raiding a residential dwelling. Don't we feel so much safer with a Ferguson-styled militarized police force more fitting the template for the modern police force.

[woo me with science]

7. Good god.

[Uncle Joe]

3. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[NYC_SKP]

4. How many things were fucked up about this series of events???

Let's see:

Failed and violent war on drugs (against civilians).

SWAT teams (militarization of civil LEOS).

Misleading the citizen/resident/ultimate victim in this.

Murder of a civilian, in their home, by the police.

Fuck.

[gollygee]

5. This is so twisted

in so many ways, it's hard to know where to start.

[marble falls]

8. They ARE occupying forces. Here in Austin almost 80% of copslive outside Austin. How ...

many of Ferguson's cops live there?

[dgauss]

9. A good place to start would be to stop this incentive -

From the article:

In 1988, Congress authorized the Byrne grant programs in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which gave state and local police federal funds to enlist in the government’s drug war. That grant program, according to Balko, led to the creation of regional and multi-jurisdictional narcotics task forces, which gorged themselves on federal money and, with little federal, state, or local oversight, spent it beefing up their weapons and tactics. In 2011, 585 of these task forces operated off of Byrne grant funding.

The grants, Balko reports, also incentivized the type of policing that has made the war on drugs such a destructive force in American society. The Justice Department doled out Byrne grants based on how many arrests officers made, how much property they seized, and how many warrants they served. The very things these narcotics task forces did very well. “As a result,” Balko writes, “we have roving squads of drug cops, loaded with SWAT gear, who get money if they conduct more raids, make more arrests, and seize more property, and they are virtually immune to accountability if they get out of line.”

[woo me with science]

13. That part about the incentives should be an OP.

ACLU launches nationwide police militarization investigation
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/06/aclu-police-militarization-swat_n_2813334.html

It's almost certain that if the police agencies cooperate, the ACLU will find that the militarization trend has accelerated since Kraska's studies more than a decade ago. All of the policies, incentives and funding mechanisms that were driving the trend then are still in effect now. And most of them have grown in size and scope.

The George W. Bush administration actually began scaling down the Byrne and COPS programs in the early 2000s, part of a general strategy of leaving law enforcement to states and localities. But the Obama administration has since resurrected both programs. The Byrne program got a $2 billion surge in funding as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, by far the largest budget in the program's 25-year history. Obama also gave the COPS program $1.55 billion that same year, a 250 percent increase over its 2008 budget, and again the largest budget in the program's history. Vice President Joe Biden had championed both programs during his time in the Senate.

The Pentagon's 1033 program has also exploded under Obama. In the program's monthly newsletter (Motto: "From Warfighter to Crimefighter&quot , its director announced in October 2011 that his office had given away a record $500 million in military gear in fiscal year 2011, which he noted, "passes the previous mark by several hundred million dollars." He added, "I believe we can exceed that in FY 12.”

Then there are the Department of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism grants. The Center for Investigative Reporting found in a 2011 investigation that since 2001, DHS has given out more than $34 billion in grants to police departments across the country, many of which have been used to purchase military-grade guns, tanks, armor, and armored personnel carriers. The grants have gone to such unlikely terrorism targets as Fargo, N.D.; Canyon County, Idaho; and Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Link to the final ACLU report on militarization of police in America
https://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/war-comes-home-excessive-militarization-american-police-report

[woo me with science]

14. kick

[valerief]

11. USA is sooooo not a Pledge of Allegiance country. Who the fuck would

pledge allegiance to this shit?

[JEB]

12. K&R for exposure.

[woo me with science]

15. kick