Late Night Video — We’re Building a Domestic Army
The man in this video clip says he is a retired Marine Corps Colonel and he is speaking at Concord, NH city council meeting where he Council is considering a request from the Concord PD for armored vehicles. He draws some parallels with the time he spent in Iraq (without equipment like this) and starts to show how Homeland Security standardization of gear makes it easier for PDs to look indistinguishable from an occupying army. This is almost 4 minutes long:
One of the things that could be pared back or completely eliminated in the rush to austerity are all of the grants targeted to police like the Homeland Security Grants and the Byrne Grants.
Tags: Late Night Video
Pretty good video. I agree with a lot of it, but especially the part where he talks about the effectiveness of all this expensive equipment. It doesn’t stop problems before they happen, it doesn’t really do all that great of a job of mitigating the risks once these problems do happen, and it almost always leads to a total lack of creativity in solving security problems. In short instead of training officers to prevent these problems they get trained to wait for the incidents to happen, rely on their equipment and hope that their technological advantage saves their butts.
That’s a very good observation, Falcor. There’s little about this stuff that is useful to community risk prevention and it would make better sense to me that Federal grants would be more focused on targeted crime reduction support rather than helping military contractors develop secondary markets for their stuff.
Once a police force gets a SWAT team, you can be sure that they’ll figure out some reason to use it.
On two college tours this year we’ve already been assured that the campus police has a SWAT team.
Those went off the list.
Radley Balko has apparently written a book on this — The Rise of the Warrior Cop. He had an essay in the WSJ a few weeks back providing useful history and some thoughts on ramping the militarization down.