More grenade launchers for the cops
Another step on the road to fascism.
The Trump administration plans to reinstate in full a program that provides local police departments with military surplus equipment such as large-caliber weapons and grenade launchers, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.
Sure. Why would we not want a completely militarized police force? We have no history at all of cops abusing their power, so why not trust them with tanks, missiles, machine guns?
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is expected to announce the changes to the program on Monday when he speaks at a Fraternal Order of Police conference in Nashville. It was not immediately clear why Mr. Sessions would announce changes to a Pentagon program, but he has rolled back several Obama-era policing reforms and helped bolster the Trump administration’s support among law enforcement.
President Barack Obama put limits on the program in 2015, when several high-profile cases of police officers killing black men inflamed tensions between law enforcement and local communities.
The Times is coy because it’s the Times, but I don’t have to be coy. Of course it’s clear why Sessions would do this: he’s a thoroughgoing racist and always has been, and he wants to make the police even more terrifying to those Other races than they already are. Sessions, like Trump, loves force and violence and Authority, and wants to strengthen it at the expense of the citizenry.
The shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 by a white police officer triggered protests and a heavily armed police response that many in the community saw as unnecessary. Images of the police with sniper rifles on top of armored cars or wearing riot gear to watch over protests set off a debate about whether police departments had lost sight of their missions to serve and protect.
“We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like they’re an occupying force,” Mr. Obama said in announcing that he was placing curbs on the program.
But for Trump and Sessions that’s a feature, not a bug, and they want more of it not less.
Mr. Obama prohibited transfers of weaponized vehicles, certain large-caliber ammunition and other equipment. He also added restrictions on transferring some weapons and devices, explosives, battering rams, riot helmets and shields.
Mr. Trump plans to sign an executive order to reverse those limits, a “policy shift toward ensuring officers have the tools they need to reduce crime and keep their communities safe,” according to the document, which described the president’s coming order and the rationale behind it.
It cited two academicarticles that said the program helped reduce crime and did not lead to an increase in police-involved deaths. It also said that a military-style helmet saved the life of an officer who responded to the 2016 shooting that killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
And it called much of the equipment provided through the program “entirely defensive in nature,” a characterization certain to draw the ire of those opposed to the police deploying certain heavy weapons and vehicles in tense but not clearly dangerous situations.
Remember, kids: when in doubt, shoot.
Who needs the support of the military when you can just turn the popos into a sympathetic army…
And there is too much support for that from people who assume the only people who need to be scared of an over armed police force are the “bad hombres”. My liberal friends have demonstrated such complacence and in some cases, a similar desire for “law and order”.
I had a friend who visited Israel, and reported approvingly on the militarism he experienced. He said (and I am quoting him; if this is not happening in Israel, I apologize, but this is more about his attitude and his observations than about Israel) that if you so much as stopped to talk to a small child on the street, armed men with semi-automatic weapons would jump out and confront you. He liked that; he said “that’s what we need here”. I kid you not. He was a liberal, believed in social justice, and all that jazz, but felt we would be safer if there were big guns hiding in every single nook and cranny of the country. He felt his child would be safer if no one was allowed to talk to any children without risk of being shot with extreme prejudice. I tried to answer him, but I was so short of breathe from hyper-ventilating at the horror of it, I doubt I did a good job.
Good lord.
Yes, that was pretty much my feelings. I tried to ask him if he would give up liberty to that extent, and he said he would, because safety was more important. Too many of my liberal friends were going down this pathway.
As Benjamin Franklin said “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”.
I’ve been thinking about this subject lately, and I realized that my final straw with the Libertarian Party (and generally with those who use the label ‘libertarian’ for their political ethos) has been virtual silence on the issue of BLM. If ever there was a chance to break out of libertarianism’s hard-lock inside middle-to-upper-class white enclaves, this was it, but even with Johnson saying he had had his ‘head pulled out of the sand’ by the movement (but apparently only actually talking about the subject if prompted, never actually pressing the point), they cannot break from the ‘small government’ shell-game, where they manipulate the term to mean any of three different things (‘less intrusive’; ‘local’; ‘less costly’) as if all three definitions were congruent.
The fact is, BLM is an issue of local governments needing to be restrained by broader governments–cities and counties by states, and states by the feds. Do that, advocate for a system of checks and balances that keeps local tyranny and oppression in check, and you’d actually be delivering on the ostensible promise of liberty that the party and the ideology tries to lay claim to. But they just can’t do it.
The US has a militarized civilian population, a militarized police force is a logical development. However, grenade launchers? What sort of grenades?
iknklast,
I wonder if your friend would also approve of racial profiling in order to improve security. Did he reflect on the underlying oppression that caused the high security situation in Israel?
RJW, I don’t think he was reflecting at all. He merely had a knee jerk reaction; he saw someone “trying to keep kids safe”, and apparently forgot that the biggest threat to kids (at least here, where there are no mine fields and no occupying army – yet) is their own family and friends.
We live in a culture driven by fear. The Republicans have been exploiting fear for some time to get political clout, and it’s worked. The surest way to get the populace to accept an authoritarian government is to get them afraid of some nebulous something (or someone) that only the firm “rule of law” can protect them from; then, keep turning up the fear factor until they are too afraid to consider anything but the most macho of fascist governments.
Meanwhile, the pundits and the press (and the left wing commentators) keep telling those of us trying to get people serious about the environmental crisis of global warming (and other crises we keep ignoring) that fear won’t get you anywhere, it never works. So we tone down the message, and people decide they have forever to worry about that, we have all these other things to be afraid of, and they must come first.
Result? Disaster looming on multiple fronts.
iknklast,
Agreed. Conservative politicians everywhere exploit perceived or actual security threats as far as they can, particularly if they’re losing in the polls. There are limits to that kind of manipulation.The British have elected progressive governments despite decades of terrorist threats.
Still, just between you and me, I’d have to say that a significant proportion of voters in any democracy is just plain stupid. They understand men and women in battle armor with automatic weapons, but scientists and statistics, that’s far too difficult.
The reason that I mentioned racial profiling was that I was thinking of somewhat bizarre incident one of my nephews reported when he lived in Israel in the 90s. He was walking down the street with a friend, a Moroccan Jew. There had been a recent terrorist attack and my nephew and his friend were intercepted by Israeli security personnel. The Moroccan looked like an Arab and my nephew is ethnic European, guess which of the two got the full investigative treatment. My nephew’s friend was outraged that he, as a Jew, was treated with suspicion.
For Palestinians, of course, such oppression is an everyday occurrence.
Don’t worry, none of this macho gear will ever be used against the Bundys.