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Mother Jones: The Making of the Warrior Cop
"Want to see the new toy?" a vendor asked a police officer in camo. He handed him a pamphlet for his company, Shield Defense Systems. "This will blind anyone for 10 minutes. Imagine, walk into a bar fight, blind everyone, then figure out what's going on. Some guys on drugs, you can put three slugs in their chest and it won't stop them. But blind him, and I guarantee you he'll calm down." The device attached to a gun and sent out a frequency that the vendor said temporarily scrambled its target's ocular fluid. The vendor turned to me—conspicuous for my lack of fatigues—and insisted the device caused no permanent damage (hence the name Z-Ro, as in "zero damage"
, though he said it would probably make you nauseous. He expected it to be on the market this coming January.
...
This summer, images of armored vehicles and police pointing semi-automatic rifles at demonstrators in Ferguson, Missouri, set off a debate over what journalist Radley Balko has termed the "rise of the warrior cop." A National Public Radio analysis found that since 2006, the Pentagon has given local cops some $1.9 billion worth of equipment—including 600 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs), 80,000 assault rifles, 200 grenade launchers, and 12,000 bayonets (yes, bayonets). But those totals pale in comparison to the amount of gear purchased from private companies. The Ferguson Police Department, for example, received some computers, utility trucks, and blankets from the military—but all that battle gear you saw on TV was bought from corporations like the ones pitching their wares at Urban Shield. Outfitting America's warrior cops, it turns out, is a major business, and one fueled in large part by the federal Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Defense has given $5.1 billion worth of equipment to state and local police departments since 1997, with even rural counties acquiring things like grenade launchers and armored personnel carriers. But Homeland Security has handed out grants worth eight times as much—$41 billion since 2002. The money is earmarked for counterterrorism, but DHS specifies that once acquired, the equipment can be used for any other law-enforcement purpose, from shutting down protests to serving warrants and executing home searches.
For the vendors at Urban Shield, the task at hand was showing that these arsenals needed further beefing up. Semi-automatic rifles, for example, were once reserved mostly for SWAT teams and the military. Now they are standard squad car guns. At the Patriot Ordnance Factory booth, a vendor showed off the POF 308, a 14.5-inch military-style semi-automatic rifle that, he emphasized, fish and game officers used to shoot bears. An article in a gun magazine by a fish and game warden boasts that it's also handy for raiding pot farms and fighting "narcoterrorists." The vendor showed me the slightly smaller .223-caliber semi-automatics they'd started selling to the California Highway Patrol a year ago, for use in vehicle takedowns on the freeway. "The United States will forever be a nation of ready militia," the company's website said. For $5,100, it sold limited-edition, rotating bronze sculptures of a man in a tricorn hat, posed as though in battle, a sword on his belt, a tattered Colonial flag waving behind him, a POF semi-automatic rifle in his hand.
Farther down the hall, Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate was showcasing a drone. It not only captured video, but was designed to drop objects at specified GPS coordinates, "like Hunger Games, if you will," a representative from Robotics Research, DHS's contractor on the project, told me. Buzzing around her booth was a cylindrical, remote-controlled robot that sold for $1,100. If the robot was too big to fit into, say, a building's ventilation system, the police could make a smaller body on-site using a 3-D printer, then transfer the electric wiring.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/swat-warrior-cops-police-militarization-urban-shield
, though he said it would probably make you nauseous. He expected it to be on the market this coming January.
...
This summer, images of armored vehicles and police pointing semi-automatic rifles at demonstrators in Ferguson, Missouri, set off a debate over what journalist Radley Balko has termed the "rise of the warrior cop." A National Public Radio analysis found that since 2006, the Pentagon has given local cops some $1.9 billion worth of equipment—including 600 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs), 80,000 assault rifles, 200 grenade launchers, and 12,000 bayonets (yes, bayonets). But those totals pale in comparison to the amount of gear purchased from private companies. The Ferguson Police Department, for example, received some computers, utility trucks, and blankets from the military—but all that battle gear you saw on TV was bought from corporations like the ones pitching their wares at Urban Shield. Outfitting America's warrior cops, it turns out, is a major business, and one fueled in large part by the federal Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Defense has given $5.1 billion worth of equipment to state and local police departments since 1997, with even rural counties acquiring things like grenade launchers and armored personnel carriers. But Homeland Security has handed out grants worth eight times as much—$41 billion since 2002. The money is earmarked for counterterrorism, but DHS specifies that once acquired, the equipment can be used for any other law-enforcement purpose, from shutting down protests to serving warrants and executing home searches.
For the vendors at Urban Shield, the task at hand was showing that these arsenals needed further beefing up. Semi-automatic rifles, for example, were once reserved mostly for SWAT teams and the military. Now they are standard squad car guns. At the Patriot Ordnance Factory booth, a vendor showed off the POF 308, a 14.5-inch military-style semi-automatic rifle that, he emphasized, fish and game officers used to shoot bears. An article in a gun magazine by a fish and game warden boasts that it's also handy for raiding pot farms and fighting "narcoterrorists." The vendor showed me the slightly smaller .223-caliber semi-automatics they'd started selling to the California Highway Patrol a year ago, for use in vehicle takedowns on the freeway. "The United States will forever be a nation of ready militia," the company's website said. For $5,100, it sold limited-edition, rotating bronze sculptures of a man in a tricorn hat, posed as though in battle, a sword on his belt, a tattered Colonial flag waving behind him, a POF semi-automatic rifle in his hand.
Farther down the hall, Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate was showcasing a drone. It not only captured video, but was designed to drop objects at specified GPS coordinates, "like Hunger Games, if you will," a representative from Robotics Research, DHS's contractor on the project, told me. Buzzing around her booth was a cylindrical, remote-controlled robot that sold for $1,100. If the robot was too big to fit into, say, a building's ventilation system, the police could make a smaller body on-site using a 3-D printer, then transfer the electric wiring.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/swat-warrior-cops-police-militarization-urban-shield