zlacker

>>miles+(OP)
I don’t think the police need MRAPs. That’s a bit over the top. However, it does seem they need some sort of up-armored police cars given how many of them have been destroyed in the rioting. SWAT maybe has some use for military equipment, but only for bona-fide SWAT situations (hostages/bombs/active shooter.) But rolling out MRAPs for general policing is a bad policy. It’s one step removed from deploying tanks and it’s a bad look and probably counterproductive.

>>briand+Ra
Sure, maybe there is limited use in some of this equipment. But my small city police department recently got a grant for 450 high powered assault rifles and armored vests, on top of the hundreds they already had. There are only 700 officers including things like traffic enforcement.

Of course the police union lobbied for more.

They have armored trucks and undercover vehicles. They have mobile towers to survey. They have closed circuit cameras at every major intersection. They have Stingrays. They have purchased LRADs which can permanently deafen. They have helicopters, tear gas cannons for hundreds of officers, batons.

And they trot it out for peaceful protests. The police did not come equipped to protect, they came equipped to escalate and occupy.

Hell, they even manage to bust a lot of the equipment out at concerts and festivals. I stopped going to a local outdoor concert series when they decided to gate a park off and start pat downs and metal detecting everyone who entered.

>>dashun+9e
This sounds like an excellent case for equipment limitations. At the very least making departments pay 'retail' for gear instead of getting effectively donated surplus.

>>zentig+af
Why should taxpayers who fund the police have to artificially pay more markup, making someone else rich, just so the police have less equipment?

>>core-q+xg
Why should the police get a discount? They should have to buy their MRAPs through the auction systems the same way that someone running a logging company has to buy surplus LMTVs. I'm sympathetic to the cause of saving money but if the military won't auction something to a random US citizen I don't see why they should be auctioning that thing to a random US civilian police force. They can sell that stuff to other nations if they can't sell it domestically.

I don't particularly care what the standard is for disposing of unwanted military hardware is so long as it's not a double one. A civilian police force should get no special treatment above any other civilian entity.

>>throwa+Wh
> I'm sympathetic to the cause of saving money but if the military won't auction something to a random US citizen I don't see why they should be auctioning that thing to a random US civilian police force.

I don't see why it's not clear there's a difference here, in terms of community interest, but whatever

> A civilian police force should have no special rights above any other civilian entity.

What a weird way of looking at the world. I've genuinely never heard this take. Police have power over you, if you break the law; that's the point, no?

>>core-q+dk
Police power is not intrinsic. It is granted by the people through their elected government. In my state, every local authority has the power to designate entities to exercise their various powers. By tradition these are police or sheriff departments but there's nothing preventing the local government from vesting police powers in the 4-H club or Wal-mart.

>>jeffbe+sl
> there's nothing preventing the local government from vesting police powers in the 4-H club

Would love to see this happen. Being policed by literal pigs would be better than...well, you know.