Finkelstein
So if a terrorist started shooting up people in night club with a AR-15
with a high capacity mag attached, you would expect the police to take
that terrorist down with their single shot hand guns ?
As I said, more potent weaponry was broken out only when the need arose. For years and years and years this was the policy and it sufficed.
Your scenario above is a far cry from a half dozen officers serving a search warrant in full riot gear and real M4's; shooting the family pets as a matter of course and tossing flash bangs into rooms occupied by nobody but children.
I don't want to pollute this thread with bloody and graphic videos of what I'm talking about so instead will quote from a perspective piece written by Officer Patrick Skinner, a former CIA operations officer and current police officer in Savannah, GA:
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"When I left the CIA, I no longer wanted to fight our “war on terror.” For seven years after the 9/11 attacks, I served as an operations officer in the CIA counterterrorism center. My role in our efforts overseas was small but left a large impression on me: We were creating more tensions and threats than we countered or mitigated."
"I’m now a cop in my hometown, Savannah, Ga., and I don’t want to fight another war — our “war on crime.” But I’m not going anywhere. I’m just speaking up, to propose that we end what never was a war to begin with. We need to change our mind-set about what it means to “police” in America."
"For decades, the United States has funded and created police departments that resemble occupying military forces, unable to protect and serve. We armed ourselves literally and spiritually for a war on crime, and to quote Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, “And the war came.” What we now see deployed in many cities and towns is anti-policing. It’s the death of true community police work and, too often, the death of our neighbors. The well-documented militarization of American police departments has inevitably produced officers who see themselves and their roles as “warriors” or “punishers” or “sheepdogs.” Much of what our society finds so distressing and unacceptable in police interactions with their neighbors — disrespect, anger, frustration and violence — is not a result of “flawed” training; it’s a result of training for war."
"So I began my career as a local cop by calling people my neighbors, in my reports and in my conversations. I approached every 911 call from that space and mind-set. I still do. As I handled more and more calls for service, I began to savor the differences between my job as a CIA operations officer overseas in our war on terror and now as a local cop in what I was refusing to accept was a war on crime."
"Refusing to fight this war on crime has, improbable as it seems at age 49, become the fight of my life. And I am not alone. Because my neighbors are not just the point of being a local cop; they are how I can be a local cop. It is their consent that enables me. It is their trust that empowers me. And it is our truth that drives me: that we all matter, or none of us do."
-Full article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/03/beat-cop-militarized-policing-cia/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
