Article points out that the extreme militarization of the police came AFTER a significant downturn in violent crime, not as a result of any surge:
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Democracies have some sort of police to protect their citizens from criminals.
Feudalistic societies have some sort of warrior class to protect the ruling class from the citizens.
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I kinda wonder why these vehicles aren’t just converted into, well, the modern version of those old cannons and locomotives that stand around in city parks?
Strip out the gear, replace the rubber of the tires with some metal rims, weld the axles to make it immobile, remove the doors, so that it’s semi-safe for little thugs to play on.
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That super-charged it, for sure, but it goes back much further. Incidents like the North Hollywood Shootout where cops literally couldn’t hurt the bank robbers with their 9mm pistols due to the body armor, and were being fired on with AK-47s. That incident almost single-handedly militarized weaponry in the LAPD. Instead of being treated as the insane outlier that it was, they treated it as “the new normal” and escalated the whole system. This is how it happens. The silly thing is that SWAT already existed at the time for just such an incident, but they took a long time to arrive. Of course, SWAT was the first such escalation in police power and it was created in LA in the 1960s to “respond” to protestors. The acronym originally stood for Special Weapons Attack Team, so you can see where their heads were at. They retconned the acronym later to Special Weapons And Tactics for obvious reasons.
Los Angeles bears a lot of responsibility for the militarization of police. Every major shift happened there.
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Old locomotives are charming and of historical interest. Personally, I don’t want city parks full of armored vehicles. There are huge amounts of valuable steel in them. Scrap them out and they’ll get made into rebar for schools and frying pans for working mothers. A single panel on one of those things would keep my machine shop in business with quality source material for years.
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Yes, these are the sorts of ideas we need! Sell off the things as raw materials, convert them into something that isn’t a gas-guzzling Intimidation Machine, anything is better than keeping them on the books.
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Sometimes a VFW or similar will get a tank or a helicopter or a jet or whatever to do exactly that with. I can think of several in my area actually. But that’s for actual obsolete vehicles. The operational stuff they’re passing off to the police is still functioning and useful, just not immediately needed. When they send those vehicles to the cops there’s a contract by which the receiving organization is required to keep the vehicle in operating order in case the military finds a need to take it back. It’s all a cost-cutting method to make someone else foot the upkeep bill.
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Functional? I’ll give you that.
Useful? Not to a small town or a county police force.
These things are being foisted onto police departments simply because the military wants new toys so they have to offload the used stuff even if it’s still usable (to them), and the cops are gullible enough to buy the macho looking gear.
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