Discussion for article #236535
Wow. Police thinking of themselves as soldiers engaged in battle is at the heart of the problem with policing. So much for “protect and serve.” And declining to sell military gear to police is NOT taking control of them. The Right seems to think that “liberty” means they must be allowed to do what they want.
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Of course I should have seen this coming . Yet another Obama plot to turn everyone in to a gay socialist. What else could it be.
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'Coz every Andy of Mayberry is guaranteed an APC to deploy in and RPGs to return fire.
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Makes one wonder how police in this country were able to do their jobs for the first 200+ years but unable for the past 25 year, all because Obama took their military toys away (on day 9125 of 9125 days)…
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If you take young cadets and call them soldiers, dress them as soldiers, arm them as soldiers, tell them they are engaged in a war and plunk them down in communities from which they are psychologically divorced from the “enemy”, what the hell do you think is going to happen?
There are 80,000 SWAT team deployments in the country every year, not for their intended use in hostage and barricade situations but overwhelmingly for the service of drug-related warrants.
While the trend toward militarization of police forces was well underway during the 80’s and 90’s, after 9/11 Homeland Security made grants available to local and state agencies to stock up on the latest in cool toys from an approved list of connected arms suppliers. At the same time, there was shit ton of military surplus in the form of helicopters, machine guns, night vision scopes and armored assault vehicles to be had for the asking.
Say hello to the Police/Industrial Complex.
After all the foreign wars, we’ve finally decided to declare war on ourselves and arm ourselves accordingly to keep those profits flowing.
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…and Obama still has the wherewithal to let them keep digging their own graves. The best response to this insanity is no response at all.
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What is this mania about reducing everything to five points, is this the Letterman show or a news source? Come on, it’s childish and stupid. Give a subject the space it deserves, not some arbitrary number.
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What puts this into perspective for me is the fact that crime is at its lowest level since anyone cared enough to keep track of it. To imagine officers need military gear to continue the War on Crime is absurd.
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So the Far Right wants a heavily armed Commie Gestapo knocking down their doors after all? This new big government, Big Brother stance really doesn’t mesh with their so called worry about the Right to Bear Arms and the end of the 2nd Amendment. Either they want this black President coming after their guns or they really have never been worried about it at all.
Someone is exposing their hypocrisy as well as their vulnerable rear flanks.
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Wait, I thought Obama took everyone’s guns 6 years ago.
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I was wondering how they were going to spin this. In a world where the right-wing were ideologically consistent, and didn’t exist solely to be against whatever Obama was for, this would be a good thing from their vantage point. This should be a good thing from everybody’s vantage point. Your local PD doesn’t need an arsenal fit to invade North Korea, for Christ’s sake. It’s “big government” to the core. These critiques of theirs have nothing to do with what’s good for this nation or public perception of the rather scary concept of a police force equipped with rocket launchers and a battalion of armored vehicles. This is 100% “hey, we’re paid to make Obama look bad so derp!”.
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It hasn’t been a month since I read an article where Pr. Obama was arming all the police forces in the country with heavy equipment so he can take invade every state militarily. Now I read where he wants to take away their toys, which is it!!
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These people want them to be armed like the military? To be honest nothing that was banned would even matter much. Not sure many places get tanks or grenade launchers. The restrictions are not bad, but those will be granted.
These are largely crap. The police will be armed, they should be. However, the issue is not weapons it is the use of them. Sometimes I do think we are to nitpicky about things in a pressure situation but it is honestly a case by case situation. Sometimes it is called for, sometimes it is wrong. And they should be held accountable for it.
The military and police thing is a headscratcher. The police are not the military. Not in any way shape or form. At times they have overlap, but police are not set up to kill bad guys and go on missions for national security and the like. Their job is to maintain a civil society by catching people that break the law. They do not need 0.5 cals to do that job 99% of the time or more. And if the situation gets bad enough to need that sort of hardware than the National Guard going in is perfectly valid.
Conservatives drum up fears of government authority figures plotting to imprison and enslave the populous. Obama, the military, the intelligence agencies all get fingered as nefarious oppressors. Yet the same fear of authority disappears when it comes to local police forces. Conservatives want them to have all the powers of detention, all the weapons of death, all the unfettered abilities to ignore the Constitution that they fear the rest of the usual suspects possessing. Why? Because local police exercise their aggression and their otherwise scorned and feared tactics on blacks, immigrants, other minorities and the poor. The Other. The National Guard, the military or the FBI better not be terrorizing my suburb or gated community. Raining hell on the inner city, on college campuses, on immigrant enclaves? Oh, OK.
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The Turing test asks if a walled-off artificial intelligence can be distinguished from a natural intelligence. The gray area where it doesn’t seem to matter much has already been reached. Robots produce 20% of news copy, a lot of translation, and even critical legal documents, and nobody seems to mind much. Similarly, a conspiracy theory is only flaming when it is apparent that the conspiracy proponent clearly is walled off from possible evidence of a conspiracy. As soon as there is leakage of information from the side of the wall of the power-weilders to the side of the , it’s off to the races. We know that police departments have increasingly been asked to do crowd control functions. Riot control , for example, has become much more a focus of police training with the Internet-enabled possibility of flash crowds, and the transparency of bad acts by the government and its agents. With conservatives, it appears that a few shards of information on top of an existing conspiracy theory is enough to ignite a response. This is understandable. The US, which has high wealth and opportunity disparity, does resort to physical crowd control from time to time. However, the key to keeping this arrangement going is not physical force or rounding people up, but rather, as in modern China, messaging and framing. Discrediting Texas nuts goes a long way in shifting focus from the real perils of a society where information about you is widely disseminated and traded by people you have never met. People ask, “Why are they rioting?” instead of the more pertinent and introspective question: “Should I be rioting?” That’s when the real trouble starts.
Laziness. One doesn’t have to read all of the article, just the major headings [points], to enable one to feel as if one’s gotten the gist of it. And, given the writing quality of many of these articles, perhaps that’s a mercy.
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Fox News is so bad for our public discourse and for clear thinking. Everything is over the top. Everything is divisive. Everything is black and white. For god’s sake, the police are not an occupying army. They are supposed to be part of the community. Anyone who has a sense of reality knows this and knows that police should never be armed to the teeth like they are now. As a former officer, I think the President is not going far enough in restricting the military equipment available to police. I wish Roger Ailes would take up a hobby and stop pumping mental Red Bull into the public waters.
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There will continue to be a proportional relation to petty crime and militarization of police forces. Wait 'til they start breathalysing for pot.
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If Obama gave the cops more weapons, then the Jade Helm wack faction would’ve just ramped up. The right has filled in the blanks and has a full fledged wacko group at the ready for all possible eventualities.
This is proven fact. No matter what President Obama does or says, the Faux loons/teabaggers will accuse him of the opposite and have that ridiculous argument prepared as well as the one that they are hoping for.
Obama knows this and sets 'em up and knocks 'em down over and over again.
All Faux spins lead back to Faux.
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