Heres the other side of the up-arming of the populace, including people living in malign fantasy worlds -- the up-arming and up-armoring of the police with cast-off heavy weaponry and mine-resistant, tank-like vehicles from our disastrous recent and now ended or ending wars of invasion and occupation in distant lands. TomDispatch has covered this subject regularly. The New York Times now has a good update on it, on in fact what might be thought of as a domestic arms race. Both citizenry and police are in the process of being transformed into something previously unrecognizable in America. Tom Inside the municipal garage of this small lakefront city, parked next to the hefty orange snowplow, sits an even larger truck, this one painted in desert khaki. Weighing 30 tons and built to withstand land mines, the armored combat vehicle is one of hundreds showing up across the country, in police departments big and small. The 9-foot-tall armored truck was intended for an overseas battlefield. But as President Obama ushers in the end of what he called America’s long season of war, the former tools of combat — M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more — are ending up in local police departments, often with little public notice. During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft. The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look and act like military units. Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. nytimes/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-police-departments.html
Posted on: Mon, 09 Jun 2014 15:58:57 +0000
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