- Jun 19, 2006
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As part of the latest ACLU report:
War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Police - Report
This is one excerpt from the report. PDF link to download report Pretty scary stuff. I for one don't ever want to see contractors doing police work. The alleged BlackHawk incident in New Orleans was bad enough.
Snip------------------------------------------------------------------------
From The Raw Story
After the ACLU sent open records requests as part of its investigative report on police militarization, SWAT teams in Massachusetts claimed they were exempt because they were private corporations.
Some SWAT teams in the state operate as law enforcement councils, or LECs, which are funded by several police departments and overseen by an executive board largely made up of local police chiefs.
Member police departments pay annual membership dues to the LECs, which share technology and oversee crime scene investigators or other specialists.
Some of these LECs have also incorporated 501(c)(3) organizations, which they say exempts them from open records requests.
“Let’s be clear,” wrote Radley Balko for The Washington Post. “These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure, and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they’ve incorporated, they’re immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get or who they’re primarily used against.”
F that!
From the ACLU link above.
All across the country, heavily armed SWAT teams are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged.
Our neighborhoods are not warzones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. Any yet, every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color.
As our new report makes clear, it’s time for American police to remember that they are supposed to protect and serve our communities, not wage war on the people who live in them
Amen!
.
Moved from OT
Anandtech Administrator
KeithTalent
War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Police - Report
This is one excerpt from the report. PDF link to download report Pretty scary stuff. I for one don't ever want to see contractors doing police work. The alleged BlackHawk incident in New Orleans was bad enough.
Snip------------------------------------------------------------------------
From The Raw Story
After the ACLU sent open records requests as part of its investigative report on police militarization, SWAT teams in Massachusetts claimed they were exempt because they were private corporations.
Some SWAT teams in the state operate as law enforcement councils, or LECs, which are funded by several police departments and overseen by an executive board largely made up of local police chiefs.
Member police departments pay annual membership dues to the LECs, which share technology and oversee crime scene investigators or other specialists.
Some of these LECs have also incorporated 501(c)(3) organizations, which they say exempts them from open records requests.
“Let’s be clear,” wrote Radley Balko for The Washington Post. “These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure, and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they’ve incorporated, they’re immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get or who they’re primarily used against.”
F that!
From the ACLU link above.
All across the country, heavily armed SWAT teams are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged.
Our neighborhoods are not warzones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. Any yet, every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color.
As our new report makes clear, it’s time for American police to remember that they are supposed to protect and serve our communities, not wage war on the people who live in them
Amen!
.
Moved from OT
Anandtech Administrator
KeithTalent
Last edited by a moderator:
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