Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Militarized police forces are not acceptable in the United States of America.
What we need is for the militarization programs to be ended.
We need a public, national database on police violence toward citizens.
And we need relentless attention from the DOJ to cases of police violence until this garbage stops.
But we are already receiving relentless messaging that we have no right to expect or demand actual reversal of the militarization. Cameras on the militarized police are all we are going to be offered, and we will be expected to cheer in delight at this concession by our corporate masters.
The militarization of our police is federally driven, bipartisan, and as much a part of the growing police state as the mass surveillance, prison industrial complex, and assaults on journalism, other political protesters, and whistleblowers.
What is being offered is not a first step to anything. Cameras are the sum total of what our corporate politicians will offer as a solution to Ferguson. Never mind that this administration has vastly expanded the obscene militarization of our police forces and can also reverse it. Never mind that that obscene militarization continues, to the point that we now regularly see photos in our newspapers that look like something out of Afghanistan. We are to cheer for cameras, because actually REVERSING a vicious, malignant policy would be asking too much...
The Obama administration's escalation of police militarization
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.What we need is for the militarization programs to be ended.
We need a public, national database on police violence toward citizens.
And we need relentless attention from the DOJ to cases of police violence until this garbage stops.
But we are expected to cheer, because now there may be cameras on the officers in our militarized police state. We are to accept that the militarization itself is an acceptable "new normal."
This is textbook MO of our new corporate-ruled government. Implement unconscionable new authoritarian policy...then make some small concession that preserves the bulk of the new abuses, and seek adulation for that. You will know the corporate Third Way by their absolute refusal to entertain the possibility that the abuses should actually be reversed. You will know them by the incessant, malignant propaganda messaging that teaches us always to accept the "new normal," no matter how unconscionable it may be.
Militarized police, prison industrial complexes, impoverished communities, mass surveillance....They are all part of the new normal being constructed around us.
We have to insist on reversal of the militarization itself. Our corporate government will never yield more than we demand.
We must not accept our militarized police forces as an acceptable "new normal" in the United States of America. Corporatists have no right to do this to us and to our country.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/national/what-weapons-are-police-using-in-ferguson/2014/08/14/4acf0920-23e0-11e4-8b10-7db129976abb_video.html
54 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
I'm genuinely curious. 
though even if they do, conventional means have been sufficient in the past (my college town had a mass shooter 20 years ago, and they dealt with the situation without any urban assault vehicles).
...and the report in my link above describes how it already has been misused.
Why assume it won't be misused? 
Hyperbole is the chief weapon of the GOP in their use of tactical fear to control us.
...you are both right and wrong. Right in your assessment of the situation and demands for it to cease. But wrong if you think complaining/protesting about it will change anything.
That would require a level of unparalleled solidarity across a myriad of political affiliations and countless other divisions that TPTB have worked so hard to establish and maintain.
The driving force behind all this are moneyed 1%ers. They have done so in order to protect ''their wealth and assets'' from us. And as this Ponzi game falters, the militarized-police will be all that separates us from them.
- Which is why they're arming them now. It's close......
K&R
and are, in fact, a central part of their plan. And their voices are the only ones that count anymore. Every fascist state in history has had a vicious and unaccountable police force. 
Grenade launchers along with the rest of the military equipment does not belong on the streets of America.