Sometimes not even sold, but given. There are government programs where police departments can ask for used military gear and get it at no cost (i.e. no impact to their budget). This makes the departments especially eager to acquire as much "death tech" as they can.
> So you end up with towns of a thousand having swat teams and tanks and you wonder why the culture shifts from protecting and serving to war, death, and extortion.
This makes me very sad. I was born in the 70s so I grew up during the coldest part of the cold war. We were taught in school that (sorry to Godwin) Nazi Germany was pure evil, Stalinist Russia was pure evil, Italy under Mussolini was pure evil, China under Mao was pure evil, and so on. Yet here we are becoming just as militarized on a local level as those regimes, giving our police forces nearly carte blanche to oppress the citizens at will. It's disgusting and disturbing, and I say that as a former law enforcement employee of 14 years.
That scares the shit out of me, and I don't even live in the US. Maybe your government is nowhere near Mao or Stalin, but all the required pieces of oppression are being rapidly put into place, so be very hopeful that two elections and a terror attack from now someone won't decide to actually use those tools.
This was the point I was trying to make. No, we aren't there yet, but we're on the slope and it's getting more slippery every day.
The DDR aka East Germany ended in the 90s, and the Franco regime in Spain ended 1975 with Francos death.
It is debatable if one should also count the Yugoslavian/Serbian government which existed until the mid-90s as oppressive - I certainly do, Miloševic rot in pieces.
Oh, I almost forgot the rest of the Soviet block... so you basically have oppressive regimes as low as 20-30 years ago, leaving a LOT of people with first hand experience.
But typically, the sort of people who blithely compare the US to a police state do so by invoking the Nazis. I wasn't going to credit such arguments with that much subtlety or self-awareness, since they seem to come from a sense of prejudice and knowledge of pop culture rather than history. Although you're right - there are a number of recent police states and dictatorships which the US does not resemble.
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Maybe the difference was never as black and white as it seemed to me at the time, but I still believe we have been drifting away from the protection of basic rights I was once taught were so important to who we are as a people.
However when most people complain about military gear finding its way to police I have to laugh a little bit. When automatic grenade launchers and .50 cal machine guns start appearing then there are problems(too late at that point I guess).
MWRAPS and armored personnel carriers, those are okay. Dressing in all black(A horrible tactical color BTW) or camo now your just doing that to look upsetting.
The armored tanks are not so bad as it provides something that police can feel safer and less threaten in so escalation doesn't need to happen so fast.
If you turn up in an armoured tank, you have just escalated the situation.
If your dealing with against a threat with a firearm I'm going to assume there are going to be more cops with guns in the majority of the situations. Those are the folks you don't want to set off!
So if you can feel a little bit safer in a little ole MRAP you might not be inclined to start a shooting gallery as quickly.
Calling it an armored tank is exaggerating. It's basically a mobile barrier that can carry a bunch of officers. There's all kinds of nice stuff you can do with them, and frankly I think it would be kind of embarassing for a town if they couldn't get a robust all terrain vehicle to some location within a reasonable timeframe.
Why?
We don't have shootouts with drug lords going on. My city has suffered exactly 3 officer deaths on duty in the last 25 years and only one of those was by gunfire (15 years ago). I utterly reject the reasoning that my city's officers need to be made to feel safe by the acquisition of ex-military hardware.
Let me be as clear as i can, that vehicle does not make me, the citizen, feel safe. I've seen them deploy that vehicle for something as common has a home robbery. This is not Afghanistan, criminals are not enemy combatants. When you have that kind of hardware sitting around, you will find a use for it.
I don't know what kinds of 'nice things' you are referring to, i'd love to hear examples. Lastly i reject that euphemistic description of that troop carrier as a 'robust all terrain vehicle'. This is a well paved, suburban, low violence city; not Kabul.
In most situations a rifle is going to be able to penetrate through almost every part of a police/civilian vehicle. If someone is shooting at you the only proactive thing you can do to keep your self safe is to return fire to either take the enemy out of the fight or suppress them.
If you have a vehicle that can stop small arms fire the immediate need to start shooting back is slowed down to a degree.
They also make nice rolling barriers in case you need to move to someone that is injured with out the need for suppressing fire.
Also psychologically it slows people down due to the fact that they will have less of a chance to be able to harm/pose a threat to police.
On the other hand if they start using turret mounted automatic weapons such a MK19 then that's going to be a problem.
When folks throw around escalation when bringing in an armored vehicle I in my mind I'm thinking the bad guy is going to get MAD due to having a harder time killing a police officer.
I guess we can all take a vote with the knowledge that police get killed in the line of duty. Let's pretend we are all police here. Who want's to be the last cop killed before we achieve societal and world peace?
What cops really need is better and more substantive training, not equipment to hide behind.
I'm not saying that you should give them armoured troop carriers though. You want them to feel safe, not invincible.
If we're worried about officers prematurely killing people how does giving them military-style tools make that any better? If they were going to prematurely kill people before, they're still going to do it. The definition of 'safe' simply moves to a new place. If the OP demonstrates anything, it's that if you give law enforcement these kinds of 'toys' they will find any and every excuse to use them (all under the fake banner of 'officer safety').
Edit: Taking some words from your comment, I guess what I'm arguing is that law enforcement is already pretty invincible.
Fair enough. What I'm arguing is just that LE officers are humans too and they both need and deserve to feel safe in their job, which involves risking their own lives for the safety of the public. But I definitely don't think that they need to go full-military for that. They indeed are pretty safe already.
If all that can happen is the armor getting dented up your not going to feel compelled to shot back so quickly. You will have much more flexibility in responding too. Your initiative is going to get taken away if you don't need to immediately react to a threat.
I do however thing that the carriers should get painted blue or white that someone resemble police colors. The all black and super tactical looking equipment is even too much for me as former military.
When I went to high school in this general area (15+ years ago) they used run-of-the-mill SUVs just fine.
Several years back, near where I lived in NJ, there was a police officer killed on duty. He was reacting to a complaint about drag racing - while he was driving an SUV. He attempted to pursue one of the drag racers, and rolled over his vehicle. Trying to chase a drag racer while you're in an SUV is stupid.
Police should value their own lives higher than that of people behaving aggressively towards them, but that's speaking in a degree. And they shouldn't behave like dangerous paranoics (because of lack of training, or because they are dangerous paranoics).
I´m not sure I articulated that all that clearly, sorry...
An uparmored Humvee, on the other hand, is problematic.
Simultaneously, the terms of the sale dictate that they must use those military items within a year of purchase, or they have to return the items.
This is why the police are increasingly using military gear in situations for which they are not warranted.
I don't like this source, per se, but I've seen it posted elsewhere, and this is the handiest one right now, so here it is.
http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/tanks-on-the-streets-...
If there were plenty, why are the bad cops never arrested?
A large contributing factor is the military industrial complex spewing out death tech at an absurd rate, and with nobody to blow up with it all it just goes to police forces at auction. So you end up with towns of a thousand having swat teams and tanks and you wonder why the culture shifts from protecting and serving to war, death, and extortion.