We also note that this is hardly "news." Items here labeled "The Militarized Society" have been warning of this for several yrs.* (If there weren't 2,325 items labeled as such we'd try to find the first one. Nope, easy to find: The second load of crap we typed here was already on it. And in over five yrs., things have only worsened.)“There’s been an unmistakable trend toward more and more militarization of American law enforcement,” Norm Stamper, former Chief of the Seattle Police Department and author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing, told Danger Room. During his tenure in Seattle, he clamped down on the WTO protests in 1999, the infamous “Battle in Seattle.” It’s a response he now calls “disastrous.”
According to Stamper, having small local police departments go around with tanks and military gear has “a chilling effect on any effort to strengthen the relationship” between the community and the cops. And that’s not the only danger. “There’s no justification for them having that kind of equipment, for one obvious reason, and that is if they have it, they will find a way to use it. And if they use it they will misuse it altogether too many times,” said Stamper. What happened a year ago in Arizona, when army veteran Jose Guerena was shot down during a drug raid that found no drugs in his house, could very well be an example of that misuse.
*First brought to our attention in the '90s by our friend Peabody, who read about it in The Nation.
3 comments:
For Fuck's Sake.
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Jeeze, if it bothers you so much just go out and get an anti-tank grenade launcher.
Heavy Weapons Ed.:
Uh, any ideas where we could get one?
And a whole lotta practice rounds?
Or, we could incorporate a town somewhere & take advantage of the freebies.
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