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Geekery Today: posts tagged POLICE The Law Enforcement Magazine

Translation from cop-speak to English (posted 25 October 2008)

The San Antonio police department recently adopted a perfectly reasonable policy restricting the use of tasers to situations in which there isn’t any risk that somebody will get killed. Here’s part of a reader’s comment in reply to the story about the policy in POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine:

I think the one officer at a time is a good policy, but to deny them the use of the Taser is WRONG! What are we supposed to do, go back to the baton or billy club? Once an officer is SCARED he will resort to whatever it takes to save him/herself.

—konaron @ 10/16/2008 8:04 PM

Translation: according to konaron, cops are a bunch of twitchy, trigger-happy cowards who will resort to any kind of violence, no matter how excessive, in order to save their own skins. Therefore police department policies should indulge their violence as far as possible, even if it means letting them kill people with their non-lethal weapons.

And I’m the one who’s supposed to be running down cops?

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No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#7) (posted 6 October 2008)

Here's a cover with a photo of a cop in an ordinary blue duty uniform looking through the site of a huge assault rifle, pointed at a target off-camera.

Posturing macho warrior cops in Chicago, Miami, Palm Beach County, Montana, Johnson City, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. are all now starting to carry are all now starting to carry AR-15 or M4 assault rifles with them on ordinary street patrols, for all those tactical situations that they expect to find themselves in when they’re out there peace-making.

Now, in Phoenix, the police department is ordering more semiautomatic AR-15 rifles for patrol cops to tote on the streets. The goal is to make sure that there will be at least 3 cops carrying an AR-15 in every patrol squad.

More patrol officers on Phoenix streets will soon be carrying semi-automatic rifles, a move that officials say will provide a better match for criminals and more accurate tool in high-risk encounters.

… Phoenix council members on Wednesday approved a request for the police department to purchase 60 Bushmaster .223-caliber rifles from Clyde Armory at a cost of $44,813.28. Officials anticipate having the order fulfilled in time for the first set of 20 officers to train with the rifles in early November.

There are currently 60 rifles assigned to patrol officers. Once the additional 60 are implemented, each squad will have access to a rifle. The eventual goal is to have three per squad, said Sgt. Andy Hill, a Phoenix police spokesman.

Special units have used the high-powered gun for years, and some patrol officers have been carrying them since 1999.

—Lindsey Collom, The Arizona Republic (2008-10-02): Police Department to get more rifles

Meanwhile, cop press outlets like POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine continually run stories proclaiming that there aren’t enough cops swarming the city streets, and print demonstrably false claims about violent crime rates—for example:

Consider the widespread belief that violent crime rates are dropping in America. This stanza of the sociologists’ catechism is backed up by the statistic that the murder rate is declining. […] But as recently pointed out by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his keynote speeches at TREXPO West, we actually live in the most criminally violent period in American history. The murder rate is down, not because Americans have stopped trying to kill each other but because emergency medicine has advanced far enough to keep the victims of deadly assaults alive when just years before they would have died.

The claim about violent crime rates is demonstrably false; the attempt to explain away declining murder rates is pure bullshit. If you check the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports data from 1992 to 2007, you’ll find that total violent crime rates per 100,000 have fallen every single year for the past 15 years, except for small upticks in 2005 and 2006. (Small enough that the rate never even reached where it had been in 2003.) Absolute numbers of violent crimes reported decreased every year except for 2001, 2005, and 2006, in spite of continuous increases in total population. The total numbers include not only murder, but also robbery, rape, and all forms of aggravated assault, with attempted murders being counted under the aggravated assault category, so advances in ER procedures and technology make no difference at all. And you see roughly the same trends when you break the figures down by each category. In other words, this is a complete lie which could have been proven false by spending a couple minutes perusing easily-read tables on the FBI’s own website. The interesting question, then, is what kind of purpose it serves for heavily-armed government cops — who are stocking up on assault rifles and tanks, cordoning off whole neighborhoods, training themselves in warrior mindset, and calling for a surge by inner-city police forces explicitly modeled on the military occupation of Iraq and funded by Department of Homeland Security — for these cops, I say, to go around trying very hard to convince each other, in spite of the evidence of their senses, that we actually live in the most criminally violent period in American history.

Do you feel safer now?

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How cops see themselves (posted 25 September 2008)

A few days ago I wrote a post that referenced a story in POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine. POLICE is a glossy journal of blue thug culture, which includes charming pieces like America Needs a Surge Against Gangs, How to Justify Officer Safety Searches, Working Informants. Here is a collage of cover photos from the past two years of POLICE.

Here's a cover with a photo of an armed cop standing next to a National Guard soldier with a flag in the background, captioned "Standing Guard" Here's a cover with a photo of two armored SWAT police coming around the corner, with the one in front pointing a huge shotgun obliquely towards the camera. Here's a cover with a photo of a cop aiming a gun at the target on a training range. Here's a cover with a photo of heavily armed SWAT police standing in the door of a huge armored vehicle, aiming a shotgun obliquely at the camera, with the headline "Heavy Metal Thunder: Armored Vehicles Give SWAT the Winning Edge" Here's a cover with a photo of a cop standing in darkness, pointing a lit-up handgun obliquely at the camera. Here's a cover with a photo of a heavily armed SWAT police, with a helmet and body armor, charging directly at the camera with a shotgun pointed directly at the camera, with the headline "SWAT Saves Lives". Here's a cover of a patrol cop's rear end and gun holster, with the cop about to pull the handgun out of the holster. Here's a cover with a photo of a gang of heavily armored SWAT police, with face-plated riot helmets and heavy body armor, forcing a prisoner in an orange jump suit to the ground, captioned "SWAT behind bars". Here's a cover with a photo of a cop in an ordinary blue duty uniform looking through the site of a huge assault rifle, pointed at a target off-camera. Here's a cover with a photo of an armored SWAT police firing a huge TASER shotgun obliquely at the camera, with the shock-delivery projectile actually flying out towards the viewer. Here's a cover with a photo of a patrol officer crouched in combat posture behind a huge SUV with police markings, with her handgun drawn and pointed at a target off-camera to the left. Here's a cover with a photo of an armored SWAT police charging towards the camera, holding an assault rifle that's currently pointed at the ground. Here's a cover with a photo of a line of about 5 or 6 armored SWAT police in body armor and helmets, coming around the corner of a yellow school bus, with the caption "Are Terrorists Targeting Our Schools?" Here's a cover with a photo of a SWAT police in body armor, wearing sunglasses and squared off facing the camera, with a large assault rifle in his hands.

This is a selective collage—but the selection includes the majority of the covers POLICE has printed over the past two years. That’s the way that a magazine staffed and written almost entirely by current or former police, and written for an audience of professional police, on the subject of policing, has chosen to brand itself and its contents for its prospective audience. What do you think that says about the way government cops see themselves these days? What sort of model do you suppose images like these suggest for police to use to understand the ethics and the attitude that they need to adopt in their professional lives? What do you think that a publication like this encourages them to think of when they think of what their job is all about, and what kind of posture they should adopt when they deal with non-police — with people like you and me and our neighbors — on the street or in our homes?

Do you feel safer now?

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No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter… (#6) (posted 19 September 2008)

Quick quiz. Try to identify where this photograph was taken, and what military force the people pictured in it are members of.

Here is a photograph of several men in dark uniforms with helmets and body armor, in combat posture, with assault rifles pointed directly at the camera. They are posed in front of a large tank. One man is standing in front of the tank, smiling, in a normal suit and tie.

The photograph was taken in Richland County, South Carolina. The people in the photograph are Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott and his Special Response Team. They are posed in front of their recently acquired Army-surplus Armored Personnel Carrier, which has a top speed of 30 miles per hour and a turret-mounted .50-caliber belt-fed machine gun. They call it the Peacemaker, apparently because this is exactly the sort of military hardware Jesus would use to terrorize or kill suspected meth addicts.

Sheriff Leon Lott told the Columbia State newspaper that he hoped the vehicle, named The Peacemaker, would let the bad guys know that his officers are serious.

We don’t look at this as a killing machine, Lott told the paper. It’s going to keep the peace. We hope the fact that we have this is going to save lives. When something like this rolls up, it’s time to give up.

—Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine (2008-03-06): S.C. Sheriff’s Department Armored Vehicle with Belt-Fed Machine Gun

Take another look at that photograph, and let me know whether that’s what peace looks like to you. Please keep in mind, if you happen to be in Richland County, South Carolina, that, in the view of the Sheriff’s Department, keeping the peace means putting so much firepower in the hands of government police that their capacity for violence terrorizes the rest of the populace out of any thought of defying or resisting their orders.

The Richland County Sheriff’s department got their new armored personnel carrier through a federal government program which provides military surplus weapons to local law enforcement agencies.

As Radley Balko said back in May, in response to another story:

I’m afraid this intermingling of domestic police and military is well beyond the point of no return.

Do you feel safer now?

(Via John Markley 2008-09-04, Radley Balko 2008-09-01, and Pete Guthier 2008-09-01.)

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