Probably only means anything to UK boingers, but … those were the days!
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Every President since has contributed directly to the problem, quite frankly.
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Exactly. The thinking being “It’s hard to feel like a bad ass when you look like Hello Kitty” and “looking like clowns would keep the clowns out”.
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That’s because the US is different:
credit to @anon67050589 who posted this a while ago.
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Germans have seen real fascism. They know the reality of it. They don’t want it anymore. Too many Americans still think it’s something they can use for their own purposes. They haven’t learned yet.
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That’s pretty much it, isn’t it? Although the much famed professionalism of the US military that always gets trotted out as a contrast to the cops isn’t that impressive either. Just think of all the war crimes, of Abu Ghraib and that helicopter wedding footage.
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Very much liked. Exactly this:
“Whenever they act like soldiers they thereby cease to act like police.”
(Except, sorry @anon67050589, it’s principles. Not principals.)
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The police are, and have been for some time, the occupying army of the establishment.
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Military spending depends on constantly using up or giving/selling the gear so they can continually crank out more. It’s an evil welfare system where we pay people to make things and then throw them away. Except the things that they make are weapons of war and where they throw them people die.
I think an actual welfare system would be better and cheaper.
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Note to America’s police forces*: Star Wars’ Stormtroopers are the bad guys. In most movies and other video fictions up until maybe 2010, heavily armed figures bulked up with armor and hidden by face shields are the bad guys. When you dress your people up like bad guys they aren’t going to be treated well.
*I include “soldiers in armies of occupation” such as we sponsored across the mid-east for the past 20 years as our police forces.
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I think that the 4th of July parates might be part of the problem. To paraphrase a poem: I wish the US would finally remember what they once aspired to become, but never realised: a land where everyone is free. It feels apart from all the parading and gesturing, there is not much.
Which were better spent on reparations to Black people than on the police.
That would be the same in most other places around the world, not just Germany. The US is an exceptionally violent place. There’s a dominant mindset in which violence appears to be the one and only solution to each and every problem that is encountered. Even though it obviously rarely works.
Yes, indeed, but that would be communism, and all the people who made a career from promoting violence against the disenfranchised would be out of a job: politicians, policemen, security contractors, and a lot of other asshats. And they would have to rely on that welfare state while they retrain for something useful. That would make them look weak, so that won’t happen.
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Aww, shush. It’s not a war crime when US troops do it.
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Oh no, I’m horrified! Maybe autocorrect? That’s not a mistake I would normally make!
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I’ll repost this again:
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I haven’t been to an honest to god parade in decades. When I was a kid you maybe got an old Deuce and a Half from the National Guard Armory.
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To match their military like training, starting with the buzzcut on day one at the Academy. To worsen the situation they are infected with racists. Can you imagine a police precinct with nazi officers tasked to police a jewish community!? What could go wrong… this stuff is madness!
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I was hoping that the flash bang grenade going off next to crib was made up, but no.
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Today, the idea of a militarized police force is baked into how American police see themselves."
This is what has to change.
Maybe instead of defund the police, it should be de-militarize the police, but certainly defunding is one way to get there.
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Never gets old:
“There’s a reason you separate the military and the police; one fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”
Cmdr. William Adama, Battlestar Galactica
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