I’m writing to urge you to support Rep. Hank Johnson’s bill to limit and track military surplus* local police departments can receive. We’ve seen in recent days, and sadly plenty before that, that departments with this sort of military equipment treat their citizens as enemies in a war zone instead of people they have pledged to protect and serve. It has to end and Representative Johnson’s bill is a step in the right direction.
While this is important all across the country, as people who represent Seattle citizens, it should be especially important to you. After all, Seattle’s police in recent years have been found by the Department of Justice to have (pdf) a “pattern or practice of constitutional violations regarding the use of force that result from structural problems, as well as serious concerns about biased policing.” Those very same structural problems and bias will be worse when the Police Department uses surplus military weapons and equipment instead of standard, civilian policing.
Again, I hope you will do everything in your power to help move this bill. I realize that the legislative branch isn’t exactly moving forward very quickly on controversial bills these days, but it is still important to pursue.
Thank You,
Carl Ballard
* [h/t]
Indeed the best way to combat a rioting mob is to let them loot and destroy until they tire themselves out, then give out candy and stuffed animals.
We also need a federal law that says citizens have a right to video and audio record police in public that preempts state wiretapping laws. Right now, we have a mish-mash of laws that’s confusing to both citizens and police. Make it part of the Civil Rights Act, because recording the police is all about protecting citizens’ civil rights from overreaching cops. This should be high-priority legislation, because a lot of cops really DON’T LIKE being recorded and have become very aggressive and often violent toward bystanders recording them.
AP reported that two dozen cruisers were destroyed this past week in Ferguson.
At what point in an ongoing and occasionally violent demonstration is it a good idea not to keep putting out police cruisers to be destroyed, but instead to put out equipment with some inherent resistance to being torched or overturned?
Never? When it’s clear that civilian stuff doesn’t last long in the midst of an occasionally violent mob? Only after a cop gets killed?
Here’s a partial list of the militarized agencies:
The U.S. Department of Education
The Bureau of Land Management (200 uniformed law enforcement rangers and 70 special agents)
The U.S. Department of the Interior
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (with an armed uniformed division of 1.000)
The National Park Service (made up of NPS protection park rangers and U.S. Park Police officers that operate independently)
The Environmental Protection Agency (200 special agents)
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (224 special agents)
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
http://dollarvigilante.com/blo.....ter-u.html
Welcome to the conversation, HA libbies. Prominent voices you abhor have been discussing this issue for nearly a decade now:
http://www.popularmechanics.co.....ck=main_sr
@4 Oh my, our resident x-ray reader has signed up for the “Uncle Sam is Hitler and sovereign citizens are patriots” meme. Maybe that explains why the medical board doesn’t license him to do brain surgery.
Would Lincoln have deployed F-16s and Abrams tanks against General Lee if he had them? Do we need to ask? If it were up to me, that nest of rattlesnakes in Bundy Gulch would have been cleaned out by now. I’d do it with the Army, Marines, and Air Force.
@5 Don’t know if you’re thinking the same thing, Roger, but if it were me whatever forces I used to deal with Bundy and his pals I’d do it as quietly as possible. No sense giving such a bunch of narcissistic attention whores any more of that gets their rocks off.
I wonder if the problem is so much actual “military surplus” per se, so much as it is the beltway bandits who make the stuff actively seeking out new markets. Isn’t it curious that we see the cops in some suburb in the Midwest playing with all their fancy toys after a couple of years of the Mideast wars winding down and the armed forces not having to buy as many bullets? The whole SWAT-team syndrome seemed to start up about the time we withdrew from Vietnam. None other thant William F. Buckley Jr. made note of this in a pices in the National Review and expressed some pretty negative thoughts about it.
@6 Subtlety isn’t my usual style, but as I’ve said before, U.S. Marshals likely will pick these guys off one by one as they go into town for beer or return to their homes. Plain-suited guys with sunglasses will grab them, push them into a black SUV with tinted windows, and trundle them off to federal detention. And that’ll be the end of Civil War 2.0.