To begin with, any law enforcement agency that routinely
makes use of this gear during non-disaster, non-catastrophe conditions is going
to have an image problem. The sight of a wave of officers dressed in black
tactical gear and body armor with military-grade rifles, grenade launchers, and
armored vehicles is enough to convince anyone seeing it that the people running
that agency have gone power-mad and are reacting with excessive force just so
they can play with their exciting new toys. The sight of that kind of firepower
being aimed at unarmed civilians staging a protest against unjustified use of
deadly force is going to make an already tense situation worse, and the fact
that such equipment (and the people using it) frequently are being used in inappropriate situations does not help…
Every time a police department deploys a SWAT team, complete
with assault rifles and armored vehicles, in order to search for suspects who
have never actually lived at the address being invaded, everyone in this
country is a little less free than they had been, and all of the traditional
animosity and distrust between underserved and disenfranchised communities and
their local authorities become that much worse. But some of these scenes are
enough to convince even social conservatives that things have gone too far. For
example, last week the San Diego Unified School District acquired its own
armored vehicle under this program, a mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle
or MRAP, of the kind used for army patrols in Afghanistan…
You can catch the story from the local public radio station’s home page if you’d like; there are some really great pictures included (even if
one of them has been digitally altered) that give you an idea of the size of
the vehicle involved. The school district is insisting that they will only use
the MRAP as a rescue vehicle, to knock down walls or transport children to
safety in the event of an “active shooter” situation or a fire or earthquake.
No one has explained, as yet, what is going to happen if they accidentally
knock down a wall on top of some unsuspecting class, or how they appear to have
managed to get through the last century-plus of operations without owning a
vehicle whose armor can stop small-arms fire and IDE explosions, if this need
is so critical. But nearly as bad, at least in my opinion, is the inherent
squandering of government funds involved here – because that’s our money they’re throwing away…
Since the despicable attacks of 13 years ago today there
have been exactly zero armed incursions on American soil, and exactly that many
occasions when local law enforcement would have had occasion to use
military-grade weapons to repel one. The world is a more dangerous place than it was decades ago, but nearly all
of the threats to our nation and our way of life are made up of covert attacks
and shadow warfare carried out at levels that local police forces will never encounter.
The only possible benefit of this military surplus give-away is to require the
armed forces to buy new gear, which funnels more public funds into the
companies that make it. The whole thing is a mass of the worst possible kind of
pork-barrel spending, covered with a two-faced mock-patriotic flag-waving
justification stinking to high heaven of both social and financial inequity…
And I object to it, in the strongest possible terms, because
the funds we are giving away consist entirely of money we are borrowing from
other nations – some of which aren’t all that friendly…
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