Should the review call for demilitarization of police forces, it will be interesting to see how the federal government will actually go about getting the stuff back.
I would imagine it would go about as well as the US army's current attempts to get the 200 Apache helicopters back off the various state national guards.
The so-called "North Hollywood Shootout" in 1997 was a big instigator of this. Two heavily armed bank robbers were able to hold off the LAPD by virtue of superior weapons and body armor.
There was a big public outcry and support for giving police the "tools they needed" to be able to take on the better-armed criminals, gangs, and drug dealers.
So now that the police have become essentially local armies in many jurisdictions, people think they have gone too far.
What troubles me most is that neither Obama nor most legislators in congress have the first clue or any experience in law enforcement. So anything that happens is going to be driven by political concerns, not what makes the most sense for effective and appropriate law enforcement.
Politicians often don't have a clue about many subjects, but that's not necessarily too bad a thing.
Politicians should be generalists not specialists. What they should do is surround themselves with experts is specific fields, and consider the advice they give.
Unfortunately, in many nations the politicians more frequently listen to the distorted scare and panic the media has created that week and base their policies on that instead.
> What they should do is surround themselves with experts is specific fields, and consider the advice they give.
The problem here is that it's all too easy to pay off experts to give advice that isn't necessarily "correct" but is what a special interest wants for some reason.
Further many of these experts are also allowed to remain anonymous (or effectively so) which means that they aren't even selling their reputation on a one-time transactions where afterwards they will be publicly humiliated or shamed. They are allowed to do this over and over.
I agree with your statement in principle 100% but in practice I'm not sure it's terribly effective.
Obama nor most legislators in congress have the first clue or any experience in law enforcement
He was a practicing civil rights attorney, taught constitutional law and was president of Harvard Law Review.
You may not like him, but to say that someone who has that level of professional legal experience doesn't have any experience in law enforcement, would seem ridiculous.
You realize that police don't think that, right? And other than those attorneys working for Dept of Justice and other agencies with a law enforcement mandate, I don't think many attorneys consider themselves "law enforcement" either.
The local ambulance chaser or deed auditor hardly goes around calling himself "law enforcement".
It doesn't matter what someone calls themselves when asking what they have experience in.
A deed auditor would tend to think that they have had some experience in the enforcing of the area of law pertaining to deed auditing without ever needing to title themselves as law enforcement.
Police are the problem, what they think is besides the point, they've invalidated their voice and are now the subject of the conversation about what to do about them.
Isn't drawing the "effective" and "appropriate" lines anyway a political exercise?
The local sheriff's experience in law enforcement doesn't lend him any great advantage over me in deciding whether jay walkers should spend time in jail (or whatever other stupid example you want to use).
He probably has developed a better intuition about what sorts of people will escalate their lawbreaking, but that still doesn't give him an advantage in deciding what steps are appropriate in dealing with such a problem.
Agreed. Furthermore, a heavily armed and militarized police doesn't seem either effective or appropriate in most situations, which aren't like the North Hollywood Shoot-out, so what's the problem with a review?
Let's not review an alarming situation because not everyone involved will have the deepest understanding of it?
>So anything that happens is going to be driven by political concerns, not what makes the most sense for effective and appropriate law enforcement.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I care more about not having a militarized police force than I care about the police being able to shoot the 1 in 1,000,000 well-equipped robber with a 50 cal/machine gun/40mm launcher/whatever they are getting these days.
Sorry for putting the rights of the civilian population (political concerns) over being able to kill any conceivable criminal ("effective" law enforcement).
It's interesting to me that this notorious shootout that prompted better police armament seems to have turned out fairly well despite the initial disadvantage of the police. Although badly outgunned, the police managed to keep the robbers relatively confined until the SWAT team arrived and disabled the robbers. A lot of people were injured but the only deaths were the criminals. Not exactly the best day ever for the LAPD, but it seems like a reasonable outcome for an unusual situation.
The natural incentives for police aren't necessarily what's good for society. A policeman will naturally want to keep himself alive and catch the bad guy at almost any cost. False convictions, injuries to innocent bystanders, dead suspects, and other such things aren't inherently something police care too much about. We make them care by imposing a framework where they have a reason to avoid these things, but left to their own devices they naturally worry about their own lives and their goal of catching criminals.
The police are certainly the ones to ask about how best to effectively combat criminals and similar things, but they're not the ones to ask about the correct tradeoff between police and civilian lives, the rate at which criminals should be allowed to get away (not zero!), and overall public safety from police, not just public safety by police.
In terms of how you phrased it, I think police are good ones to ask about effective law enforcement, but not necessarily about appropriate law enforcement.
I would argue that the problem stems from a failure to train police in conflict resolution (without the use of military hardware). Police are supposed to be civilians, equal to and part of their communities.
I can only hope something good comes of this and it's not just "We reviewed it and decided it's fine."
I really have no problem with state police having _access_ to some of this kind of equipment. It's probably good for equipment to be distributed throughout the country but it's obvious that there is a severe lack of training and an really strong desire to break it out and parade around with it like a bunch of teenagers with their first gun. I hear people talking about how the police are the "thin blue line" between law and order but in this case they are clearly a fat green line. This equipment should have gone to the national guard.
If the police use military gear, it should be kept under lock and key and if it is authorized for use, should trigger a bunch of additional reporting requirements as an incentive not to use it.
I think people might have the wrong impression of the 1033 program. The program makes sense - instead of wasting extra military equipment, give it to local police who can use it. A lot of this equipment is very benign types of things, stuff like shoes, first-aid kits, blankets, etc.
As far as I know, local police aren't getting attack helicopters or artillery units. I don't think the equipment needs to be "kept under lock and key" except for a very few things.
The M16 is a field-issue combat rifle, certainly, but it's also the mainstay of sport hunters and shooting enthusiasts everywhere. It's also the appropriate weapon to have providing overwatch when serving a warrant on a potentially hostile perp; It's accurate at, and visible at, far greater ranges than a service pistol. Sometimes you need a guy in the rear to make certain nobody fucks with you.
This is somewhat misleading. AR-15 patterned rifles are a mainstay of shooting enthusiasts.
You'll be hard pressed to find someone who hunts with a select fire, optionally fully automatic m16.
It's not really humane to hunt anything but foxes and rabbits with a civilian AR-15. 5.56×45mm is too small to guarantee a killshot against a deer, so most consider it pretty inhumane to try -- there's a high likelyhood it'll leave a deer to slowly bleed out.
Frankly, it's a pretty terrible sport hunting rifle. The round is too small for most big game, and the cartridge is too powerful for most small game.
The mainstay of sport hunters is actually the 12-gauge shotgun.
Hunting isn't really a good justification for the proliferation of AR-platform rifles, and is definitely a non-sequitur when discussing the armament of our police force.
I get what you're saying. And by the raw numbers there's a lot of good stuff in there too. But if you look through that list you see a lot of things like "MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE" (probably an MRAP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP_(armored_vehicle) )that are totally inappropriate for the local police force to be rolling around in. I'm not saying the 1033 program is a bad idea… I just think if you give someone an armored assault vehicle, it should come with the requirement that they only use it if the country is under attack or something very very serious. Better yet, give it to the guard.
I used to live in NYC and have family that is NYC police and I know they deal with some crazy stuff. They dress a bit more aggressively than most police forces. I'm currently living in Japan where the image of the police is more Norman Rockwell than Soldier. I'm also reminded of reading of a hospital that switched from customizable scrubs where the nurses were picking their own patterns to standard white uniforms and got behavioural change from both patients and doctors. I wish I could find the link.
So.. in some sense I do think there is a bit of a problem with even a set of boots coming from the military to the police. If you wear a respectable blue uniform your mindset turns toward earning your community's respect. If you wear jack boots, body armor and a military uniform, you look intimidating. I'm sure that's what the police want, but it's not appropriate for most normal police work and I believe it's the public's job to tell them so. Police are civilians who have special privilege to enforce the laws of society. They should be protected by the legal system, not body armor. If you need body armor to handle a protest, call in the Guard.
We're probably mostly in agreement, even if we lean slightly different directions on some of the issues. For example, I can't think of any legitimate MRAP uses by local police either (although if anyone can point our a realistic use case, I'd definitely like to hear it).
I completely agree that the police should be part of the community they work in and not some military-like third-party authority force. And because of that it presents an issue when the police look like a pseudo-military. However, I don't think in most cases police look like this, although I might be wrong.
Body armor is a tough call. Just yesterday a Texas police chief was killed making a routine traffic stop, and it's understandable why officers feel constantly threatened. As far as I could find, about 65 police officers die in the line of duty each year. My first reaction is that that is pretty low, perhaps policing isn't as dangerous as one would think, but I'd need to look into it a lot more before drawing any real conclusions. It's quite possible the relatively low death toll is a result of more aggressive policing, but it could also indicate that aggressive policing isn't needed.
I'd argue that we already have military hardware distributed around the country with local people regularly trained to use it: The National Guard. I really don't see a need for police to have access to any equipment of this nature, if a situation is bad enough to require such hardware, call in The National Guard.
One aspect of the gun control debate is the conflict between gun control laws and the right to rebel against unjust governments. Blackstone in his Commentaries alluded to this right to rebel as the natural right of resistance and self preservation, to be used only as a last resort, exercisable when "the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression".[71] Some believe that the framers of the Bill of Rights sought to balance not just political power, but also military power, between the people, the states and the nation,[72] as Alexander Hamilton explained in 1788:
[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude[,] that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens.[72][73]
=======
If you accept above interpretation, why don't local police have nuclear weapons? Also why aren't nuclear weapons sold to citizens who have a right to "keep and bear arms"?
The nuclear arms argument is a classic fallacy bandied about frequently when gun rights come up.
There can be no argument in favor of nuclear weapons used for individual, or even small group or very localized, self-defense. In fact, I'd argue there can never be a valid argument in favor of nuclear weapons for self-defense (with emphasis on self).
For defending a larger population base, the police have no reason to have nuclear weapons because they are not in charge of national defense or national security. That is left to the military, which does have nuclear weapons.
There can be no precise or selective targeting with nuclear weapons, in the sense of shooting a bad guy and not shooting an unarmed civilian near by. Nuclear weapons also do not function to defend against individual crime, which is something a gun can defend against. In any act of attempting to defend yourself from a localized attack by using a nuke, you will kill yourself and countless civilians nearby. There's an exceptionally long list of reasons why the floated nuclear weapons counter makes absolutely no sense.
Ultimately you can tell the nuclear arms argument is irrational, because if you follow the logic behind it to the proper conclusion, no person ever has a right to self-defense under any circumstances: because you should thus never be allowed to wield any weapons, including a knife or baseball bat in self-defense. It's the ultimate argument in ridiculousness: if you can't be allowed to do X very extreme thing, then you can't be allowed to do X drastically less extreme thing. A scale comparison would be, if I'm allowed to drive a car - cars kill 30,000 people per year in the US - then why can't I 'drive' an aircraft carrier.
That makes sense. Now, the general point I think would be that at a smaller scale we're hearing accounts of local police (or perhaps state police) riding around in tanks shooting tear gas into groups of citizens.
Where are the accounts of organized groups of citizens riding around in tanks firing tear gas at who they believe to be oppressive police force? Are those available in the free market?
I guess I'm trying to figure out where the line is supposed to be drawn in terms of who gets what kinds of arms? I'm sure alot of folks would argue that as soon as a local police force is given particular types of weapons, it's perhaps assumed that citizens will have same or similar weapons available to them to organize to protect themselves from oppressive government.
EDIT: Or more precisely, as soon as certain types of weapons are turned against its own citizens, is it right that those citizens don't have the same or similar weapons at their disposal to protect themselves?
One thing I think you're missing is that citizens only really need to have modern weapons (not every weapon) to be in ultimate control. There are 1,000+ armed citizens for every police officer.
As for what the second amendment should mean, the supreme court has spent the last 100 years hearing arguments in every direction. You might guess that your "nukes" argument is about as old as nukes (and before that people just used other examples).
Agreed. This is a highly nuanced and multi-faceted space in general. Specific to US and what Obama is proposing, how do you think they'll be framing the question in order to understand what the right answers are?
Hopefully they'll look at the problem facing police and help them solve it using more brains and less brawn.
Personally I look at this all through the lens of technology. George Holliday using his new Sony Handycam to show the world the beating of Rodney King was merely the initial trickle of justice. The torrent is coming and only genuinely good police officers will survive it.
I don't know if I agree that it's a necessary conclusion that if "not 100X", then "not 1X". The reason for the inquiry was to probe the boundaries of the issue that's being argued. If the boundaries are defined by the stated interpretation of 2nd amendment, perhaps folks come to different conclusion of what kinds of weapons local police forces should be allowed to utilize.
I see that my thread was downvoted, so I'll respond with this.
In my opinion it was a very keen observation on which the above excerpt is based. That is that people on equal footing are far more likely to engage to resolve disputes in a civil manner than those where one group is sufficiently and strategically in a favorable position. Take any sufficiently one-sided argument anywhere in the news and show me where the weaker group prevailed?
To draw a parallel to technology. We don't architect our systems for the best case scenario. For critical infrastructure we plan for the worst and hope for the best. I think that gets to the essence of the above interpretation of 2nd amendment. I think we can draw a parallel to real world and the architecture of our government. For critical infrastructure of our government, where basic human rights are at stake, it behooves us to plan for the worst and hope for the best.
Except he is the Commander-in-Chief of the entire armed forces. And he gave an order for gitmo, a military prison, to close. Which means everyone that shows up to work there every day is in serious violation of an order from a superior.
Everything else is just words. He ordered it closed, it should be covered in dust and tumbleweeds by now with not a person to be found.
I'd like to see more work on police-specific weapons.
Weapon retention is a HUGE problem for the police. They open-carry pistols, aren't terribly well armed, are easy to get to show up, and have to grapple with suspects. This means more of them die by their own weapons (taken by someone else) than by an attacker's own weapon!
Retention holsters (the level 3 stuff, like SERPA) are great, but this is the one area where weapons with biometric or other authentication make sense. Particularly for non-SWAT police, they'll probably carry the gun openly for an entire career but never actually fire in self defense.
Police weapons having an integrated "guncam" and "gunradio" which start recording and calling for help the instant they're removed from the holster would be great, too.
it is not about the gizmos, it is about training and education.
LEOs who do no respect basic rights of citizens and journalists.
LEOs who point their weapons at unarmed civilians, nilly willy, shouting racist slurs.
LEOs who have no means of deescalation, run by pure panic and fear like beaten dogs.
the gear doesn't matter. the triggerfinger does.
listening to the eyewitness statements the officer should get maximum punishment, locked up for life. betrayal of every single principle of law enforcement.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadI would imagine it would go about as well as the US army's current attempts to get the 200 Apache helicopters back off the various state national guards.
There was a big public outcry and support for giving police the "tools they needed" to be able to take on the better-armed criminals, gangs, and drug dealers.
So now that the police have become essentially local armies in many jurisdictions, people think they have gone too far.
What troubles me most is that neither Obama nor most legislators in congress have the first clue or any experience in law enforcement. So anything that happens is going to be driven by political concerns, not what makes the most sense for effective and appropriate law enforcement.
Politicians should be generalists not specialists. What they should do is surround themselves with experts is specific fields, and consider the advice they give.
Unfortunately, in many nations the politicians more frequently listen to the distorted scare and panic the media has created that week and base their policies on that instead.
The problem here is that it's all too easy to pay off experts to give advice that isn't necessarily "correct" but is what a special interest wants for some reason.
Further many of these experts are also allowed to remain anonymous (or effectively so) which means that they aren't even selling their reputation on a one-time transactions where afterwards they will be publicly humiliated or shamed. They are allowed to do this over and over.
I agree with your statement in principle 100% but in practice I'm not sure it's terribly effective.
He was a practicing civil rights attorney, taught constitutional law and was president of Harvard Law Review.
You may not like him, but to say that someone who has that level of professional legal experience doesn't have any experience in law enforcement, would seem ridiculous.
That's a bit like saying that an Electronics Engineer who can build a CPU is a good person to hire to write Javascript.
Not exactly the same. But knowing civil rights and constitutional law is very different from having a wholistic understanding of law enforcement.
You'd need Dirk Gently for that.
You realize that police don't think that, right? And other than those attorneys working for Dept of Justice and other agencies with a law enforcement mandate, I don't think many attorneys consider themselves "law enforcement" either.
The local ambulance chaser or deed auditor hardly goes around calling himself "law enforcement".
It doesn't matter what someone calls themselves when asking what they have experience in.
A deed auditor would tend to think that they have had some experience in the enforcing of the area of law pertaining to deed auditing without ever needing to title themselves as law enforcement.
Because allowing them to do that got us into this paramilitary mess in the first place.
You aren't in Mega City One, not yet at any rate.
Though taking a look through recent press, it is getting fairly hard to tell the difference, admittedly.
The local sheriff's experience in law enforcement doesn't lend him any great advantage over me in deciding whether jay walkers should spend time in jail (or whatever other stupid example you want to use).
He probably has developed a better intuition about what sorts of people will escalate their lawbreaking, but that still doesn't give him an advantage in deciding what steps are appropriate in dealing with such a problem.
Let's not review an alarming situation because not everyone involved will have the deepest understanding of it?
Maybe I'm crazy, but I care more about not having a militarized police force than I care about the police being able to shoot the 1 in 1,000,000 well-equipped robber with a 50 cal/machine gun/40mm launcher/whatever they are getting these days.
Sorry for putting the rights of the civilian population (political concerns) over being able to kill any conceivable criminal ("effective" law enforcement).
The natural incentives for police aren't necessarily what's good for society. A policeman will naturally want to keep himself alive and catch the bad guy at almost any cost. False convictions, injuries to innocent bystanders, dead suspects, and other such things aren't inherently something police care too much about. We make them care by imposing a framework where they have a reason to avoid these things, but left to their own devices they naturally worry about their own lives and their goal of catching criminals.
The police are certainly the ones to ask about how best to effectively combat criminals and similar things, but they're not the ones to ask about the correct tradeoff between police and civilian lives, the rate at which criminals should be allowed to get away (not zero!), and overall public safety from police, not just public safety by police.
In terms of how you phrased it, I think police are good ones to ask about effective law enforcement, but not necessarily about appropriate law enforcement.
Somewhere along the line, that got lost.
I really have no problem with state police having _access_ to some of this kind of equipment. It's probably good for equipment to be distributed throughout the country but it's obvious that there is a severe lack of training and an really strong desire to break it out and parade around with it like a bunch of teenagers with their first gun. I hear people talking about how the police are the "thin blue line" between law and order but in this case they are clearly a fat green line. This equipment should have gone to the national guard.
If the police use military gear, it should be kept under lock and key and if it is authorized for use, should trigger a bunch of additional reporting requirements as an incentive not to use it.
As far as I know, local police aren't getting attack helicopters or artillery units. I don't think the equipment needs to be "kept under lock and key" except for a very few things.
Edit: You can see a list of the most distributed stuff here: http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/08/21/most-p...
Or the full data here: https://github.com/TheUpshot/Military-Surplus-Gear
You'll be hard pressed to find someone who hunts with a select fire, optionally fully automatic m16.
It's not really humane to hunt anything but foxes and rabbits with a civilian AR-15. 5.56×45mm is too small to guarantee a killshot against a deer, so most consider it pretty inhumane to try -- there's a high likelyhood it'll leave a deer to slowly bleed out.
The mainstay of sport hunters is actually the 12-gauge shotgun.
Hunting isn't really a good justification for the proliferation of AR-platform rifles, and is definitely a non-sequitur when discussing the armament of our police force.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v218/baumgar/ArpaioHowitze...
I used to live in NYC and have family that is NYC police and I know they deal with some crazy stuff. They dress a bit more aggressively than most police forces. I'm currently living in Japan where the image of the police is more Norman Rockwell than Soldier. I'm also reminded of reading of a hospital that switched from customizable scrubs where the nurses were picking their own patterns to standard white uniforms and got behavioural change from both patients and doctors. I wish I could find the link.
So.. in some sense I do think there is a bit of a problem with even a set of boots coming from the military to the police. If you wear a respectable blue uniform your mindset turns toward earning your community's respect. If you wear jack boots, body armor and a military uniform, you look intimidating. I'm sure that's what the police want, but it's not appropriate for most normal police work and I believe it's the public's job to tell them so. Police are civilians who have special privilege to enforce the laws of society. They should be protected by the legal system, not body armor. If you need body armor to handle a protest, call in the Guard.
I completely agree that the police should be part of the community they work in and not some military-like third-party authority force. And because of that it presents an issue when the police look like a pseudo-military. However, I don't think in most cases police look like this, although I might be wrong.
Body armor is a tough call. Just yesterday a Texas police chief was killed making a routine traffic stop, and it's understandable why officers feel constantly threatened. As far as I could find, about 65 police officers die in the line of duty each year. My first reaction is that that is pretty low, perhaps policing isn't as dangerous as one would think, but I'd need to look into it a lot more before drawing any real conclusions. It's quite possible the relatively low death toll is a result of more aggressive policing, but it could also indicate that aggressive policing isn't needed.
One aspect of the gun control debate is the conflict between gun control laws and the right to rebel against unjust governments. Blackstone in his Commentaries alluded to this right to rebel as the natural right of resistance and self preservation, to be used only as a last resort, exercisable when "the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression".[71] Some believe that the framers of the Bill of Rights sought to balance not just political power, but also military power, between the people, the states and the nation,[72] as Alexander Hamilton explained in 1788:
[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude[,] that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens.[72][73]
=======
If you accept above interpretation, why don't local police have nuclear weapons? Also why aren't nuclear weapons sold to citizens who have a right to "keep and bear arms"?
There can be no argument in favor of nuclear weapons used for individual, or even small group or very localized, self-defense. In fact, I'd argue there can never be a valid argument in favor of nuclear weapons for self-defense (with emphasis on self).
For defending a larger population base, the police have no reason to have nuclear weapons because they are not in charge of national defense or national security. That is left to the military, which does have nuclear weapons.
There can be no precise or selective targeting with nuclear weapons, in the sense of shooting a bad guy and not shooting an unarmed civilian near by. Nuclear weapons also do not function to defend against individual crime, which is something a gun can defend against. In any act of attempting to defend yourself from a localized attack by using a nuke, you will kill yourself and countless civilians nearby. There's an exceptionally long list of reasons why the floated nuclear weapons counter makes absolutely no sense.
Ultimately you can tell the nuclear arms argument is irrational, because if you follow the logic behind it to the proper conclusion, no person ever has a right to self-defense under any circumstances: because you should thus never be allowed to wield any weapons, including a knife or baseball bat in self-defense. It's the ultimate argument in ridiculousness: if you can't be allowed to do X very extreme thing, then you can't be allowed to do X drastically less extreme thing. A scale comparison would be, if I'm allowed to drive a car - cars kill 30,000 people per year in the US - then why can't I 'drive' an aircraft carrier.
Where are the accounts of organized groups of citizens riding around in tanks firing tear gas at who they believe to be oppressive police force? Are those available in the free market?
I guess I'm trying to figure out where the line is supposed to be drawn in terms of who gets what kinds of arms? I'm sure alot of folks would argue that as soon as a local police force is given particular types of weapons, it's perhaps assumed that citizens will have same or similar weapons available to them to organize to protect themselves from oppressive government.
EDIT: Or more precisely, as soon as certain types of weapons are turned against its own citizens, is it right that those citizens don't have the same or similar weapons at their disposal to protect themselves?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Meneze...
One thing I think you're missing is that citizens only really need to have modern weapons (not every weapon) to be in ultimate control. There are 1,000+ armed citizens for every police officer.
As for what the second amendment should mean, the supreme court has spent the last 100 years hearing arguments in every direction. You might guess that your "nukes" argument is about as old as nukes (and before that people just used other examples).
If you want to learn more about it here's a good place to start Wikipedia'ing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
Personally I look at this all through the lens of technology. George Holliday using his new Sony Handycam to show the world the beating of Rodney King was merely the initial trickle of justice. The torrent is coming and only genuinely good police officers will survive it.
In my opinion it was a very keen observation on which the above excerpt is based. That is that people on equal footing are far more likely to engage to resolve disputes in a civil manner than those where one group is sufficiently and strategically in a favorable position. Take any sufficiently one-sided argument anywhere in the news and show me where the weaker group prevailed?
To draw a parallel to technology. We don't architect our systems for the best case scenario. For critical infrastructure we plan for the worst and hope for the best. I think that gets to the essence of the above interpretation of 2nd amendment. I think we can draw a parallel to real world and the architecture of our government. For critical infrastructure of our government, where basic human rights are at stake, it behooves us to plan for the worst and hope for the best.
Everything else is just words. He ordered it closed, it should be covered in dust and tumbleweeds by now with not a person to be found.
Weapon retention is a HUGE problem for the police. They open-carry pistols, aren't terribly well armed, are easy to get to show up, and have to grapple with suspects. This means more of them die by their own weapons (taken by someone else) than by an attacker's own weapon!
Retention holsters (the level 3 stuff, like SERPA) are great, but this is the one area where weapons with biometric or other authentication make sense. Particularly for non-SWAT police, they'll probably carry the gun openly for an entire career but never actually fire in self defense.
Police weapons having an integrated "guncam" and "gunradio" which start recording and calling for help the instant they're removed from the holster would be great, too.
Will they explode if someone else tries to use them and fire several different voice activated rounds? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawgiver_%28Judge_Dredd%29
it is not about the gizmos, it is about training and education.
LEOs who do no respect basic rights of citizens and journalists.
LEOs who point their weapons at unarmed civilians, nilly willy, shouting racist slurs.
LEOs who have no means of deescalation, run by pure panic and fear like beaten dogs.
the gear doesn't matter. the triggerfinger does.
listening to the eyewitness statements the officer should get maximum punishment, locked up for life. betrayal of every single principle of law enforcement.