"Welcome to the party, pal!"
"Are police becoming militarized?"
As Professor Robert A. Churchill observed in To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face, the militarization of the police coupled with the war on guns was one of the prime motivations of the spontaneous organization of the constitutional militia movement:
The Road to Ruby Ridge and Waco: The Growth of Paramilitary Policing and the Declaration of a War on Guns
During the 1980s, law enforcement agencies across America embraced the use of paramilitary weapons and tactics. The number of police paramilitary units in urban and suburban communities grew rapidly in the post-Vietnam era. . . More importantly, such units took on a significantly expanded role after 1985 . . . Furthermore, these units shifted their focus from reactive responses to hostage situations and "barricaded persons" -- their original purpose -- to such proactive tasks as investigatory drug raids and "warrant work." . . . Much of this proactive work involved no-knock entry into private residences, with very high risks to all concerned. Hraska refers to the expansion of paramilitary policing into progressively smaller communities as "the militarization of Mayberry." The 1980s and early 1990s also witnessed a significant increase in cooperation and joint operations among local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. Kraska has noted that the federal government began to take an active role in training and equipping local police paramilitary units in this period. . . The war on drugs also produced new interagency programs called Multi-Jurisdictional Task Forces (MJTF), in which local, state, and federal officials combined their policing resources to combat drug trafficking. . . Finally, the early 1990s brought a renewed interest in urban warfare. . . An exercise planned for Detroit in July 1994 featured cooperation between U.S. Army Special Forces and the Detroit police SWAT team. In 1996, Pittsburgh SWAT teams participated in an urban warfare exercise alongside troops from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Though the trend of paramilitarization had its roots in America's prohibition on illegal drugs, paramilitary tactics were eminently applicable to the prohibition on guns that was an ascendant priority in the 1990s. . . More than anything else, it was the application of paramilitary tactics to an emerging war on guns that produced Ruby Ridge and Waco." -- "The Origins of the Militia Movement," Part Three of To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face by Prof. Robert Churchill, University of Michigan Press, 2009, pp. 188-190.
And it was Ruby Ridge and Waco which sparked the constitutional militia movement.
Welcome to the party, Ruben.
Got militia?
6 comments:
Thought provoking and good post.
The core mission of the military is to kill people and break things.
The core mission of the police is to arrest and charge suspects based on probable cause.
Like the current commercials asking if you want your doctor to try your job, there are damn good reasons why we don't want the military policing our streets any more than we want our police doing dynamic entry with full body armor, flash bangs and fully automatic weapons. Ask Jose Guerena how that works out.
Seeing a continuation of the paramilitarization with the all-encompassing roadblocks.
"May I see your papers . . . please".
B Woodman
III-per
I got no problem with creating tactical units with military capabilities which have the potential to save lives and kill bad guys.
The problem seems to be that these units are having an increasingly harder time of recognizing who the bad guys are. Most of the time they simply treat John Q. honest, law abiding citizen, as an armed and dangerous criminal all the time, and the results of that have been horrific to say the least.
You either have a constitution and bill of rights or you don't. Most of the time these people now act like we never did and we get to pay all the bills for it, both in monetary and human terms.
Under those circumstances, where the constitution and bill of rights have no value and are ignored or outright subverted under color of authority, you can expect that absolute tyranny and despotism will result because there is nothing to stop it, except us.
Quote from the CNN piece:"The mission hasn't changed," he said, "And that's to make people feel safe in their communities..."
The mission of the Police is to provide me with an emotional state? To make me FEEL a certain way? Not to actually make the place more safe, but to make me FEEL better?
You guys paying any attention to the "dispute" between FHP and MPD here in south Florida? An FHP trooper pulled over a marked MPD cruiser going 120mph on the turnpike. Or tried to. 15 minutes of high speed chase with her at code 3 weaving through traffic until he finally stopped. He said he thought she was trying to stop somebody else. He also said he was going 120mph because he was late for his off duty job. Now both departments are in a flame war and pulling over each other's units. One FHP cruiser had a 5 gallon bucket of human waste poured on it in the troopers driveway. This is just a few weeks after Miami Beach had an officer tear down the beach with two ladies hanging onto his city issued ATV while he was intoxicated and on duty. Killed one civilian and put another in the hospital.
And these are sworn acredited law enforcement officers?
Drunken frat boys is more like it.
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