“But when you delve a bit further and formulate an analogy its akin to a couple with one child buying a minivan.”
Not really. Or, really not, actually.
A minivan is like a hatchback, only bigger. Enough bigger as to probably be a bit wasteful, but no real harm done.
An armored personnel carrier is not like a squad car only bigger - it’s a whole different kind of thing. An APC is not a machine for moving police in a sleepy suburb of 8,000 people from noise complaint to traffic accident to domestic disturbance call (but too big to be a really efficient way to do it). An APC is a machine for carrying out infantry operations.
To your analogy then, this podunk police department buying an APC is more like a couple with one kid buying an APC - a totally inappropriate decision to acquire military hardware for which there is no conceivable sensible use, and an indication of, at best, an unhealthy interest in tools of violence, and at worst of dangerous mental illness.
I looked up some minivan mpgs once, trying to justify my loathing of the things. I was horrified to find that they get about 1mpg less than a mid sized car. Which makes sense I guess. They basically are a mid size car stretched up a bit, and the cross section isn’t really that much bigger.
Am m113 APC, which that looks like, gets about 2mpg.
I dunno, it’s a mistake to think that crime is an urban problem. Mostly it’s a function of how close a town is to the nearest interstate exit and how much meth is being made locally. We used to canoe past a tiny town, just an unincorporated wide spot in the road . A couple brothers from that town broke out of prison and killed the local cop in that little town then went on interstate crime and murder spree before coming back and dying in a huge shootout. I can’t be too upset if some local department wants to have an army surplus M113, which is basically an aluminum box with tracks. They even float pretty well…
Fascism come from street level intimidation, usually with local political groups of “brown shirts” who attack immigrants, minorities, and union members It comes in the middle of the night when people vanish and mutilated bodies turn up in the fields.
I wouldn’t necessarily assume it’s asset forfeiture loot - the US government has basically been giving away all sorts of military equipment (including various armored vehicles) as a result of the frolics in Iraq & Afghanistan. At least, that’s usually how police departments justify picking them up. They fail, of course, to mention just how much of their budget will end up going to maintaining the equipment once they have it, however.
There have been a flurry of articles about rural police getting armored vehicles and other military equipment lately because of the federal government giveaways. There was a series of interviews that I believe Boingboing previously covered where the various police heads tried to justify these purchases. No one offered local violence as a justification - though one mentioned violence on television. Looking up the crime stats for the places mentioned, none of them had high crime rates. Police departments are picking this stuff up because they can, not because they need it. The problem is that doesn’t stop them from using it for routine police business - serving warrants, drug busts (no matter how minor), etc. Everyday policing escalates into military actions.
The first rule of rescue is DON’T BECOME ANOTHER VICTIM. I think if I was on that SWAT team and there were real bullets flying through the air, I’d want the driver to pull his vehicle up BETWEEN the bad guys with guns and the “OFFICER DOWN” instead of behind him/her. Those things are ARMORED after all and provide much more protection than that smoke canister thrown out the top hatch. It looks to me like DORAVILLE got the instruction manual for LOOKING BAD ASS and not the one for Combat Rescue.
Eh, I can’t tell from that video where the shooter is supposed to be.
Perhaps the smoke canister was mostly thrown up wind of the victim, hence the swirling cloud of smoke around the swat team, and the shooter was supposed to be on the other side of the apc.
Not to mention that tracked vehicles tear the shit out of paved roads. I wonder if Doraville’s SWAT budget covers increased road maintenance costs necessitated by their APC.
