Seems like “police militarization” is the phrase of the week thanks to that unpleasantness in Missouri. Ran it through Startpage this morning and got over 25K hits for the past week alone. What some have been crying in the wilderness for years and years seems only to be noticeable by the card-carrying journalists for whom the first amendment exists when they’re sucking tear gas and getting rousted out of restaurants by anonymous but scary Rambo-wannabes with qualified immunity.
Cops have been gunning up very publicly since the seventies, duh. Supposedly it was all going to be a last resort they could keep in their pocket for those rare ‘hostage situations’ and such, but how often does power stay unused? In reality they’ve been using ‘civilians’ as training targets for nearly as long, and it never seemed to bother the boys and girls in the ‘media’ before now.
But this week – I suspect mostly thanks to a few seconds’ video in a McDonalds – the Warrior Cop seems to be getting his fifteen minutes.
It’s as you say. Conservatives have been warning about this tendency for years, and the limp members of congress have just blown it off. But now that the victims are not old white men, but those of the privileged classes (i.e. black and or journalists) Congress is crapping themselves trying to address this terrible and important issue.
Joel — what you said. The JPFO alert I wrote yesterday (and that runs this evening) notes the same thing. Why are people suddenly so shocked when so many have been trying for at least two decades to tell everybody exactly what’s going on?
Harry Flashman: Though I agree with you on the warnings and on the warnings being tragically ignored, I haven’t seen too many conservatives shouting warnings against the militarization of policing. On the contrary, it’s been libertarians and a handful of liberals. Mostly, conservatives have been beating the “all cops are heroes” drum and calling for special privileges (e.g. special gun rights) for cops (including off-duty and retired).
Who among conservatives has been warning against police militarization?
“Cops have been gunning up very publicly since the seventies…”
In the Twenties, cops had better guns than the military. Submachineguns and self-loading rifles were common in law enforcement before they ever were in the Army. People need to stop getting their history from Andy Griffith reruns.
In the Sixties, they’d have already turned the dogs and water cannons on the protestors. In the Twenties, Andy and Barney would have broken the old Potato-Digger out of the armory and started mowing them down. The po-po used to be pretty quick to go weapons-free on unruly crowds, especially if such crowds were made up of black folk or commies.
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