Black People : Cops Ready for War

Keita Kenyatta

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Nestled amid plains so flat the locals joke you can watch your dog run away for miles, Fargo treasures its placid lifestyle, seldom pierced by the mayhem and violence common in other urban communities. North Dakota’s largest city has averaged fewer than two homicides a year since 2005, and there’s not been a single international terrorism prosecution in the last decade.

But that hasn’t stopped authorities in Fargo and its surrounding county from going on an $8 million buying spree to arm police officers with the sort of gear once reserved only for soldiers fighting foreign wars.
Every city squad car is equipped today with a military-style assault rifle, and officers can don Kevlar helmets able to withstand incoming fire from battlefield-grade ammunition. And for that epic confrontation—if it ever occurs—officers can now summon a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret. For now, though, the menacing truck is used mostly for training and appearances at the annual city picnic, where it’s been parked near the children’s bounce house.

“Most people are so fascinated by it, because nothing happens here,” says Carol Archbold, a Fargo resident and criminal justice professor at North Dakota State University. “There’s no terrorism here.”
Like Fargo, thousands of other local police departments nationwide have been amassing stockpiles of military-style equipment in the name of homeland security, aided by more than $34 billion in federal grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a Daily Beast investigation conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
Interactive Map: States Spend Billions on Homeland Security
The buying spree has transformed local police departments into small, army-like forces, and put intimidating equipment into the hands of civilian officers. And that is raising questions about whether the strategy has gone too far, creating a culture and capability that jeopardizes public safety and civil rights while creating an expensive false sense of security.

“The argument for up-armoring is always based on the least likely of terrorist scenarios,” says Mark Randol, a former terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress. “Anyone can get a gun and shoot up stuff. No amount of SWAT equipment can stop that.”
Local police bristle at the suggestion that they’ve become “militarized,” arguing the upgrade in firepower and other equipment is necessary to combat criminals with more lethal capabilities. They point to the 1997 Los Angeles-area bank robbers who pinned police for hours with assault weapons, the gun-wielding student who perpetrated the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, and the terrorists who waged a bloody rampage in Mumbai, India, that left 164 people dead and 300 wounded in 2008.
The new weaponry and battle gear, they insist, helps save lives in the face of such threats. “I don’t see us as militarizing police; I see us as keeping abreast with society,” former Los Angeles Police chief William Bratton says. “And we are a gun-crazy society.”
Adds Fargo Police Lt. Ross Renner, who commands
http://news.yahoo.com/cops-ready-war-094500010.html
 
Published on Wednesday, December 21, 2011 by RT

New Riot Shields Designed to Suffocate Protesters with Sound Waves

Law enforcement can already beat protesters with batons, spray subversive chemicals into their eyeballs, shoot rubber bullets at a speed of around 100 yards-per-second and blast deafening sound bursts.
sound_shield.jpg
The device looks similar to existing riot shields, but it incorporates an acoustic horn that generates a pressure pulse. Police in the US already use acoustic devices for crowd control purposes that emit a loud, unpleasant noise. (Image: Gizmodo) Why, then, shouldn’t they be stop a person from breathing?
That’s the very question that Raytheon, the defense contractor and missile manufacturer that’s long-time pals with the Pentagon, seems to think it can answer with one new piece of protester-proof riot gear. They are calling it a man-portable non-lethal pressure shield, and its effects could have you contesting to catch your breath.
Move over, LRAD, the new pressure shield in the works from the DoD allies that brought you such classics as the BGM-109 Tomahawk subsonic cruiser and the Phalanx CIWS anti-ship missile defense system stands to be the next step in crowd control and could give your local policeman a whole new way to deal with those pesky Occupy hippies and their silly pleas of ending corrupt Wall Street corporate personhood. This upcoming addition to the arsenal brings with it a whole new way of beating down protesters. The shield, by sending out a series of pulsed pressure beams, resonates the upper respiratory tract of the victim and, depending on which setting is chosen by the officer, can render them warned, stunned or incapacitated.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/21-3
 

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