What they h*** are they preparing for?
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The USA produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns out a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens.
Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the "1033 Program" that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces in 2011 alone.
1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year's staggering take topped the charts, next year's orders are up 400 percent over the same period.
This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns.
Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice told The Daily, “The trend toward militarization was well under way before 9/11, but it’s the federal policy of making surplus military equipment available almost for free that has poured fuel on this fire.”
Thanks to it, cops in Cobb County, Ga. — one of the wealthiest and most educated counties in the U.S. — now have an amphibious tank. The sheriff of Richland County, S.C., proudly acquired a machine-gun-equipped armored personnel carrier that he nicknamed “The Peacemaker.”
This comes on top of grants from the Department of Homeland Security that enable police departments to buy vehicles such as “BearCats” — 16,000-pound bulletproof trucks equipped with battering rams, gun ports, tear-gas dispensers and radiation detectors. To date, more than 500 of these tank-like vehicles have been sold by Lenco, its Massachusetts-based manufacturer, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel.
“It’s kind of had a corrupting influence on the culture of policing in America,” Lynch says. “The dynamic is that you have some officer go to the chief and say, people in the next county have [military hardware], if we don’t take it some other city will. Then they acquire the equipment, they create a paramilitary unit, and everything seems fine.
“But then one or two years pass. They say, look we’ve got this equipment, this training and we haven’t been using it. That’s where it starts to creep into routine policing.”
Over the last couple of years we have seen a militarization of policing in the USA and not in the USA alone. In Europe such trends can also be seen, including in recent times in the UK.
<I think we should be worried, very worried indeed, as to why the govt thinks the PDs need that hardware>
While in Britain in general we are not, as yet, seeing a total proliferation of such military hardware in the hands of each and every police force it is beginning.
One of our problems here is now that the officers, much like those shown in some of the confrontations at the “Occupy LSX” where there was no violence at all, and in the same way cops in the USA acted, are so hell-bent on using violence against anyone who does not obey the instructions of the dictators, of the bankers and their cronies, the politicians.
The war on terrorism and the war on drugs are but an excuse to use every means possible to suppress the people and the police, themselves, supposedly, part of “the people” allow themselves to be used as a tool of oppression.
US police officers swear, aside from upholding the Constitution, to serve and protect (and that means all and not just the 1% of the richest exploiters), they seem to have no idea what that actually means.
Many a Sheriff also is totally unaware that he (or she even) is THE ultimate law enforcement agency in the area and NOT the alphabet agencies. In the US the federal agencies have no right to operate without the Sheriff's consent and he does not have to give it.
If the Feds then operate regardless they are in breach of the law and one or the other Sheriff who knows the Constitution has shown them that already.
The majority of local law enforcement chiefs, whatever their title, do, however, seem to believe that they have to toe the line of the federal government and have to do their bidding.
In Britain and other European countries things stand a little different and it is there where the police are the agency to do the government's bidding, and that can and will include the suppression of demonstrations and such.
It is the Metropolitan Police Service of London who have declared that during 2012 and especially to the run up to the Olympic Games and the Games itself demonstrations of all kinds but especially those against the government are going to be unlawful.
Sorry, what was this about democratic country and all that???
© 2011
