No Shoot, Sherlock!
Ferguson, Missouri has been turned into a war zone. Why? Because they can.
The city of Ferguson, Missouri, is being forced by the Obama administration to return two military vehicles that it obtained from the Pentagon, amid widespread concern and criticism over the deployment on American streets of equipment intended for war zones.
The US Department of Defense will reclaim a pair of Humvees that were given to the beleaguered St Louis suburb under a controversial program to distribute surplus weapons, vehicles and other gear, according to several government officials involved in the process.
What the hell?
I want to tell you the truth. My husband is a small town country lawyer. He is mortified that small town police departments have become military powers. Their “raid teams” smash down doors and do a full scale raid when the suspect isn’t even there. `
The front page of my local newspaper today boasts that the local police made a major bust of 70 pounds of marijuana, a substance that is legal one state over. What the hell? It will cost us a small fortune to arrest this guy, detain him, get him a court appointed lawyer, try his case, and then put his butt in prison where we will feed, house, and give him healthcare for possession of something that is legal one state over.
But let me get back to the militarization of local police departments. It scares the crapola out of me. The police are here to protect and serve, not walk around in riot gear in a small town.
Take the damn military surplus back. Beat it into plowshares.
We do need riot police. But at the very least it should regional, ready, and small. If you have all this fancy equipment it’s real easy to turn a traffic stop into a riot. And I also think that having all this junk is making our cops paranoid and far more likely to escalate a situation.
The military is trained to kill people. The police should be trained to save them.
Okay, here’s your soapbox back.
Please keep the soapbox, Mrs. B. “Nobody does it better …” than you.
The news from Ferguson is unreal. Supposedly the town is in a state of emergency. Yet, those whack job Oath Keepers were allowed to render their ‘services’?
I have questions. Many questions. Will try to pose those questions later, when I can do so and respect Mama. At present, the insanity is crowding my mind.
1When police get dressed up for a riot all too often they will start that riot. Maybe because it is uncomfortable, maybe they just want to prove they were right. Cops in standard street gear are much less likely to start trouble.
2First and foremost, local police serve and protect…themselves.
3I’m a middle aged woman who grew up thinking cops “protect & serve”. Now I think they are state sanctioned criminal gangs. Whenever these gang members lose a lawsuit, the taxpayers have to dish out money; I think the amount taxpayers have to pay to the victims should be taken directly out of the police budget. Maybe then the police will quit hiring cowardly thugs who murder people for moving violations. And they also shouldn’t be allowed to buy military grade weapons so they can pretend to be Rambo.
4Um . . . yeah. When I first saw these critters on the streets of really, really big cities I thought that there might have been some sort of proportionality between size of site and size of weapon. Now I wonder if these weapons could be stolen by really, really nefarious domestic terrorists in the mode of Tim McVey. Seriously, where does any burg keep critters like this locked up and safe? I have also heard these critters are used on the southern border for patrolling. If what you are after are completely and totally well described drug dealers who just might even be your own citizens (too many people think that all drug dealers on the border come OVER the border), that might just be quite another kettle of fish. But if the object is to declare war not just on any Jose in sight but Josefina and los ninos, i absolutely refuse to put up with such unmitigated stupidity.
5A little off topic but in Ferguson last night they arrested peaceful protesters then ignored “Oath Keepers” walking around with loaded assault rifles.
6http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/11/1410920/-Guess-what-happened-when-heavily-armed-white-men-decided-to-roam-the-streets-of-Ferguson
There doesn’t seem to be any sensible logic to any of this.
Argh! Bleeeeep! I just got a robocall from Ben Carson. Now I can’t possibly digest my dinner!
7Good column; I couldn’t agree more. Thanks.
8Climb right back up on that soapbox, please, and preach this sermon loudly and often. Police officers ARE NOT members of the military, and we are not the enemy.
9If you haven’t read Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, I highly recommend it. You can find him on FB https://www.facebook.com/radley.balko?fref=ts
where you can link to his articles.
I left the Occupy march I’d attended because as the sun was going down, I could see the cops were itching for a confrontation, which there was. Health and peace.
10We know how to fix the police — the right things were tried decades ago. Google “community policing” for the details of the policies that are known to reduce crime and produce order without excessive force.
But the cops hate community policing because, done right, it forces them to get out of their beloved black-and-whites and interact with people who are not perps or other police.
11All of this followed logic. If you keep dumping money onto “defense” contractors, you eventually have so many toys that the military says “no mas, full up”. Then you need to do something with the excess (while still building more), so you give it to the cops. Cops, when presented with war toys, are logically going to start a war with citizens, so they can use the toys. First step is to cut the war budget – something that appears to be sacred in Congress.
12@Miz JJ
So right!
Half-Memorized from ROTC 101x, “The purpose of a military organization is force projection as an instrument of a nation’s foreign policy.” In other words, in the USofA, they go where the President sends then and once there if it furthers the administration’s foreign policy objectives, they kill people and break things. And if they have a longish history of killing people and breaking things sometimes their mere presence aids in accomplishing an administration’s foreign policy objective.
Rather far from “To Serve and Protect” I think.
13Sorry for the second post.
I used this summary on my post-law enforcement resume,
“As a police officer, my role was to maintain order, discourage crimes through high-visibility presence, and keep the peace through surveillance of public places and apprehension of suspected violators of the law.”
I mean every word of it.
14Rave on. We need a whole string of soap boxes posted in front of movie theaters and video stores and gun shows where folks learn how to do it and then go get the stuff to do it with. I aLways was taught that the police were our friends and at my age I intend to keep thinking that. I hope they never put me in a situation to think otherwise.
15Today I got good tips from a tough mama on how to keep your kids from overdoing video games etc: take away their batteries and cables and change their passwords until they decide to do what Mama wants them to do. That’s it: find out the passwords of all the cops and change them until further notice.
I could tell you a story. Took place on the campus of the largest university in this state. I had a front-row seat.
When the camo-wearing officer (it was a campus building; he blended in to the background seamlessly) with the assault helment toting five different ways to kill a person pointed his hand at the staff lined up against the wall and shouted, “Everybody here OK?”, while his comrade in arms silently peered at us over the mezzanine wall, I wanted to just get up and go home.
I saw students innocently walk into this police action, to be stopped by a phalanx of myrmidons with their weapons drawn and aimed directly at the bewildered students. What I saw defies belief, but I saw it, and photo’d some of it. September 28, 2010.
We are protected and served by graduates of the University of Baghdad and the University of Kabul. Be very careful, they are very nervous.
16To jump on what Micr is saying, in furtherance of the MILATARY mission, its eqipment is designed to support that mission. These pieces of military equipment are designed to effectively and efficiently kill your opponent and end his means to waging war.
Using a jack hammer to drive a ten penny nail can be done but….dang….
17Mrs. B, you note “…And I also think that having all this junk is making our cops paranoid and far more likely to escalate a situation.” if cops didn’t have a gun strapped to their waste they would approach each situation with care, apprehension, and ready to de-escalate the situation quickly.
I think we are at a stage where guns need to be replaced with a baton, mace or a taser. Guns can be assigned to a limited number of personnel for a given incident or situation where a trooper is hundreds of miles from assistance.
Cops depend on guns to often and are likely to use their gun before they try diplomacy.
18I hear what all of you above are saying. I do. Now does anyone want to talk about the over-armed, doofish, ignorant maroons police have to deal with every damn day? One wag once characterized police work as “dealing with the dregs of society”. I don’t like what I see going on but cops are people too and they have families they’d like to go home to at the end of their shift. Too often it’s a dangerous, dirty, thankless job that frankly is underpaid for what society asks them to do. Maybe if we were a more respectful society our cops might be so, too. I’m just sayin’.
19What’s scarier than the fact that police forces have this military equipment is the fact that they want it.
20Putting military equipment into the hands of police creates psychological image of war, with the police v. citizens even when that’s not the case. It helps police feel they are the only bulwark of civilization and non-police are all potential enemies. This immediately escalates any situation into a military-themed confrontation.
Of course some police want it. The boyz want their toyz. They get more prestige with other boyz if they have the cool toyz. They get to feel like heroes (soldiers are heroes; they save the country) and feel a kinship with the military that, frankly, they do not have and should not want or be allowed to feel.
Military gear isolates them from the citizenry (which they now routinely call “civilians”–police are also civilians, not military!!!) and by doing so contributes to the lack of opportunity for community policing, for building trust between police and non-police. They literally cannot make those casual contacts with the people in the neighborhood if they’re clanking past in some kind of armored vehicle with a machine gun sticking out the top, even if they want to.
Respect and courtesy are a two-way street. That’s how social interactions work–reciprocity. When cops come onto a situation and start screaming threats, insulting people, throwing people down…when they lose their temper if someone takes their picture…they cannot then expect the same level of respect as a cop that speaks calmly, that does not lose control, and so on. I’ve seen both. There are cops who can calm a tense situation and cops who come in loud and mean and escalate it.
Yes, cops want to go home to their families. Yes, it’s a stressful job. But their behavior can make it worse or better, and they need to be taught how to make it better. They need to understand that when they scare people, those scared people can’t think as clearly. When they physically hurt people, some levels of pain make it impossible for the person to hold still. That the people they’re dealing with ARE people, not “animals”–people who react to perceived danger with fear, to pain with a normal biological reaction of trying to get away from the pain.
21I have no dog in the Marijuana race but I do have opinions on legalization. When States declare federal law null and void, we will not like the outcome. If CO & WA can do it on pot, MS can do it on voting rights and OK can do it on marriage equality. We have to find a different way to decriminalizing pot. Secondly, There’s a possibility that the
2270 lbs were homegrown but more likely it came from some not-very-nice people in the drug trade. Legal pot gives a safe market for nasty folks who have controlled the market for years and aren’t interested in losing market share. Jus’ sayin’…
Cops don’t deserve any more respect than the person serving you a burger at a fast food restaurant. They knew how dangerous the job can be and if they don’t like it they can find another job. They get the respect they earn, just like everybody else and it isn’t by automatically pointing a gun at you if you’re not white. Stop blaming the victim for not kissing the cop’s butt.
23Elizabeth Moon … your comment is rational and sane and should get an A+++++ mark! Thank you!!
24Elizabeth Moon, I agree with what Marcia in CO just said. For a number of years the security department where I worked was under my supervision. During that time we had two different men (both retired police) head up the security force, and they couldn’t have been more different. One had run the Beverly Hills PD and he was very suspicious of everything and everyone, and was frequently wrong. The other had worked for LAPD for 30 years and had never fired his gun at anyone. Guess who did the better job?
25There are police departments in different parts of the world who do not arm their people with the exception of armed response teams. The unarmed cops use creativity and even civility to handle issues. What can we learn from them?
26Well said, Ms. B.
27My university was the site of the infamous pepper spray incident a few years back; heavily armed campus cops somehow perceived a few students sitting on the sidewalk outside the student union as a major threat. They were armed with pepper spray, so of course (!?) they used it.
More recently, our little town was the happy beneficiary of an MRAP like the one in your picture. No idea what they thought they would do with it since the most common crimes around here are bicycle theft and drunk students barfing in the streets.
The citizenry, with fresh memories of the pepper spray incident and Ferguson, rose up in righteous indignation and forced the city to give it back. Well, not quite – the next town to the north of us, a less progressive place, was happy to take it off our hands. So if the terrorists invade via Tijuana and show up at the Saturday Farmers’ Market, we’ll have to borrow the armored vehicle back from 7 miles away.
Wally, those not nice people would not be in the drug trade if the marijuana were legal. Just saying.
28Brave words Elizabeth Moon… and others. Now, go put on the uniform and do the job and then you can pontificate. I’ve never done it either. But I live in the same world they and you do. I’ve seen the incivility and brainless behavior of “law-abiding” citizens. Can we talk about fist fights and worse on Black Friday before Christmas? Who do they call? Not you.
Look around people. Firefighters get massacred when they show up to put out a fire. An officer gets blown away at a routine traffic stop. This isn’t a recent development. It’s been coming for decades. That is, for anyone who’s been paying attention.
And so here we are. NOW… can we stop playing “who’s the victim” and begin to act like adults instead of spoiled children acting out? Here’ a crazy idea: how about EVERYBODY start acting in a civil and respectful manner and we’ll see where that leads. M’kay?
29JAKvirginia:
I spent six years as an unpaid EMT/Paramedic volunteer picking up (among other things) drunk soldiers between Fort Hood and beer covering parts of three counties 24/7. I have been out at three in the morning on a mass casualty, on domestic violence calls, on fire calls, on psych calls, on bar fight calls in an Army base town. Did my hospital training in a military hospital. Watched the county I live in–this county–go from reasonable law enforcement in ’79 to crazy, dishonest, vicious law enforcement with a lying DA and county judge (now, after indictment and a plea bargain, disbarred) as the county turned Republican.
I was in uniform, as a Marine Corps officer, during ‘Nam, at HQMC. So was my husband, in the Army, in ‘Nam and stateside both. You might recall there were anti-war demonstrators all over back then–if you’re old enough–and a whole lot of discourtesy towards military personnel in and out of uniform right there in D.C. and the Pentagon. We’ve both been in situations where we were in danger, could have started a nice big hunk of trouble, but had the training, maturity, and manners to calm down the situation instead.
So here’s my crazy idea: don’t try to be snide and pull rank on someone you know nothing about. If you want civility in the community try using it yourself. Here. With me. Take your own fine words and your sarcasm, and choke them back down.
30Thank you for your resume, Elizabeth. Let me tell you a story:
I’ve lived in Washington, D.C. most of my life, from when it was a backwater to when it finally made it to the world stage. One notable event was the opening of The Kennedy Center in September 1971. A front page WaPo article the following year called the center a “Great American Rip-off”. Why? Because “Americans” were ripping it off. Just some of the incidents: Strings of crystals from the elevator lights were being taken; the DONATED BY IRELAND Waterford crystal chandelier in the South Lounge of the Opera House had to be raised because “patrons” were helping themselves to the crystals; and to top it off, an employee of the KenCen stopped a woman with 10-inch scissors from cutting a square out of the 60 foot tall gold-thread sheers that hung in the Grand Foyer. Why was she doing that he asked. “I just wanted a souvenir.” was her response. And there were people who actually blamed the KenCen for not having a souvenir stand. So, Americans pillaging a memorial to JFK wasn’t the problem — the KenCen was the culprit!
I told a housemate once that when I hit 50, I figured I had seen enough to no longer be shocked. I was wrong. My mouth has dropped open more times in the last 13 years (I’m 63) than it ever did in the preceding 50. The sheer rudeness, carelessness, and stupidity of our “society” has become epidemic. And the story above is just the tiny tip of a huge iceberg of stories I could relate.
You may think I’m an idiot. But I’ll tell you this, I’ve watched and paid attention the last 50 years and America is not what you might think it is. And it’s not recent. I argued with that same housemate that America’s learning curve was flat. He felt it had actually declined. And as the years have gone by I find it increasingly difficult to refute his point.
Are there bad cops? Sure. Now do me and everyone else the courtesy of explaining why instead of tarring and feathering all of them. Do good cops do bad things? Yes. Again, explain why. And it should go without saying there ARE good cops. May I offer some reasoning about the bad cops? Budget cuts? Training cuts? Salary cuts where good officers leave and the newbies aren’t quite the quality they should be? An America that demands safe streets and then goes on those same streets and acts like barbarians? (Please… do you read the papers, watch TV?)
A crazy man shoots up a movie theater and kills people but doesn’t get the death penalty because one juror jerk who doesn’t believe in the death penalty. (I suppose Hitler would’ve gotten a fine and community service.) Oh, horrors! Let’s worry about the mental state of a murderer but not the mental state of our law enforcement? The people we EXPECT to protect us? C’mon America. Get real.
Y’know, I believe it’s time for me to fade into the sunset. Rational thought in America is breathing it’s last. It’s just become choosing sides and fighting it out. The WWE Roundtable. I’m just too tired to care anymore.
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