"SWAT teams were created for extreme situations like mass shootings or hostage taking. But today, the highly armed units more commonly serve warrants."
"All that battle gear you saw in Ferguson was acquired not from the military, but from private companies like the ones touting their wares at Urban Shield."
above quotes from Shane Bauer's article "The Making of The Warrior Cop" at Mother Jones who notes that vendors of this weaponry play on the fears of the police of being outgunned by the bad guys and being in greater danger than ever of being shot and killed in general while ignoring the inconvenient reality and selling lies and half-truths and paranoid fantasies to potential customers .
"...This was a common theme: Since the bad guys are well armed, police need better defenses and an intimidating appearance. And it's true that guns on the street have gotten bigger—but it's also true that being a cop today is the safest it has been since 1964. The most dangerous year in recent decades was 1973, when there were 134 felony killings of police officers in the line of duty. By 2012, that number had dropped to 47. Some of that might be because police are better protected, but they are also not being attacked as often: Assaults on cops are down 45 percent since their peak in 1971. Indeed, violent crime overall is down in America—it has fallen by nearly half since 1991."
Published on 29 Oct 2014
http://democracynow.org - In a new cover story for Mother Jones magazine, "The Making of the Warrior Cop," senior reporter Shane Bauer goes inside the corporations and government departments involved in enabling police departments to acquire anything from bayonets to semi-automatic rifles and drones.
Reporting from the exposition called "Urban Shield" -- which organizers call the largest first-responder training in the world -- Bauer says that the equipment police departments have received from the military pales in comparison to the amount of gear purchased from private companies. The Department of Homeland Security has provided some $41 billion in funding to local police departments to buy the equipment from various corporations, on top of more than $5 billion from the Pentagon since 1997.
Democracy Now!, is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on 1,300+ TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9am ET at http://democracynow.org.
See major article at Mother Jones:
Urban Shield and The Making of the Warrior Cop at Mother Jones by Shane Bauer, Oct. 2014
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.
And the writer notes these newer weapons are examples of high tech adding to the growth of the surveillance police state. These new bits of technology in the hands of local police in fact sound more like the ravings of the paranoid than being a description of what actually does exist and there are those willing to use these high tech gadgets to limit even further the rights of citizens.
"...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."
and so the vendors at Urban Shield in order to sell more of their product in general argue there is a need for the police to have greater fire power because the bad guys have bigger guns than they used to and so have supposedly increased the risk to the public and to police officers but this is not quite true and is part of an Urban Myth and propaganda sold to and by the police so vendors can sell more and the police can have better toys to hunt down mainly people of color in America as Shane Bauer points out:
"...Today, 85 percent of SWAT operations are for "choice-driven raids on people's private residences," Peter Kraska, an Eastern Kentucky University researcher who studies tactical policing, said in a recent Senate hearing. According to a study released by the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this year, 62 percent of SWAT deployments were for drug raids. The study found that in these raids, drugs were found only half of the time. When weapons were "believed to be present," they were not found in half of the cases for which the outcome was known.
The study also found that while white people were more likely to be involved in the types of scenarios SWAT teams were intended for—like hostage or active-shooter situations—71 percent of today's SWAT raids (when race was known) target people of color. The racial disparity can be much higher in some places: In Burlington, North Carolina, the study notes, African Americans are 47 times more likely to be affected by SWAT raids than whites.
SWAT officers have even come to be used to conduct "saturation patrol," where extra police are deployed in a specific neighborhood. One SWAT commander told Kraska, "The key to our success is that we're an elite crime fighting team that's not bogged down in the regular bureaucracy. We focus on quality of life issues like illegal parking, loud music, bums, troubles."
and as for police versus the bad guys :
"...This was a common theme: Since the bad guys are well armed, police need better defenses and an intimidating appearance. And it's true that guns on the street have gotten bigger—but it's also true that being a cop today is the safest it has been since 1964. The most dangerous year in recent decades was 1973, when there were 134 felony killings of police officers in the line of duty. By 2012, that number had dropped to 47. Some of that might be because police are better protected, but they are also not being attacked as often: Assaults on cops are down 45 percent since their peak in 1971. Indeed, violent crime overall is down in America—it has fallen by nearly half since 1991."
and so it goes,
GORD.
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