This is a controversial position, and I recognize that it isn't perfect.
I don't think that regular cops should have weapons. They should be primarily involved in conflict resolution only. If somebody wants to overpower a cop because they own a gun and the cop doesn't, then that person should be charged with a crime, but the cop should ALWAYS be the weaker party.
And I mean no weapons. No pepper spray, no tasers. Nothing. Police departments should also take an active role in making sure that their uniforms, as well as their vehicles, are as non-aggressive looking as possible. Cops should be the people that stop to help you change a tire when you have a flat, help you get home if you're drunk, or mediate between you and the scary homeless dude that won't get off your porch.
Police work should be a dangerous job, and the only people who should even be capable of doing it are people who are experts at conflict resolution, not escalation.
I recognize that weapons are sometimes necessary, but I think that a cop showing up with a gun should be an extremely rare thing to see.
I know there is the argument that cops are there to protect us...but from who? Unless it is a hostage scenario, when is a time that a cop is going to directly intervene in a bad guy doing something bad to me, and a is going to need their gun to do so?
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Police are protected by something called "qualified immunity", which is to say that, while in the pursuit of their job as a police officer, are not subject to the same laws with regards to assault as most civilians.
I think that this should go away. If a cop assaults somebody, it should go to court, and the cop should have to prove that it was self defense. If they shoot somebody, they better be able to prove that they had a direct threat to their own life.
Cops should be burdened with additional responsibilities but offered no additional rights.
We should all remember that regular police in Britain don't carry guns. The guns are carried by special units that get called in when a suspect is thought to have a weapon.
I was in London in May when 2 men attacked a British solider and beheaded him on a public street, on the south side of London. One of the men was seen to have a gun, so the regular police called for the armed police. The armed police showed up 15 minutes later.
What was amazing to me (I'm a USA citizen) given the brutality of the attack, was the absolute calm with which everyone dealt with it. The public, the commentators in the media, the police, they all talked about the incident in a reasonable way, noting that tragedy can not be banned from human life. There were no calls for suspending civil liberties so as to keep the public safe. It was one of those moments when I realized how far my own country had wandered from its supposed commitment to freedom.
Also worth noting, the 2 attackers spoke to various bystanders, before the police arrived. Several bystanders captured the scene on their cell phone videos. The attackers repeated rhetoric that was Islamist in nature, and they used rhetorical flourishes that, I later read, had similarities to some Al Qaeda propaganda. Despite that, the media was restrained in its treatment of the religious/terrorist angle.
There may, at some point in the future, be a similar attack in the USA, where some men espousing a radical Islamist view kill an American soldier. I doubt the political reaction will be as calm in the USA as it was in Britain.
There were no calls for suspending civil liberties so as to keep the public safe.
Actually, the incident gave rise to a lot of noise from some politicians about how they needed to introduce the "Snooper's charter" which was previously rejected, so that they could stop these kinds of crimes before they happened, etc.
This only got drowned out when Snowden started releasing the stuff that shows that they didn't wait for any Snooper's charter anyway.
They don't carry guns, but they still are wrapped up in shank-proof vests and bristling with a Batman belt of cuffs and batons and gadgets. And if there are such scary things as students protesting university fees, they'll happily get up in full riot gear, stomp people, and then kettle them. Don't mistake British police for nonviolent.
>There were no calls for suspending civil liberties so as to keep the public safe. It was one of those moments when I realized how far my own country had wandered from its supposed commitment to freedom.
There has been a rash of 7 shootings in the last 5 days in my town. Nine people were shot and 5 killed. I haven't heard anything calling for any suspension of civil liberties...
The quote above sounds like misunderstanding and repetition of the false info that during the Boston neighborhood manhunt martial law was declared, which is actually incorrect.
Some law enforcement officers have no choice but to operate like this.
My dad was a Sheriff in a really remote area of California when I was a kid. He would often tell me how his closest backup was sometimes 30-45 minutes away. When he pulled someone over, or responded to a domestic dispute, he had no choice but to try to resolve any conflicts by talking. He once even told me, his number one weapon of choice was talking. I don't think he ever even had to pull out his gun once, during his career.
Sadly, if you know another cop can roll onto the sene in under 30 seconds, there isn't much incentive to resolve problems without a huge show of force.
And I mean no weapons. No pepper spray, no tasers. Nothing.
I would wager that I've been on the ass-end of police interactions more than the typical US HNer and while I sympathize with this position (and like you wrote, it's "controversial"), I can't agree with it. Police officers in high-crime areas do come across legitimately dangerous people and may be greatly outnumbered. I can think of several police interactions where I suspect the perps would have tried to fight it out if the cops weren't armed. You put cops in situations where they are unarmed and undermanned, you just get a situation where police officers will probably refuse to do their jobs. Remember don't have to protect us. [1] The only way to make unarmed policing work in the USA would be to significantly increase the number of cops on the street, and I don't like that trade-off, especially is recruitment stays the same as it is now.
I do agree that "people who should even be capable of doing it are people who are experts" - in some (at least, possible many/most/all) states the requirement to become a local or state police officer is a high school diploma, a background check (many times past criminal activities are fine, as long as all cased are "disposed") and a 20-week police academy. Oh, and police departments are allowed to reject applicants who may be too high-achieving[2]. You dump Joebob McStripsearch on the job with a gun and no idea when/how to use it, combined with a BS war on drugs, and of course shooting dogs in the name of officer "safety" becomes commonplace.
Police departments should be recruiting the smartest people in the country and then training the fuck out of them. Four years+ of coursework in community relations, constitutional law, civil rights, psychology, armed and unarmed self defense, plus time spent during training interacting with the community, etc. Putting bad officers on the street with no weapons might stop dogs from getting shot, but won't stop testilying and profiling. Get great people, who are trained experts at how to deal with situations, and they will deal with situations expertly.
As a reference, training to be a full police officer in Germany takes about 2.5 years (about 130 weeks; possibly varying slightly by state). I have no particular insights on the efficacy or the specifics of the training in comparison to the US -- I assume much of those 2.5 years is spent on the job, and I guess it's possible that police officers straight out of the acadamy also go through some additional training in their first assignment.
Those dangerous places are most likely over run by gangs making their bread on the black market. The solution is simple, but militarizing the police is easier.
Is it standard operating procedure for SWAT teams to always kill the dogs of the homes they enter? It seems like every story I read about a police raid usually ends with the household dogs getting killed. That is the most enraging part of this story. My dog is like family to me and if someone killed him I would be absolutely devastated.
Cops are cowards and are terrified of dogs, especially in high stress environments. Sometimes they kill them just to remove the possibility of a threat from them. As many people consider their pets part of their family (myself included), I'm surprise there haven't been any revenge killings of the cops involved yet. I suspect it's only a matter of time before they do it to the wrong person.
It does seem to be SOP and not just in SWAT raids, and answering codyb this has to my knowledge held true for years, Balko doesn't have to do much cherry picking to cite a lot of puppycide incidents. Hmmm, they might be particularly prominent because they're tangible unlike "police terrified my family and me" but didn't kill or seriously injure humans.
I have seen our local police spray mace/pepper spray on dogs, but have not heard of any dogs being shot here unless the police were actually being attacked.
I too am a dog aficionado, and I can't imagine the feeling of having my best friends shot simply because of an error.
That said, some dogs are naturally protective of their family members, and it is the responsibility of dog owners to train their dogs sufficiently to be able to maintain control of their dogs, even while being restrained by authorities.
This is where Schutzhund training comes into play.
My dogs respond to both voice commands as well as hand signals.
When I say "Pfui! Ablegen!" my dogs immediately lie down and are still. The same with "Platz."
I have trained my dogs to work well in varying situations, including violent confrontations, with/without firearms, attackers with bats, etc, and it takes a level of commitment that the casual dog owner lacks.
I was urged into Schutzhund training by a neighbor who raises beautiful Rottweilers and he didn't want to see any uncontrolled bull-dogs in this neighborhood. (rural agriculture, and my dogs run loose on my un-fenced property)
It was the best thing to ever happen for my dogs and I.
I suspect that if you started yelling in a foreign language while one of these teams was trying to secure your house, you'd end up just as dead as your dog.
There's a difference between a stern command, and crazed yelling.
I keep forgetting that not everyone has combat experience and the ability to remain calm in tense situations.
Besides, any reasonable person who felt threatened by my dog(s) would see the results of my commands and the situation would thereby pose no threat to the police.
From there I could tell the dogs to play dead and further defuse the situation.
The bottom line is that dog owners need to maintain control of their dogs at all times.
There are too many dunderheads out there who think it's cool to have a bad ass dog yet have no idea about how to maintain those dogs in a proper fashion.
Living in the country, as I have for most of my life, we don't see too many of these types of police actions, as being in such a close-knit community, everyone knows what everyone else is up to, so the police in this county rarely, if ever, break down the wrong door.
I have a long driveway and can see who is coming up to the house from quite a distance, so I don't see how anyone could storm my house without being seen, and once I've identified the interlopers as police I would make sure to place my dogs in their kennels.
I guess that's why I live where I do. I like it this way.
This is not meant to be a defense of the reprehensible police tactics outlined in the article, but rather an example of one way to deal with one's dog(s) in a responsible manner.
I think most of what you are saying is at best orthogonal to the article, where the dogs were not in any way 'bad ass dogs not under control' but simply stupid little house dogs that were in some cases actually /running away/ when they were shot, and the people were not getting in trouble for being threatening in any way but for not being fast enough to lie still and silent on the ground. It's obviously unlikely that you will ever be in this situation, but if it did happen I don't believe it would go as smoothly as you seem to think.
It doesn't matter if the dog is lying still or not. They will just shoot it because they've got combat high. It happens to everyone, even seasoned veterans.
To some extent, you hear this because Radley Balko is the major voice in America talking about SWAT raids gone wrong, and Balko is a dog-lover who is, like you, outraged by dog-shootings.
Totally. I'm not arguing that it doesn't happen, and happen with considerable frequency. I'm saying that when the parent poster suggests that he sees it basically every time, that's because Balko is an incredibly dominant presence in this area of reporting, and he highlights cases that involve dogs being shot.
I don't regard this as a problem, and I think that Balko is invaluable. I do wish that more reporters would take up this issue.
This is part two of Salon.com's excerpts from the book: "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The militarization of America's Police Forces."
To read the first ("Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book."): http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/“why_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_...
The old saying "when you've got a hammer everything looks like a nail" comes to mind. If you have a full time SWAT team but only need them legitimately 6% of the time what do you do with the rest of their time? In these cases it looks like the Police department's solution is to just use them for inappropriate stuff when there isn't anything better to do.
That's what I'd like to know too? I'm reminded of the old line I hear of "well, that escalated quickly".
Shouldn't there be maybe a simple check from a non-armed individual (I'm thinking a nice gentleman or lady in business attire - an investigator). Seems like most people will gladly help the police if they are kind and courteous. Then if that doesn't work out, bring in standard officers (no SWAT), to discuss matters but without breaking into a house. There still seems like there should be many levels of escalation before a SWAT is called.
Only if some sort of armed conflict occurs then a SWAT team is probably necessary and called in with proper escalation procedures. Why jump straight to armed conflict mode by bringing in a SWAT? Heck, I would even wager to say that RIGHT before a SWAT is called if you warn the individuals that if they don't comply, a SWAT will be called, then just the warning will be enough. Still I can't stress enough, that there should be escalation procedures. Long escalation procedures.
Because the person who gets to make the call is often either someone on the team, or someone who is likely friends with the members of the team, who is not fiscally responsible for the optimal use of resources, and because the officers get paid more for high-risk jobs (such as SWAT raids).
Since drug war/prison system/militarized police keeps popping up on HN, I'd highly recommend anyone very interested in learning more about how this came to be to watch the documentary "The House I Live In."
It's an excellent explanation of how drug laws and being "tough" on crime have led to skyrocketing incarceration rates, trigger happy cops, and broken communities.
Having gone to University of Maryland, I have to say that I am not at all surprised that this occurred in PG County. Every time I had to deal with county police or government for any reason, it was a miserable experience that showed severe incompetence, if not corruption. Also, they have a tank that they deploy (along with SWAT officers with shields and tear gas/rubber bullets) if students party in the streets after sporting events.
My car was stolen from the DC metro and was recovered by the PG county police. Trying to get my car back from them gave me the impression that the average PG county police department employee is barely literate and totally incompetent.
Sounds about right. When my house in College Park was robbed, I never wound up getting any insurance money for my stolen property because I just couldn't string together enough competent employees to complete the process.
This escalation seems to be due to a number of things:
1) A perceived rise in the weapons capabilities of criminals and terrorists (See: LA Bank Robbery w/ automatics and vests)
2) A great deal of 9/11 DHS money going to local enforcement grants to prevent terrorism and up capabilities (providing the weapons and armor
3) A colossal lack of judgment and an incredibly improper escalation of force employed in civilian targets.
It is incredibly maddening and frustrating, but at the same time I can understand it from the Police perspective. Perhaps we can combat this with a few policy and legal related things:
1) Legislation that provides a method to sue the government for excessive force, damages, and property damage
2) Require any urban assault teams to videotape raids and make that content public to the courts to verify accounts
3) Reduce the amount of money that goes to excessive gear, armor, and weapons and free up more money for training on target judgment and force escalation.
Not a silver bullet, and it won't bring these dogs, or the man with the book in the previous segment, but it could be a start.
While I agree a significant down-sizing of these tactical forces is required, I think a good argument can be made for the capability of police and government leaders to call a specially trained team within a certain timeframe to combat escalated force.
If a couple of guys with easily available automatic weapons decide to stroll through a shopping mall it's nice to have that option, but you don't need one in every town, and every police officer doesn't need to be in full tactical kit all the time.
I'm speaking out of turn but part of it is also cultural - if you're wearing a vest and you've got the weapons and everything strapped to you looking unsociable with your sunglasses and scowl you're a badass. I gather normal blues don't get the same reaction within the community.
> If a couple of guys with easily available automatic weapons decide to stroll through a shopping mall
I think that these sorts of incidents, and similarly the Ned Kelly / North Hollywood Shootout incidents, are rare enough that we really should not be wasting resources planning for them. Have a few squad cars have guns locked away in the boot, only to be removed with explicit approval (perhaps unlocked remotely), and then proceed to not worry about something that will almost certainly never happen to you.
These things rarely happen despite the fact that the required equipment is readily available. That's because there just are not that many people interested in shooting up lots of people.
Particularly the Ned Kelly / North Hollywood situations... there is really no good reason to attempt to arrest those people while the crime is in process. Like how how high-speed chases should be handled, just fall back and arrest them later. Don't confront those people on their terms, use time to your advantage and arrest them later on your terms. That's not the appropriate attitude in every situation (for example, Columbine), but I think it is the appropriate attitude in nearly every situation.
Yeah, SWAT teams were created for a reason, to respond to crises that the regular police were not equipped or trained to handle (that's why it's Special Weapons and Tactics). The problem here is just that they're being used for routine policing tasks that really should be the purview of regular patrol officers. We don't have to get rid of them entirely, just limit the kinds of situations that they're allowed to respond to. Sending SWAT teams after suspects with no criminal record and who are not expected to be armed is absurd and wasteful.
Sure but the executive branch is setting a horrible example by enforcing federal laws against drugs in states where said drugs are legal.
If the administration and a local jurisdiction disagree on what's legal they shouldn't use the citizenry as a proxy punching bag through which they release their frustration.
Yeah but they were funded and trained by DHS money, training that focuses on fighting wars not peaceful conflict resolution. You're right though, it's not just one administration, this is the Bush Administrations fault as much as the Obama Administration.
Reading the article made me so angry I'm having a hard time even expressing my anger in words.
Police officers who behave like this should be in prison and banned from ever getting a job as a cop again. The bosses who authorize and cover for them should be in prison as well. Behavior like this should be absolutely unacceptable. Instead it's encouraged and praised by the people who should be holding them accountable.
I'm sure there are a few cops out there who would never behave this way, but the bad ones seem to be increasing in number rapidly. A lot of it undoubtedly has to do with the fact that their power keeps increasing, and that attracts the wrong sort of person to the job. And peer pressure and isolation from the rest of society due to their us-vs-them mentality doesn't help for the rest of them. When faced with their friends abusing power, it's easier to ignore it and let it slide rather than make waves.
A key solution is to end the War on Drugs, which is the fodder for this madness. That can only happen when the population realizes that it is a failure and that a different approach is needed.
Otherwise reasonable people will say "but these drugs are dangerous and we must protect people from their harm" -- help them understand that is a fallacy and you will have made a difference.
It was "the fodder for this madness", but it is now so beyond just the Drug War ending the latter wouldn't change this problem.
The actual result would be way worse for those of us who aren't part of the drug culture as the police-judicial complex would struggle to avoid layoffs. Which is also part of our problem, real crime is way down (certain parts of the country excepted), yet the authorities haven't downsized in response.
Good luck getting the DA to actually press charges. If the DA says it's not a crime, you don't have any standing to go to a judge for criminal proceedings. You can only sue for civil.
With how corrupt things seem to be in some places, that's a definite loophole.
It is easy to feel powerless, but we have to remember that we have direct access to the most powerful system ever invented for information transfer. Time to use for something other than looking at cats!
So it sounds like
a) there are more SWAT teams than incidents that need them, so they're being sent to incidents that don't need them
b) nobody who can do anything about it gives a shit that these teams can't ratchet down to the new incidents they are being given.
Proposed solution: every 2nd or 3rd SWAT deployment goes to the house of someone in their chain of command, or a member of another team. The team members never know if they are on a fake deployment or a real one. The chain of command AND the team starts caring about how the team deals with little old ladies and dogs because they might belong to someone important. And if someone thinks that constantly being on incidents that don't require them to be on a hair trigger and kill things is dulling their edge, maybe they'll stop deploying them to incidents that don't require hair trigger killing.
It sounds like the problem here is not militarization of police, but the incompetence of these particular police and the huge amount of drug-related activity going on. If people react to the end of drug prohibition the same way they reacted to the end of alcohol prohibition, the whole country will be strung out in weeks if we legalize the stuff. That's the only thing that keeps me from jumping on the legalization bandwagon. I'd support the cops in the Calvo case standing trial for total incompetence however.
I am enjoying the subtlety of your Darwinian argument.
One friend of mine suggests that we need to make adult play centers that have pitfalls, like dead drops, to keep people fit and alert. The kicker is that they would be placed in such a way that it would be necessary to traverse them to get to essentials like the DMV, liquor store, etc.
But I guess the big question is whether you think these people on drugs will create a massive amount of collateral damage or not on their way to thin themselves out? I imagine cars crashing through walls, people passing out with their stoves on and burning down their apartments, strung-out people electrocuting themselves, that kind of thing.
> If people react to the end of drug prohibition the same way they reacted to the end of alcohol prohibition, the whole country will be strung out in weeks if we legalize the stuff.
None of the drugs currently prohibited were as popular before being prohibited as alcohol was before it was prohibited, so I don't see any reason to expect that they would be as popular after prohibition as alcohol was.
Heck, none of them are as popular while prohibited as alcohol was while it was prohibited.
Not that I think your statement correctly presents the response to the end of alcohol prohibition, either.
If people react to the end of drug prohibition the same way they reacted to the end of alcohol prohibition...
Have you ever visited the USA? Or any other area where it's legal for adults to purchase and consume alcohol? If not, I think you should do so at your earliest opportunity. It might blow your mind.
I would like to point, that several US SWAT teams are trained by a brazillian company, that is world famous for training the best SWAT teams.
The thing is: that company is THAT famous, because it has literal urban warfare veterans, here in Brazil our SWAT teams (with other names) are used to fight heavily armed (ie: bazookas, grenade launchers, armour piercing auto-cannons) drug lords.
Our teams here routinely kills lots of people, out of necessity, and they consider their job war, also our most elite and violent teams, sent into the worst places, are part of the military police (that here is a "normal" police but is actually part of the army, they follow normal army rules and hierarchy, and in case of foreign war, can be sent to the other country and keep their current hierarchy level there).
Here in Brazil most of it is necessity, but it is not surprise that training US SWAT here would result into something weird...
Sending people trained to face this, to do regulamentation checks, or raid a party, or a amateur gambling ring, is beyond absurd and silly.
Oh, the website of the company that train some US SWAT teams: http://www.cati.com.br/site/pt/?target=curso_interno&cid=27 the US version is broken for some weird reason, also yes, the site is very cheesy... but I know it is true because a friend of mine that works for GOE (Special Operations Group, of the São Paulo civil police) gave me the link and explained some stuff (and back then, invited me to be a volunteer fake hostage for their training)
Elite Squad and Elite Squad 2, the movies, do a good job of portraying what speeder is talking about. The Brazilian favellas are run by drug lords. From my understanding, there has been a big push by Brazil to eradicate these criminals before the World Cup begins. It's quite interesting that BOPE is training US SWAT teams.
Also São Paulo (where I am from) we have "ROTA" that criminals here nicknamed "wheels of death" because few of them survived after seeing one of their cars (this was the car that specifically got that nickname, the fact the same vehicle model was used by funeral companies also did not help: http://anjosguardioes.com/uploadfotos/Galeria/Policia-Milita... )
To complete the story, add who am I, what I have done to them, and why they are firing to me.
Because I won't identify with just any SWAT team receiving this and then answer from their standpoint.
Given the regime and how it treats it's people, one could easily reverse the question.
So, before answering the "should police have guns and shot at people" -- I'd first ask: wait, how did it got to a shooting match between them? What's wrong in this society that exhibits this?
For example (and Godwin's law be damned) if the unit send to stop the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was shot at, I could not care less about it. If they wanted that, then they should not have done what they have done (and served those who they have served) in the first place.
As society becomes more chaotic, the cops are going to get more violent and pro-active. Look at police in Brazil and other war zones. They have to be this way, and they're not universally competent, so you get the dog-shooters and zombies volunteering for these missions as well as the regular cops.
Maybe instead of blaming the tool -- the cops -- we should fix our fractured and dysfunctional society.
I don't think that regular cops should have weapons. They should be primarily involved in conflict resolution only. If somebody wants to overpower a cop because they own a gun and the cop doesn't, then that person should be charged with a crime, but the cop should ALWAYS be the weaker party.
And I mean no weapons. No pepper spray, no tasers. Nothing. Police departments should also take an active role in making sure that their uniforms, as well as their vehicles, are as non-aggressive looking as possible. Cops should be the people that stop to help you change a tire when you have a flat, help you get home if you're drunk, or mediate between you and the scary homeless dude that won't get off your porch.
Police work should be a dangerous job, and the only people who should even be capable of doing it are people who are experts at conflict resolution, not escalation.
I recognize that weapons are sometimes necessary, but I think that a cop showing up with a gun should be an extremely rare thing to see.
I know there is the argument that cops are there to protect us...but from who? Unless it is a hostage scenario, when is a time that a cop is going to directly intervene in a bad guy doing something bad to me, and a is going to need their gun to do so?
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Police are protected by something called "qualified immunity", which is to say that, while in the pursuit of their job as a police officer, are not subject to the same laws with regards to assault as most civilians.
I think that this should go away. If a cop assaults somebody, it should go to court, and the cop should have to prove that it was self defense. If they shoot somebody, they better be able to prove that they had a direct threat to their own life.
Cops should be burdened with additional responsibilities but offered no additional rights.