Police Militarization Must Be Halted
Last month, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and the House of Representatives finally took a stand against the growing militarization of our police forces and our main streets. Shortly after Congressmen Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) introduced the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act last month in the House of Representatives, a bill that has over 30 bipartisan co-sponsors, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) introduced a bill by the same name in the Senate. Congress is waking up to the rapidly changing face of American law enforcement, and it is ready to do something about it.
The Senate and House bills target the Pentagon’s transfer to police forces of free military-grade equipment coming back from U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. This program has gifted over $5 billion-worth of recently used and unused war equipment – armored personnel carriers, tanks, Humvees, and Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles, grenade launchers, armed drones, and assault weapons – to U.S. police since the late 1990s when the program first started. The bicameral legislation would prohibit the transfer of these military weapons. Given that the Pentagon has 13,000 MRAPs to give away, this comes at a critical time."
*Stopping violent extremist groups or individuals, whether in America or overseas, doesn’t require a militarized approach. As Rand Corporation showed in studying nearly 300 terrorist groups between 1968 and 2006, over 83 percent of them were ended or dismantled by negotiations, integration into the political process, intelligence or policing. Only 7 percent were ended by military force.
The lesson for America law enforcement, then, is to ensure that police represent the community’s demographics (a political issue), live in and integrate with the community (a trust-building and intelligence gathering issue). Anything that increases the distance and distrust makes deterrent and de-escalation much more difficult. Former police chiefs – such as Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, who once used military tactics on protestors in Seattle’s infamous 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization – are saying the same thing. We should take note.
The time is now to change the way we police America before hundreds of thousands of more pieces of military gear go to main streets across America. The face of America is changing quickly. Let’s make sure it’s not for the worse."
http://www.michaelshank.tv/police-militarization-must-be-halted/
= new reply since forum marked as read
And a cheer. 
Militarization of our police departments is a *bipartisan* effort of corporatists in both parties, right along with mass surveillance, the assaults on journalism, and the persecution of whistleblowers. The programs and legislation that are turning our police departments into paramilitary forces come through Homeland Security and the Pentagon, and are being used to suppress and intimidate dissent, exploit communities, and fill lucrative private prisons with slave labor as the nation is corporatized and Americans are made into a nation of low-paid wage slaves.
Both parties are complicit in this outrage. See the links below. Real change requires pushback against corporate politicians who are enabling this militarization, and that includes both corporate Democrats and Republicans.
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http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025390424
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025413841
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025404667
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025416747
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025428157
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", 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.
https://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/war-comes-home-excessive-militarization-american-police-report
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025412909
