So many things I have been considering to opine on for my new thought channel. I think I’ll start here: a (now) open letter to the Senators and House Representative for my area in Capitol City… er, Washington, on the militarization of police and other law enforcement. I know the Ferguson protests are moving further into our collective rear-view mirror, but the issue is no less pressing and no more dealt with. I am posting my letter as a suggestion that you, my good reader, write your own similar letter to your national lawmakers, and maybe something like it to any city official in the pipeline to keep your own police force in check. If you are a politician running to REPLACE my current political representatives, feel free to read and respond as well. More commentary after the meat of the content:
Dear SENATOR & REPRESENTATIVE:
I feel the need to write to you about to the events last month in Ferguson, MO. Those events are pretty much over and, on the surface, seem not related to the business of our state. But I feel those events demonstrate something larger and more dangerous to the nation which we are seeming too often- the militarization of police departments.
Not just in this one town in Missouri, but in cities and counties all over this nation, police are becoming militarized. This is relevant to you as a national lawmaker because the equipment and training has often been paid for by money from Defense and Homeland Security Department budgets. Local police agencies have been encouraged to stock up on weapons and receive training for situations beyond what they see in most of their normal duties. This would be fine if they were just getting better communications and life-SAVING equipment, but often it is heavy-duty deadly weapons.
And once these local police have this equipment they too often use it responding to smaller crimes that do not need such heavy-handed responses. Civilians who are guilty only of minor crimes or totally innocent bystanders have been hurt and killed in these raids upgraded for no reason other than so officers can show off. A toddler in Georgia was wounded by a grenade and hospitalized for months after a raid searching for a low-level drug user who did not even live in the house. A grenade! There is evidence this is leading to police seeing some or all of their dealings with civilians as incidents they have to control and dominate, rather than opportunities to serve.
As a constituent and citizen, I would appreciate you turning some of your efforts into reducing federal giveaways of high-powered weaponry to local police and instead look at ways of encouraging more effective and service-oriented policing. The militarized local police is not a direction our Founding Fathers or great grandchildren would want
Respectfully,
{The Freelance Minion}
So I wrote and sent that to my House Representative and the Senator NOT retiring this year (I did not feel the Senator planning to leave in Jan. would be around enough to affect change, but the candidates looking to replace him can sure respond to this).
There is more than little suspicion that police are arming this way not in reaction to REAL threats they are seeing on the streets but the idea of future crime seen in movies like Robocop, Judge Dredd, Die Hard, etc. But seriously, does your average police force NEED to be equipped to storm a supervillain’s hollow volcano lair? Outreach activities to get communities on the side of the law and negotiation skills to work with members of the community would do a lot better than giving them quite literal tanks. I am not being a dreamy liberal here. Police do an important and occasionally dangerous job, but making the community feel they are outsiders invading makes that job more difficult.
But SERIOUSLY seriously, this has been coming a long time. Remember Darryl Gates with the LA door busting tank in the 80’s? And this very overbearing attitude was criticized in the FBI’s and ATF’s handling of Ruby Ridge and Waco respectively during the 90’s. But now we are increasingly giving these over the top tools and training to local police. And they are using them for increasingly trivial raids, with civilian injuries and deaths on the rise. Toddlers have been critically wounded by grenades. A security guards killed when he was seen as a threat by police preparing to storm a country club poker game.
It has got to stop, but just telling each other we need it to stop won't work. We have to write letters like this to local officials (who oversee the police) and national leaders (who oversee funding for these militarization programs). Get to THEM, so we can start to get the knowledge we need to end this.