from Hacker News

Exploring the Militarization of US Police Forces

by vcolano on 5/16/17, 12:33 AM with 18 comments

• by samcheng on 5/16/17, 3:22 AM

  I encourage Americans to think about this militarization at their next Fourth of July Parade.

  Watching the Sheriff's Department marching, in formation, dressed in black, with ARs, behind an MRAP, is, well, disquieting.

  With whom are they going to war, exactly?

• by microcolonel on 5/16/17, 2:55 AM

  I'm not sure about the other equipment, but I can say that police definitely need designated marksman rifles(7.62x51mm NATO)and infantry rifles(5.56x45mm NATO [typo'd as 6.65mm in the article]) as a matter of course.

  Here in Toronto the other month, right across the street from my home, there was a man having a mental breakdown in a park swinging a handgun around, and they had five marksmen in range ready to take a shot if it got out of hand on the ground, and rifles on the ground to make sure it doesn't get too far out of hand.

  Grenade launchers are fairly common equipment for a police force these days, there are a large number of crowd control and tactical (visibility flares, IR flares) devices which can be launched out of standard grenade launchers, since the military has brought down the cost of this equipment, police forces seem to standardize around it.

  The border states having higher spending on weaponry and armour is intuitively understandable, given how hot the border is. Per-landmass and per-police-officer numbers might also be a more interesting stat to look at.

  LA county makes regular use of their armoured vehicles, that I understand. So unless you're arguing that police officers in LA county should just let themselves get shot when people are shooting at them, I think it'd be hard to imagine it being a bad thing that they have armoured vehicles.

  Explosive Ordinance Disposal vehicles (and other equipment, such as X-ray imaging devices, tracked robotic vehicles, projected water disruptors) make a lot of sense. The New York Police Department has had a bomb squad since 1903(!). If you love the idea of bomb technicians being shredded into mists of blood, flesh, and bone; or love going to funerals where there is no recovered corpse, then sure, their lives are not worth even a couple hundred k per capita, less than the average person in the general population in the U.S. government's estimation.

• by solotronics on 5/16/17, 4:19 AM

  6.65mm rifle should be 5.56mm

  there is a 6.5mm round but its very specialized and not likely to be acquired by police forces

• by rrggrr on 5/16/17, 3:34 AM

  Police militarization is the not the non sequitur many believe it to be. The top two spenders on military hardware are US border states fighting very well armed drug gangs, and episodically its own well armed populace. Chicago is in Cook County, infamous for its heavily armed street gangs, record shootings, and close ties to Mexican drug cartels.

• by akita on 5/16/17, 2:26 AM

  Unrelated to the content of your article, but something that I noticed:

  The link to your GitHub profile page in the footer of the article is broken: it points to 'https://github.com/https://github.com/vcolano'.

• by i_feel_great on 5/16/17, 3:41 AM

  This does not appear to happen in other developed, western countries. Not to the same extent at least. I have not seen it in New Zealand or Australia, although there are criminals and drug dealers in both. I have not heard of such a thing in the UK, France, Germany, Italy or Canada. Is this an American thing?

• by packetized on 5/16/17, 3:55 AM

  The 1033 program is a donation (permanent loan) from the DoD to the individual requesting agencies; the spending involved as described by the author does not actually represent money given by local agencies to the DoD, but rather value written off by the Dod.

• by fixxer on 5/16/17, 2:22 AM

  Good ol' Illinois in the top 10. Represent!

  Cook County kinda sorta expected, but why Lake County? Waukegan really that bad?

  EDIT: http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Waukegan-Illinois.html not that bad