I mean, who honestly even wants to 'responsibly' disclose anything like this if they live in the US? The risks of assault rifle toting FBI agents coming for coffee at six AM outweighs any benefit I can think of.
Statute of limitations doesn't always start as soon as something happened. Many times, it only starts once it has been discovered or could have reasonably been discovered.
Exposing incompetence and recklessness in government departments and large corporates, or even just any ol' trashy outfit that collects personal data, will make them very angry at being made to look incompetent and reckless.
> As they handcuffed him, his 9-year-old daughter cried in terror
The police in America are well beyond the line of "citizen" police, you have the continental European model of two police forces, civil and military, and it's hard to see that there's much civil, it's more like ordinarily armed military force and a ready-for-war military force. It hasn't helped produce liberty or better enforcement in Europe, I can't see why Americans have allowed it to become their model.
This discussion about no-knock warrants/raids[1] has a similar feel, an offence against common law, liberty, and above all, good sense.
> I was in my boxer shorts when I heard my mother‐ in‐ law scream. It was a loud, fearful scream. I ran to the window, where I saw three or four men dressed in black with high‐ caliber rifles in my yard approaching my house.
> I then heard an explosion, which was the sound of my door being blown open, followed by immediate gun fire. There were loud noises, the sounds of boots, and then more gunfire.
> I hit the floor and began to yell, “I’m upstairs; please don’t shoot!” The men in black had me walk downstairs backwards, in my boxer shorts, with my hands in the air. I still can see two high‐ caliber rifles pointed at me. At the bottom of the stairs, they bound my hands, pulled me across the living room, and forced me to kneel on the floor in front of my broken door. I thought it was a home invasion. I was fearful that I was about to be executed.
> I could see my mother‐ in‐ law bound, lying face down on the kitchen floor. Payton, my older dog, was lying dead in a pool of his own blood on the other side of the living room. I soon learned that my younger dog, Chase, was dead in a back room, where he had been shot from behind as he ran away. There were perhaps a dozen men in black, just standing around in my living room. I asked for a warrant. They said that they did not have it with them, but one was en route.
> For most of the nearly four‐ hour ordeal, I was being interrogated, half‐ dressed in my living room and then in my kitchen. It was surreal.
If it can happen to a mayor it can happen to anyone.
What the officers did in both the original and comment article I would deem criminal abuse of power. Thankfully I believe police in America are have become more keen as of late on the whole not acting like an outlaw gang; with the rise of police accountability, police being charged/convicted/sentenced, and departments paying massive sums for poorly trained wayward officers.
The speed/level of abuse of force stories has dropped substantially in the past 6 months; I suspect it's not because the people becoming quieter.
Should anyone here serve on a jury panel in America, do not forget you can vote not guilty if you believe the officers acted improperly or the punishment of trial/detention/seizure far outweighs the original non-crime. Jury nullification is a strong force of good which legally cannot be brought up in the courtroom itself, but is important for cases like these.
This sounds more like the American model. In Germany for example the SEK was formed after SWAT, in response to a terror attack in Munich. Unless there is some serious crime, where guns are involved, the judge won’t send a special unit. Pictures of guns drawn on unarmed people seem to be mostly coming from the US.
I've physically seen many police walking around crowded areas with assault rifles in France and Italy. Germany not as much but they do carry pistols iirc.
Italy does have what they call carabinheri (unsure of spelling?), which is basically a special kind of police that has automatic rifles. They do seem to patrol pretty much like normal police though, so I'm not sure what the distinction is other than the armament
The Italian Carabinieri are a gendarmerie – a military police force with civilian policing functions – such as the French National Gendarmerie (whose name is also used as the standard English word for this type of police force), the Spanish Guardia Civil, etc.
Military police in English-speaking countries usually only have jurisdiction over military installations and military personnel; they do not perform civilian policing functions except in exceptional situations such as wartime or national emergencies. By contrast, gendarmerie are military police who perform civilian policing functions in normal circumstances.
There isn't necessarily a huge difference in practice between gendarmeries and ordinary civilian police forces; gendarmeries tend to have tougher recruitment standards, a more disciplined ethos, be more heavily armed, their members will have received military basic training which covers skill areas which most civilian police training does not, etc. However, even in countries with gendarmeries, the civilian police often have elite units which are on par with those of the gendarmerie; and, in France, much of the gendarmerie are assigned to policing small towns and rural areas which is often less challenging work than that of the civilian police in the big cities.
You've probably just seen the special counter-terrorism forces at one of the big French airports like CDG, as part of Vigipirate plan. These are not police but military. Half of city police forces don't even have firearms, let alone rifles.
In Italy, rifle-armed personnel of the Army are used to guard areas at risk of terrorist attacks, e.g. train stations and other crowded areas. AFAIK they never had to intervene; I think their purpose is mostly deterrence.
In Italy there is a civil police force and a military one (named Carabinieri) and both of them carry guns. However, only when they have to raid the homes of high-risk people, e.g. mafia criminals or terrorists, SWAT-like units (named NOCS the police unit and GIS the Carabinieri unit) are deployed.
the (grim) joke in Italy being that any force that even remotely has some sort of police duties (and there are many), carries a gun, even glorified traffic wardens.
But yes, machine guns and rifles are only carried by units on special duties, normally anti-terrorism (and unfortunately Italy has a long history of internal terrorism).
In nearly 30 years of living in the US I can only ever recall seeing police officers patrolling with long guns twice: once when I visited the US capitol, and once at a big festival/parade thing in Bellevue, WA.
Seeing the officer in Bellevue patrolling with a long gun was actually quite unsettling. Even though all police in the US are armed and most have a long gun in their vehicle, they very rarely carry them in public. Even at sporting events, airports, etc.
Conversely, during the short period of time I spent in Germany and Austria I saw many police with long guns. (And that echoes my wife’s experiences in France and a couple other European countries.) They were primarily at airports and city centers, so it’s probably a terrorist thing. But it was very apparent—sort of how I imagine Brits feel when they visit a country with regularly armed police.
It’s the bias of spending your life in unexciting places in the US, but visiting high-visibility terrorism targets (aka major tourist attractions, capitals, monuments and transport hubs) when abroad.
Rest assured that the small town cops in Europe don’t patrol with MP5s, but that the marines at local US embassy (which is a high value target) occasionally do…
I've been to plenty of transport hubs, tourist attractions, capitols, etc. in the US, too. Or maybe I've been fortunate in that all the police in all the high-visibility places I've visited in the US don't patrol carrying long guns.
(And the only capitol I visited in Europe was Austria.)
> Rest assured that the small town cops in Europe don’t patrol with MP5s
I understand this. And it wasn't part of my post :)
What are you talking about civil and military police in "continental Europe"? In most countries there's a military police which polices the military, a police which polices regular peope, sometimes a gendermerie which is sometimes nominally a part of the army under civilian control, and which is either for policing the countryside - France or for riot control/backup and special cases (e.g. a football match that requires lots of police) - most of Eastern Europe. In the latter case they're sometimes more hevily armed, but not even close to US police. And idepedently of those there are special heavy units for counterterrorism stuff and similar (akin to US SWAT), which can be a part of either entity - in France there's one at both and they work together. But they're deployed only in very specific and heavy cases.
In any case, the problems with policing in Europe aren't even close to those in the US, and i don't think any of then can be attributed to hving two policing entities with different scopes.
> What are you talking about civil and military police in "continental Europe"?
You just outlined it yourself, take away the military's own police and you have, in your words,
1. a police which polices regular peope
and
2. sometimes a gendermerie which is sometimes nominally a part of the army
You also go on to give several examples of this system being used in continental Europe. You could've added in Spain and Italy too.
I'm really not sure why you asked the question if you're going to answer it yourself.
If you're looking for a non-continental police force which does not follow that system then you only need compare with the UK or Ireland.
> In any case, the problems with policing in Europe aren't even close to those in the US, and i don't think any of then can be attributed to hving two policing entities with different scopes.
So you say. From[1]:
> Covell was among the 87 protesters wounded when police baton-charged the Diaz school in Genoa, beating people as they cowered in their sleeping bags and planting petrol bombs to justify the raid.
> Once arrested, protesters, including five Britons, were taken to a police barracks where they were beaten again, sprayed with asphyxiating gas, threatened with rape and forced to sing fascist-era songs.
> Despite the handing out of verdicts including convictions for grievous bodily harm and falsifying evidence in two major trials, Italy's tardy justice system has ensured final appeals are yet to be heard and most sentences have been timed out by the statute of limitations. "No one has ever been arrested or gone to jail," said Massimo Pastore, a lawyer who has represented Covell and other activists.
That's not even the half of it. Do you think this is an isolated incident? Can you divorce this from militarised policing?
Perhaps you'll disagree and then answer the questions again, that would be helpful.
I asked because the gendermerie in most of the listed countries ( Spain, France, Italy) is nominally a part of the military ( a military branch like the army, navy, etc.) but is run by the respective Ministry of the Interior, and has a different scope. And most of all, they aren't more heavily armed than the regular police ( maybe slightly more than municipal police officers in the places that have them, but in France i can't say there's a difference in day to day armament and etc. - the French Gendermerie have a rapid response team, and some heavier equipment for when required ( snipers, lightly armoured vehicles), unlike municipal police). So i object to the term `militarised police`, because it doesn't represent reality - gendermeries in France, Italy, Spain aren't more military-like than regular police. And the same goes for the gendermeries in Eastern Europe ( including OMON in Russia and some other ex-Soviet states) - they're trained for counter-terrorism, riot control, have nothing to do with the actual military, even nominally, and while they have slightly heavier weaponry than regular police ( lightly armoured vehicles, etc.), they don't do day-to-day policing ( and sometimes don't even have the jurisdiction for it), and are only involved when big things are happening ( massive protests or matches or w/e).
Furthermore, i object to the claim that they are somehow an issue in policing. The article you've linked says just "police", so i doubt they're talking about the Carabinieri. In France, the Gendermerie ( countryside and small towns and cities) has a better reputation with regards to violence than the Police Nationale ( which only operate in cities); i can't think of a single high-profile police violence incident where the Gendermerie were involved. And when the Police Nationale were protesting due to overworking and unpaid overtime, the Gendermerie were the ones providing protection. Apparently the Spanish Guardia Civil also has a better reputation than regular Spanish police. In recent years the French army has started doing patrols in mainland France, among potentially high-profile targets ( airports, train stations, tourist hot spots)
So if anything, having two different branches of police seems beneficial in those specific cases.
And neither type of gendermerie has anything close to the equipment the US police has.
The gendarmes have grenades, as I've mentioned in another comment, do the municipal police?
Why would police need grenades, of all things?
Does the US police use grenades?
> i can't think of a single high-profile police violence incident where the Gendermerie were involved.
Have the US police ever killed an unarmed protestor with their hands in the air using a grenade? From[1]:
> Statements from several eye witnesses show that Rémi, 21, had his hands in the air and was calling on gendarmes to stop firing when he was struck and killed by an offensive grenade. Their accounts also cast some doubts over the version of events given by the authorities about the student's death.
If you don’t understand the implications of the word “nominally”, here, then you really don’t understand anything about the gendarmerie. To compare it with the American policing model is beyond ludicrous.
This is how an armed, barricaded suspect is handled in France. Watch until the end, with captions. https://youtu.be/0Bx5PRqYAig
TL;DR a police officer from higher ground shot an armed, suicidal person in the leg so that he could not commit suicide and/or hurt his family members. Very well handled, my respect from NL. I cannot imagine this happening in USA, btw.
I really like the way you cherry picked an example that allows for an apologetic on paramilitary policing. I, on the other hand, will rely on statistics, as well as horrifying examples. From an article[1] entitled Do French Lives Matter?:
> The scale of police violence was astonishing and stomach-churning. Between November 2018 and June 2019, according to figures compiled by Médiapart, 860 protesters were injured by the police – 315 suffered head injuries; 24 lost the use of an eye; and five had hands torn off. In December 2018, an elderly woman who had no involvement in the protests was killed when police threw a grenade into her flat.
> Among these victims are not only protesters but also journalists and medics. Police have been filmed beating elderly and disabled people, as well as using tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets against peaceful protesters. The main source of injuries was ‘Flashball’ rubber bullets – a non-lethal weapon that has been banned in every EU country except France. More than 13,000 of these bullets were fired in the first three months of the protests. Another extreme weapon used by police was the GLI-F4 – a teargas grenade which contains explosives that maimed numerous protesters. The grenade was eventually banned by the French government in early 2020.
> Things got so bad that the UN called for a ‘full investigation’ into the police’s ‘excessive use of force’. Similarly, the Council of Europe’s human-rights commissioner called for an end to the use of Flashballs against protesters. Amnesty International denounced the ‘extremely heavy-handed’ policing deployed against peaceful protesters. Eventually, even the French government acknowledged it had a problem with police violence.
"you really don’t understand anything about the gendarmerie" is an interesting take for someone who ignores a paramilitary group that throws grenades at grannies, blinds people and tears off hands, and beats the elderly and disabled.
> To compare it with the American policing model is beyond ludicrous.
Au contraire, I don't remember the American police beating up the elderly and disabled - or creating disabled people - en masse, in such a short space of time. Maybe you do, but it wouldn't make the comparison ludicrous. Dismissing it, however…
I'm a bit late, but you're so wrong on so many levels i can't let this slide.
First, the numbers are indeed atrocious. But they're the result of massive civil unrest which included mass civil disobedience, occasional looting and burning private property, and fighting with police ( so it wasn't just the police randomly shooting at people) which went on for months, which explains some of it.
Second, the numbers are for the police and gendermerie violence, (the latter helped because the civil unrest was massive, at the start it was mostly police). You can't just pin them all on the gendermerie because you have a preconceived notion they're the problem.
> Au contraire, I don't remember the American police beating up the elderly and disabled - or creating disabled people - en masse, in such a short space of time. Maybe you do, but it wouldn't make the comparison ludicrous
The model is different, and so are the consequences, which I wasn't talking about. US police are barely trained, suffer no consequences, and have military grade equipment. None of that applies even to the "militarised" (for you) gendermerie.
In France there was unrest, people destroying property and fighting police occasionally as a part of it. Police responded hard after initially doing nothing. Again, it was initially police, and then the gendermerie was also sent to help. Violence was done by both of them.
I think you've been seriously mislead about European police. Your description is of the heavily armed US police and not like any police force you'll hear about in Europe.
The actual military police only police servicemen and have no authority over civilians, you will only find them in army towns.
I'm British, hence I'm European. The UK does not have a paramilitary police force, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal… all have paramilitary police forces. Apparently, there are more that I was unaware of.
How were you misled into not knowing that all these major powers have gendarmerie?
I think it’s two pronged. As you rightly point out, a (lack of) free speech, which leads to this warping of “criminal” responsibility; and the fact that police are using disproportionate amounts of force, fuelled in part by the growth of their paramilitary wing.
In Romania most police raids happen at 5 AM, knock on a door a few times if no one answer, the door is breached and everyone is ordered to get on the ground, if it is a child there it is removed by a police officer, taken outside and calmed. The police enter with pistols drawn, no rifles because flats and houses in Romania are small and is hard to maneuver with the rifle. This is done to most criminals regardless of crime.
The reason is that when you raid someone they can get scared and do stupid things like try to attack the officer, try to escape, use a knife, etc. so you need to overwhelm the subject with force and end the encounter as soon as possible. I am not saying that they are shooting the subject , they didn't shoot anyone in 10 years from what I know, they are deterring him from trying to do anything stupid. If 2 skinny cops knock on the door the subject might attack the cops or try to run, if 7 big, armed officers enter the room while the criminal is half asleep then he is not trying anything and he is captured in a safe manner for everyone.
There is only a civil police here im disgusted when i see videos of how American officers behave they have never learned about disarming with anything but violence absolutely disgusting, here they need atleast 7 years of education, college 3 years then Police academy 2 years then 2 years in trainig this includes fitness and mental tests, in America it seems like they just get a bunch of gear and then off to the Streets. They are one of the reasons why i would never visit america just seems downright dangerous.. sorry for my rant.
Police in Europe is quite different from country to country, between the French, German, Spanish and say Dutch police the difference is huge. But nothing that I'm familiar with comes close to describing the police force that you apparently have as a model for the EU. Even the former SovBloc states, where the police traditionally have more problems than in the Western part of the EU in terms of corruption and having to deal with overt violence are not covered by your description. I've lived on the US border for quite a few years and even the difference between the Canadian police and the US police was night and day.
Would you mind explaining which country in the EU you believe has this model that you describe?
Just linking to Wikipedia doesn't help your argument.
For The Netherlands, this includes two: KMar (who also secure airport like Schiphol) and DSI. It does not include for example regional AT (arrestatieteam, the equiv of a SWAT team).
Every time a Dutch police officer uses their gun on the field (so exercise is excluded), there's an internal investigation, by default. If that'd happen in USA, you'd have a huge dept. of internal affairs, lol.
There is no model of a dual police in Europe that would have a tengible difference.
You have military police which is for the military.
You have police or polices for the civils. There may be one or two, they work the same and have the same prerogatives and way of working. The difference is in the colour of the uniform and some ego battles in the top management.
> The factual bases of the government’s bare bones indictment are a handful of public tweets; a Facebook friend request and message sent to a public Facebook account; the following of a public Twitter account;1 and two emails to an FBI Agent – one with a “?” emoji and another inquiring about the status of a report of a patient privacy violation.
> The Defendant made no attempt to mask his identity, and the FBI never contacted the Defendant to express any concern or to ask him to stop his communications. Instead they arrested him.
> And any claim that he engaged in a sustained course of conduct with a continuity of purpose to cyberstalk or threaten are ludicrous when compared to facts embodied in the case law regarding these statutes.
This simply has to stop. Text-book messenger shooting.
If anything, law should be reversed, exposing private information online, either unprotected or behind inadequate protection (default user/pass, weak encryption or previously compromised credentials) should be a criminal offense.
Yes well there you go - if you keep putting your boot on the face of the person trying to help you, don't be surprised if people stop trying to help you. I find myself surprisingly in favor of the FBI's actions - good! Attack and destroy researchers and journalists that share their findings in a responsible way! Force it all underground, keep them silent, keep systems from failing a test, keep them from improving, and so let them rot, from the inside, until another presumably healthier system replaces it from the outside.
Similar outcomes have happened enough times when cybersec people tried to report a security hole that the security community should have noticed the pattern long ago and taken steps which imo would be just to shrug their shoulders in future when they find security holes and think about reporting them for free out of some misplaced kindness towards big business.
Don't responsibly disclose, it's not worth the hassle anymore. Unless somewhere has a paid bug bounty program that has a good reputation I just use an anonymous email and send the bug to https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/
“Many IT guys in the dental industry know that the Patterson FTP site has been unsecured for many years. I actually remember them having a passworded FTP site back in 2006. To get the password you would call tech support at EaglesoftPatterson Dental and they would just give you the password to the FTP site if you wanted to download anything. It never changed. At some point they made the FTP site anonymous. I think around 2010.”
So literally this is about anonymous access on a publicly accessible FTP server? I thought before reading the article that maybe he had hacked into it using a weak or guessable unchanged password (which would’ve been required back in 2006). The FBI response seems very excessive to say the least.
Yeah, no. There's nothing measured in the approach taken by the FBI. Data on a server is not lethal, the FBI's response was.
And while sad, I'm not surprised. I spent time at Microsoft and once in downtown Seattle I saw a kid, maybe 9 or 10, kicking a can along on the sidewalk.
Police car sees this, siren on, jumps out the car screaming like a banshee at the poor kid to stop.
I've travelled. Like, 34 countries, and I've never seen a child treated that way. It was one of the scariest things I've seen, and it made me move back to London.
And so whilst disappointed by what the FBI did here, I'm not surprised. Isn't their slogan serve and protect or something?
> Isn't their slogan serve and protect or something?
It is their slogan, which has the same value of a McDonalds or Coke "healthy food" marketing campaign.
I think there actually was some kind of ruling in the US where it was ruled that the police in there do not have to serve or protect their citizens. [1]
Be more cynical.
It can be morally and legally wrong to persecute the researchers all it wants to be, but historically might makes right and the state has an ever growing monopoly on force; which I have no opinion on as to whether it is good or bad - but it needs to in order to facilitate it's survival in an ever more connected and delicate yet growlingly chaotic world.
You live in a world of laws prescribed to you at their discretion.
They can and will justify it infinitely and such legal actions are ramping up exceedingly since 2020 when it comes to the researchers.
I always wondered when they would come for the researchers, many of whom I find derivative projects of during incident reports. Many of the nation state actor and cybercriminal economy is fueled by the intellectualism of FOSS and university projects. It is only logical to assume Microsoft, Universities and the like don't take much of an approach in hosting such things like write-ups or FOSS cybersec tooling because they can offer the information of the authors on a silver platter to the feds when the time is right.
All those inclined to or capable of writing such things could thus be swept up in a targeted persecution from three letter agencies across NATO, forcing them either into labour or giving them fabricated charges at a show trial. You can consider the implications of a "Streisand" but the psychological value of such an event would outweigh any negative implications for such an operation.
Most of the security apparatus in the west are dull, but you have to understand how Machiavellian the people who give them the orders are.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadNot working out so great for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who "hacked" the website by looking at it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/us/missouri-st-louis-post...
The police in America are well beyond the line of "citizen" police, you have the continental European model of two police forces, civil and military, and it's hard to see that there's much civil, it's more like ordinarily armed military force and a ready-for-war military force. It hasn't helped produce liberty or better enforcement in Europe, I can't see why Americans have allowed it to become their model.
This discussion about no-knock warrants/raids[1] has a similar feel, an offence against common law, liberty, and above all, good sense.
> I was in my boxer shorts when I heard my mother‐ in‐ law scream. It was a loud, fearful scream. I ran to the window, where I saw three or four men dressed in black with high‐ caliber rifles in my yard approaching my house.
> I then heard an explosion, which was the sound of my door being blown open, followed by immediate gun fire. There were loud noises, the sounds of boots, and then more gunfire.
> I hit the floor and began to yell, “I’m upstairs; please don’t shoot!” The men in black had me walk downstairs backwards, in my boxer shorts, with my hands in the air. I still can see two high‐ caliber rifles pointed at me. At the bottom of the stairs, they bound my hands, pulled me across the living room, and forced me to kneel on the floor in front of my broken door. I thought it was a home invasion. I was fearful that I was about to be executed.
> I could see my mother‐ in‐ law bound, lying face down on the kitchen floor. Payton, my older dog, was lying dead in a pool of his own blood on the other side of the living room. I soon learned that my younger dog, Chase, was dead in a back room, where he had been shot from behind as he ran away. There were perhaps a dozen men in black, just standing around in my living room. I asked for a warrant. They said that they did not have it with them, but one was en route.
> For most of the nearly four‐ hour ordeal, I was being interrogated, half‐ dressed in my living room and then in my kitchen. It was surreal.
If it can happen to a mayor it can happen to anyone.
[1] https://www.cato.org/policy-report/november/december-2008/sh...
Edit: formatting
The speed/level of abuse of force stories has dropped substantially in the past 6 months; I suspect it's not because the people becoming quieter.
Should anyone here serve on a jury panel in America, do not forget you can vote not guilty if you believe the officers acted improperly or the punishment of trial/detention/seizure far outweighs the original non-crime. Jury nullification is a strong force of good which legally cannot be brought up in the courtroom itself, but is important for cases like these.
This isn't really true.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/nyregion/nypd-police-covi...
https://abc7chicago.com/amp/chicago-police-covid-vaccine-man...
https://abc7news.com/amp/san-francisco-vaccine-mandate-sfpd-...
Military police in English-speaking countries usually only have jurisdiction over military installations and military personnel; they do not perform civilian policing functions except in exceptional situations such as wartime or national emergencies. By contrast, gendarmerie are military police who perform civilian policing functions in normal circumstances.
There isn't necessarily a huge difference in practice between gendarmeries and ordinary civilian police forces; gendarmeries tend to have tougher recruitment standards, a more disciplined ethos, be more heavily armed, their members will have received military basic training which covers skill areas which most civilian police training does not, etc. However, even in countries with gendarmeries, the civilian police often have elite units which are on par with those of the gendarmerie; and, in France, much of the gendarmerie are assigned to policing small towns and rural areas which is often less challenging work than that of the civilian police in the big cities.
I confirm in France. I've seen group of policemen (or army?) in the (very crowded) Paris subway stations with dogs and "uzi" weapons.
In Italy there is a civil police force and a military one (named Carabinieri) and both of them carry guns. However, only when they have to raid the homes of high-risk people, e.g. mafia criminals or terrorists, SWAT-like units (named NOCS the police unit and GIS the Carabinieri unit) are deployed.
But yes, machine guns and rifles are only carried by units on special duties, normally anti-terrorism (and unfortunately Italy has a long history of internal terrorism).
In nearly 30 years of living in the US I can only ever recall seeing police officers patrolling with long guns twice: once when I visited the US capitol, and once at a big festival/parade thing in Bellevue, WA.
Seeing the officer in Bellevue patrolling with a long gun was actually quite unsettling. Even though all police in the US are armed and most have a long gun in their vehicle, they very rarely carry them in public. Even at sporting events, airports, etc.
Conversely, during the short period of time I spent in Germany and Austria I saw many police with long guns. (And that echoes my wife’s experiences in France and a couple other European countries.) They were primarily at airports and city centers, so it’s probably a terrorist thing. But it was very apparent—sort of how I imagine Brits feel when they visit a country with regularly armed police.
Rest assured that the small town cops in Europe don’t patrol with MP5s, but that the marines at local US embassy (which is a high value target) occasionally do…
(And the only capitol I visited in Europe was Austria.)
> Rest assured that the small town cops in Europe don’t patrol with MP5s
I understand this. And it wasn't part of my post :)
In any case, the problems with policing in Europe aren't even close to those in the US, and i don't think any of then can be attributed to hving two policing entities with different scopes.
You just outlined it yourself, take away the military's own police and you have, in your words,
1. a police which polices regular peope
and
2. sometimes a gendermerie which is sometimes nominally a part of the army
You also go on to give several examples of this system being used in continental Europe. You could've added in Spain and Italy too.
I'm really not sure why you asked the question if you're going to answer it yourself.
If you're looking for a non-continental police force which does not follow that system then you only need compare with the UK or Ireland.
> In any case, the problems with policing in Europe aren't even close to those in the US, and i don't think any of then can be attributed to hving two policing entities with different scopes.
So you say. From[1]:
> Covell was among the 87 protesters wounded when police baton-charged the Diaz school in Genoa, beating people as they cowered in their sleeping bags and planting petrol bombs to justify the raid.
> Once arrested, protesters, including five Britons, were taken to a police barracks where they were beaten again, sprayed with asphyxiating gas, threatened with rape and forced to sing fascist-era songs.
> Despite the handing out of verdicts including convictions for grievous bodily harm and falsifying evidence in two major trials, Italy's tardy justice system has ensured final appeals are yet to be heard and most sentences have been timed out by the statute of limitations. "No one has ever been arrested or gone to jail," said Massimo Pastore, a lawyer who has represented Covell and other activists.
That's not even the half of it. Do you think this is an isolated incident? Can you divorce this from militarised policing?
Perhaps you'll disagree and then answer the questions again, that would be helpful.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/12/night-police-b...
Furthermore, i object to the claim that they are somehow an issue in policing. The article you've linked says just "police", so i doubt they're talking about the Carabinieri. In France, the Gendermerie ( countryside and small towns and cities) has a better reputation with regards to violence than the Police Nationale ( which only operate in cities); i can't think of a single high-profile police violence incident where the Gendermerie were involved. And when the Police Nationale were protesting due to overworking and unpaid overtime, the Gendermerie were the ones providing protection. Apparently the Spanish Guardia Civil also has a better reputation than regular Spanish police. In recent years the French army has started doing patrols in mainland France, among potentially high-profile targets ( airports, train stations, tourist hot spots)
So if anything, having two different branches of police seems beneficial in those specific cases.
And neither type of gendermerie has anything close to the equipment the US police has.
Since they do the same work, do not share and duplicate the efforts it wild make sense to just merge them.
But that would require some people to let go kingdoms.
Having worked extensively with both, the way they are organized today is a pity.
Why would police need grenades, of all things?
Does the US police use grenades?
> i can't think of a single high-profile police violence incident where the Gendermerie were involved.
Have the US police ever killed an unarmed protestor with their hands in the air using a grenade? From[1]:
> Statements from several eye witnesses show that Rémi, 21, had his hands in the air and was calling on gendarmes to stop firing when he was struck and killed by an offensive grenade. Their accounts also cast some doubts over the version of events given by the authorities about the student's death.
Perhaps you were just unaware.
[1] https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/270316/eco-protes...
This is how an armed, barricaded suspect is handled in France. Watch until the end, with captions. https://youtu.be/0Bx5PRqYAig
The Gendarmerie Captain on scene then rushes to the man's mother, takes her in his arms and says "He's okay, he's okay. It was us. He's alive."
(I unfortunately don't understand much of the French language.)
> The scale of police violence was astonishing and stomach-churning. Between November 2018 and June 2019, according to figures compiled by Médiapart, 860 protesters were injured by the police – 315 suffered head injuries; 24 lost the use of an eye; and five had hands torn off. In December 2018, an elderly woman who had no involvement in the protests was killed when police threw a grenade into her flat.
> Among these victims are not only protesters but also journalists and medics. Police have been filmed beating elderly and disabled people, as well as using tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets against peaceful protesters. The main source of injuries was ‘Flashball’ rubber bullets – a non-lethal weapon that has been banned in every EU country except France. More than 13,000 of these bullets were fired in the first three months of the protests. Another extreme weapon used by police was the GLI-F4 – a teargas grenade which contains explosives that maimed numerous protesters. The grenade was eventually banned by the French government in early 2020.
> Things got so bad that the UN called for a ‘full investigation’ into the police’s ‘excessive use of force’. Similarly, the Council of Europe’s human-rights commissioner called for an end to the use of Flashballs against protesters. Amnesty International denounced the ‘extremely heavy-handed’ policing deployed against peaceful protesters. Eventually, even the French government acknowledged it had a problem with police violence.
"you really don’t understand anything about the gendarmerie" is an interesting take for someone who ignores a paramilitary group that throws grenades at grannies, blinds people and tears off hands, and beats the elderly and disabled.
> To compare it with the American policing model is beyond ludicrous.
Au contraire, I don't remember the American police beating up the elderly and disabled - or creating disabled people - en masse, in such a short space of time. Maybe you do, but it wouldn't make the comparison ludicrous. Dismissing it, however…
[1] https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/02/do-french-lives-mat...
Edit: grenades at grannies, not grenades at grenades. The real mistake was giving the police grenades in the first place though.
First, the numbers are indeed atrocious. But they're the result of massive civil unrest which included mass civil disobedience, occasional looting and burning private property, and fighting with police ( so it wasn't just the police randomly shooting at people) which went on for months, which explains some of it.
Second, the numbers are for the police and gendermerie violence, (the latter helped because the civil unrest was massive, at the start it was mostly police). You can't just pin them all on the gendermerie because you have a preconceived notion they're the problem.
> Au contraire, I don't remember the American police beating up the elderly and disabled - or creating disabled people - en masse, in such a short space of time. Maybe you do, but it wouldn't make the comparison ludicrous
The model is different, and so are the consequences, which I wasn't talking about. US police are barely trained, suffer no consequences, and have military grade equipment. None of that applies even to the "militarised" (for you) gendermerie.
In France there was unrest, people destroying property and fighting police occasionally as a part of it. Police responded hard after initially doing nothing. Again, it was initially police, and then the gendermerie was also sent to help. Violence was done by both of them.
The actual military police only police servicemen and have no authority over civilians, you will only find them in army towns.
How were you misled into not knowing that all these major powers have gendarmerie?
> I've never even seen an armored police vehicle.
What would your personal experience have to do with the actual structure of policing in several European countries?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/police-raid-homes-busin...
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/5/20/the-child-victi...
You're missing the issue. The big problem in the story is that the Government still sees people responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities as threats.
The reason is that when you raid someone they can get scared and do stupid things like try to attack the officer, try to escape, use a knife, etc. so you need to overwhelm the subject with force and end the encounter as soon as possible. I am not saying that they are shooting the subject , they didn't shoot anyone in 10 years from what I know, they are deterring him from trying to do anything stupid. If 2 skinny cops knock on the door the subject might attack the cops or try to run, if 7 big, armed officers enter the room while the criminal is half asleep then he is not trying anything and he is captured in a safe manner for everyone.
Would you mind explaining which country in the EU you believe has this model that you describe?
> The Guardia Civil (Civil Guard) is a gendarmerie force and therefore, has a military status
> The Policía Nacional or Cuerpo Nacional de Policía (the National Police Corps, or CNP) has a civilian status
Italy[2]:
> The two main police forces in the country are the Carabinieri, the national gendarmerie, and the Polizia di Stato, the civil national police.
France[3]:
> There are two national police forces called "Police nationale" and "Gendarmerie nationale".
Need I go on? There are more, as the other comments show.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_Spain
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_Italy
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paramilitary_organizat...
For The Netherlands, this includes two: KMar (who also secure airport like Schiphol) and DSI. It does not include for example regional AT (arrestatieteam, the equiv of a SWAT team).
Every time a Dutch police officer uses their gun on the field (so exercise is excluded), there's an internal investigation, by default. If that'd happen in USA, you'd have a huge dept. of internal affairs, lol.
You have military police which is for the military.
You have police or polices for the civils. There may be one or two, they work the same and have the same prerogatives and way of working. The difference is in the colour of the uniform and some ego battles in the top management.
> The Daily Dot was unable to obtain a copy of the probable cause affidavit by the time of publication, and it may be under seal.
https://www.databreaches.net/prosecution-drops-five-felony-c...
I actually want to cry
Edit was wrong about the content of the message to the spouse
> The factual bases of the government’s bare bones indictment are a handful of public tweets; a Facebook friend request and message sent to a public Facebook account; the following of a public Twitter account;1 and two emails to an FBI Agent – one with a “?” emoji and another inquiring about the status of a report of a patient privacy violation.
> The Defendant made no attempt to mask his identity, and the FBI never contacted the Defendant to express any concern or to ask him to stop his communications. Instead they arrested him.
> And any claim that he engaged in a sustained course of conduct with a continuity of purpose to cyberstalk or threaten are ludicrous when compared to facts embodied in the case law regarding these statutes.
When the powerful are embarrassed, ruining lives is only tool in the Federal LEO toolbox.
So literally this is about anonymous access on a publicly accessible FTP server? I thought before reading the article that maybe he had hacked into it using a weak or guessable unchanged password (which would’ve been required back in 2006). The FBI response seems very excessive to say the least.
And while sad, I'm not surprised. I spent time at Microsoft and once in downtown Seattle I saw a kid, maybe 9 or 10, kicking a can along on the sidewalk.
Police car sees this, siren on, jumps out the car screaming like a banshee at the poor kid to stop.
I've travelled. Like, 34 countries, and I've never seen a child treated that way. It was one of the scariest things I've seen, and it made me move back to London.
And so whilst disappointed by what the FBI did here, I'm not surprised. Isn't their slogan serve and protect or something?
It is their slogan, which has the same value of a McDonalds or Coke "healthy food" marketing campaign.
I think there actually was some kind of ruling in the US where it was ruled that the police in there do not have to serve or protect their citizens. [1]
[1] https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-y...
Between Henry Schein and the FBI, we'll likely find a financed politician who enabled this abuse.
You live in a world of laws prescribed to you at their discretion. They can and will justify it infinitely and such legal actions are ramping up exceedingly since 2020 when it comes to the researchers.
I always wondered when they would come for the researchers, many of whom I find derivative projects of during incident reports. Many of the nation state actor and cybercriminal economy is fueled by the intellectualism of FOSS and university projects. It is only logical to assume Microsoft, Universities and the like don't take much of an approach in hosting such things like write-ups or FOSS cybersec tooling because they can offer the information of the authors on a silver platter to the feds when the time is right.
All those inclined to or capable of writing such things could thus be swept up in a targeted persecution from three letter agencies across NATO, forcing them either into labour or giving them fabricated charges at a show trial. You can consider the implications of a "Streisand" but the psychological value of such an event would outweigh any negative implications for such an operation.
Most of the security apparatus in the west are dull, but you have to understand how Machiavellian the people who give them the orders are.