Remember Officer Friendly, the beat cops who were known as peace officers and were counted on to uphold our domestic laws, detect and investigate crimes, and be a helpful, non-threatening presence in our communities? ~ Well, ... youll have to keep looking for them because twenty years ago, Congress created the military transfer program, providing federal grants so chiefs of police and sheriffs could buy surplus firepower from the Pentagon. Through those grants, in a stunningly short time, our local police forces have become high-octane, macho-military units, possessing a large armory of Pentagon freebies ranging from 30-ton tanks to rifle silencers. For ordinary police work, theyve gone from peacekeeping beats to way over-the-top SWAT team aggression thats unleashed on the citizenry tens of thousands of times a year. For example, a gung-ho Florida SWAT team raided area barbershops in 2010 to stop the horror of barbering without a license. And masked police in Louisiana launched a military raid on a nightclub in order to perform a liquor-law inspection. These were barbers and bartenders, not al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Militarization is a dangerous and ultimately deadly perversion of the honorable purpose of policing — and it is out of control. truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/jim-hightower-the-militarization-of-officer-friendly
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 21:15:43 +0000
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