http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/09/1328272/-Police-Depts-Militarizing-To-Deal-With-Returning-Vets-With-PTSD?detail=email
does anything in these pictures strik a familiar thought?
The Guardian's Ed Pilkington attended the Urban Shield trade show in Oakland, CA, where manufacturers of weapons, armored-vehicles, body armor etc etc are clamoring to sell this stuff to police departments across America and the world.
On three sides of the hall, giant black tactical armoured vehicles are stationed, wheels chest-height, sides armour-plated to resist an AK-47 round or blast of a roadside bomb, roofs decked out with spotlights, surveillance cameras and swivel turrets able to house machine guns. One of the vehicles, the aptly named Sentinel – 21ft long, 17,500lbs in weight, and costing $250,000 and up – was developed by a Florida-based company called International Armored Group that began supplying the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan. “With all that experience in blast resistance, we decided to branch off into tactical vehicles tailored to police departments at home,” said the company’s Sally Stefova.
Given the national soul-searching about militarized policing that Ferguson inspired, you might expect to see a muted, self-reflective Urban Shield this year. Not so, judging from the hardware on display on the convention floor.
As you enter the vast exhibition space you are accosted by assault rifles, gas masks, helmets, tactical knives, robots, drones, night-vision devices and countless other references to the war zone. The poster for the Urban Shield event itself shows a police officer from Oakland’s local Alameda sheriff’s department wearing a helmet and goggles and pointing an assault rifle directly out at the viewer. He crouches above a clock that has stopped symbolically at 9:11, alongside the words “Critical training 4 critical times”.
Even the T-shirts on sale at Urban Shield show no self-awareness of post-Ferguson sensitivities. “Keep calm and return fire,” one model says. Another has printed on it the figure of a person with hands in the air – the same symbol of peaceful defiance used by Ferguson protesters – onto which a gun-sight has been superimposed directly over the head, above the rubric: “This is my peace sign”.
As Steve Lenthe, a member of a narcotics unit within the local Alameda County sheriffs office who is participating in the event, sees it, Ferguson-style policing is essential because “my job is not to take a bullet. If wearing full body armor gets me home safely, absolutely.”
Lenthe was one of several police officers and vendors who told the Guardian that a serious threat came from Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans returning home with post-traumatic stress disorder. “These are sophisticated people, guys coming back from combat who know how to use their weapons and are dealing with PTSD,” he said, despite the insistence of the Department of Veterans Affairs that the link between PTSD and violent crime is overblown to the point of distortion.
I fear our future under republican rule they are no longer just arming the crazies on their side they are turning the urban police into urban guerillas and we are the enemy Black, White, Brown or Asian eventually they will have all the ordinance and calling the Nat'l guard or army will no longer mean anything as the cops will have the same fire power and body armor, this should be dealt with quickly before if not already this becomes a too big to stop thing.
make these weapons for our soldiers when they are done sell it to the police who will use it against them. those who know me know I shy away from profanity so please accept my apology, THIS IS FUCKED UP AND WE NEED TO FIX IT THAT CAN'T BE DONE BY ELECTING REPUBLICANS, BE SAFE OR A POTENTIAL STATISTIC. Rev. Al, "lot's of things were acceptable, until we stopped accepting them". vote like your life depends on it, because it does my friend, it does.
