The intensive militarization of America’s police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction. “The blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement, police militarization” as “the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.” — THE INTERCEPT
And close to home, here at bigger Archinect circle, its impact on urban environments emphasized here. DEMILIT
39 Comments
And guess who they learn from...ok, don't guess
Looter thugs ms-13 thugs anonymous ASSHOLE thugs the police should be militarized for that homeboy shit
once you start dressing like you are in a war zone you start acting like it. There is a real psychological effect of literally wearing a costume.
militarized to respond to the crazy militia posse comitats and the protestors armed with rage over the murder of an unarmed teen, so far they only seem to be using it on the latter.
Brazil
UK
France
Philippines
Argentina
Indonesia
Germany
Turkey
I can keep going... I agree with Quondam it is a big supply industry. Urban warfare is happening already.
And to me, the counterpoint.... the civilian population they might have to confront more and more:
Directly related: What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson: Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson. Great article by Zeynep Tufekci about the growing problem of digital oppression and the need for open infrastructure.
Prison, war, arms manufacturing, big pharma, big agriculture, cheap imports, cheap exports, investment banking, facebook, twitter, fast food, aka the economy
welcome to the end...
Tammuz> I looked over your .Guess Who?' list...The Illuminati Agenda? You don't buy into that do you? eric
Here is my proposal for the Eisenhower memorial...24/7 on a big screen. http://youtu.be/8y06NSBBRtY.
Mightyaa,
It's not people who look like that or are equipped like that who regularly riot and burn down their own neighborhoods after looting everything in sight.
i'd like to know Orhan's opinion on the right to bear arms?
to your point Orhan - from my Eisenhower on the Military Industrial Complex youtube link -
"
martin mosti
14 hours ago
The Military Industrial Complex now counts munincipal police departments among it's best customers."
·
Eric, noted. But the article itself doesn't contain these references. The material is factual and can be corroborated by cross referencing with many other sources. Israel is factually -even seen from people who support it- the most prominent laboratory for military policing and violently suppressing (ie oppressing, torturing and killing) people and this knowledge is being exported . Below is more material for your consideration.
--------------------------------------
Israel-trained police "occupy" Missouri after killing of black youth
Until Thursday night, the St. Louis County Police Department appeared to be the largest most militarized and brutish force operating in Ferguson. “St. Louis County Police” was scrawled across the side of most of the tactical unit vehicles and appeared on the combat-style uniforms of officers aiming assault rifles at peaceful protesters.
The ADL boasts of sending more than 175 senior US law enforcement officials from 100 different agencies to the seminar since 2004, which are “taking the lessons they learned in Israel back to the United States.”
The ADL is just one of several pro-Israel groups forging close ties between US cops and Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus.
Another is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a neoconservative think tank that claims to have hosted some 9,500 law enforcement officials in its Law Enforcement Exchange Program (LEEP) since 2004.
LEEP “takes delegations of senior law enforcement executives to Israel to study methods and observe techniques used in preventing and reacting to acts of terrorism” and “sponsors conferences within the United States, bringing Israeli experts before much larger groups of law enforcement leaders,” according to JINSA’s brochure.
Former St. Louis Police Department police chief Joseph Mokwa is listed as having traveled to Israel as part of a LEEP conference in February 2008.
Following nationwide outrage and embarrassment, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon pulled St. Louis County Police forces out of Ferguson and placed the Missouri Highway Patrol in charge of policing demonstrators. The St. Louis Police Department voluntarily removed its officers from Ferguson.
As a result, Ferguson no longer looks like occupied territory, though the underlying issue, Michael Brown’s murder, has yet to be addressed.
Meanwhile, the scope of Israel’s influence on US law enforcement remains virtually ignored by the media despite the troubling implications of emulating an apartheid regime actively engaged in ethnic cleansing and war crimes.
The culture of racism and impunity that has long plagued American policing is deadly enough as it is. Adding Israeli-style repression to an already dangerous mix guarantees disaster.
----------------------------------------
From Max Blumenthal: How Israeli Occupation Forces, Bahraini Monarchy Guards Trained U.S. Police For Coordinated Crackdown On “Occupy” Protests
“Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We’re in a global war.”
Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security and a leading expert on terror and civil liberties, said the Israeli influence on American law enforcement is so extensive it has bled into street-level police conduct. “After 9/11 we reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those fronts was torture,” Greenberg told me. “The training in Iraq and Afghanistan on torture was Israeli training. There’s been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and now we’re going to spread that into the fabric of everyday American life? It’s counter-terrorism creep. And it’s exactly what you could have predicted would have happened.”
...Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much it will inform police repression of future upsurges of street protest. But already, the Israelification of American law enforcement appears to have intensified police hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, common criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists.”
“After 9/11 we had to react very quickly,” Greenberg remarked, “but now we’re in 2011 and we’re not talking about people who want to fly planes into buildings. We’re talking about young American citizens who feel that their birthright has been sold. If we’re using Israeli style tactics on them and this stuff bleeds into the way we do business at large, were in big trouble.”
--------------------------------
From Israel’s export of occupation police tactics :
Israeli methods are sought out and adopted for their perceived quality, largely led by the government’s marketing of them. But the relationships established between agencies of order, whether they be drug enforcement, civil policing, customs officials, tactical police units or any other, are done entirely outside the democratic realm. The citizens of Beijing did not vote for their police to study the repression of civil disturbance in Haifa’s football stadium. Canadian parliament neither proposed nor endorsed the “Declaration of Intent Between the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada and the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel.” The students of Georgia Tech University were not approached for their opinion about campus security adopting the tools that help sustain an illegal military occupation. This is the danger of agencies of authority going through processes of professionalization and integration with their foreign counterparts. It’s often a strictly technocratic regime that can affect the public greatly but is done without its active knowledge or participation. As Andreas and Nadelmann argue, the efforts at professionalization are driven by the technocrats themselves, most often sanctioned by the governing authority, and it is this perceived technical neutrality that gives the efforts credibility.
---------------------------------------------------------------
From U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation:
Joint Police & Law Enforcement Training
In November 2011, a delegation of senior American law enforcement officials, including police commanders, security experts and FBI agents, went to Israel for a joint training seminar with Israeli counter-terrorism officials sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League. Israeli Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the program provided the visiting officials with an opportunity to “learn from each other and their Israeli counterparts.”The program covered topics such as border security and media response during crises as well as overviewing strategies for treating mass casualties, performing rescue operations and establishing command and control at the scene of a terror attack.
Col. Robert Quinn, commander of the New Hampshire State Police, was part of the delegation. "It's really been an eye-opener," says Col. Quinn. "We attend various training in the states on terrrosim and counter-terrosim issues but never have I ever learned as much as I have just by looking and observing as I have been in [Israel]."
In early September 2012, the New York Police Department (NYPD) opened an Israeli branch at the Sharon District Police Headquarters in the Israeli coastal city of Kfar Saba. The NYPD decision to open an Israeli branch rested on the fact that the Israeli police is one of the major police forces with which it must maintain close work relations and daily contact.
-------------------------------------
U.S. and Israeli Military Tactics Used Against American Citizens … Gazans Tweet Tips to Help AMERICANS On How to Handle Tear Gas
Some are comparing police brutality towards the Occupy protesters to that used by Israeli forces against Palestinian protesters. Indeed, numerous heads of U.S. police departments have traveled to Israel for “anti-terrorism training”, and received training from Israeli anti-terrorism experts visiting the U.S. See this, this, this, this, this.
Indeed, the Ferguson police chief received training in crowd control in Israel in 2011.
And Gaza residents are literally tweeting info on how to handle tear gas to help Ferguson citizens.
Even the mainstream media is picking up on the militarized police. USA Today headlines, “Pentagon fueled Ferguson confrontation“. And Newsweek runs with, “How America’s Police Became an Army.”
But they’re still blaming 9/11 as the reason for the militarization of the police. As we explained in 2011, that’s not accurate:
Most assume that the militarization of police started after 9/11. Certainly, Dick Cheney initiated Continuity of Government Plans on September 11th that ended America’s constitutional form of government (at least for some undetermined period of time.) On that same day, a national state of emergency was declared … and that state of emergency has continuously been in effect up to today.
But the militarization of police actually started long before 9/11 … in the 1980s.
---------------------------------------------
tammuz that is too much information, can you give us the fuckin' cliff notes?!?!
anyway, until they take the right to bear arms, i'm comfortable....I don't own a gun, but my neighbors have about 100, so i feel I'm ok, when the shit hits then fans I have Americans around me that believe in America...
The Doors - Freedom Exists
Did you know freedom exists
In a school book?
Did you know madmen
Are running our prison
Within a jail, within a gaol
Within a white free protestant
Maelstrom
We're perched headlong
On the edge of boredom
We're reaching for death
On the end of a candle
We're trying for something
That's already found us
Olaf, don't read it then. You don't tell me what to do or write and I don't tell you what to do. No need for you to be an asshole.
Incredibly Powerful Photo of Black Students at Howard University
I think it is important to also note that merely reading this as a by-product of militarization is one-half od the picture. The other half is the inherent nature and fundamental assumptions (based on disparities of race, class and so on) inherent within the policing body.
The militarization merely renders the "law enforcing" bodies (who equally enforce the assumptions carried by the authorities in regards to race, class and so on) more lethal; militarization represents the tool. Even if the sheer force of the tool endows its wielder with a wider scope of dehumanization, there must be already a dehumanizing even sociopathic element inherent within the policing body .
In other words, simply saying that the issue is about militarization is to, purposefully or not, (mis)read the run of events out of -seperate from- a context wherein the issue of race and class, of being black or brown, or of being poor and disenfranchised, determines the behaviour and tendencies of the policing bodies and, behind them, the authorities which they answer to.
tammuz that is a very precise way of putting it.
i don't support right to bear arms.
^how do you support the right for self defense and not the right to bear arms?
Are you saying that only "governments" and military should have right to defend? If so, what happens when the military/state becomes the enemy as it eventually does?
Militarizing the police is about maintaining control of an ever-more frustrated population in the face of corporate and government malfeasance. FEMA has set up plans for NATIONAL RESPONDER SUPPORT CAMPS to be located across the country
to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from and mitigate all hazards.
One of FEMA’s responsibilities is to ensure the effectiveness of emergency response personnel in responding to emergencies and disasters. Types of disasters and emergencies that could happen across the United States include, but not limited to, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, cyclones, tornadoes, blizzards, acts of terrorism, tsunamis, or avalanches. FEMA also plays a role in assisting with events designated by the Secretary of Homeland Security as National Special Security Events (NSSEs) and with respect to National Response Framework activities of federal agencies.
In other words, next time an OCCUPY-type movement or "social unrest" on any significant scale occurs, plans are in place to quickly build camps to securely incarcerate thousands of citizens. Some of the specifications for the detention camps include:
When your only tool is a bullet, every problem is a target.
this whole news post reminds me of this song corporate avengers fault the police (i don't)
Nations that include the right to bear Arms in their constitution: USA, Mexico, Haiti, Guatemala
Orhan I understand the logic and I am checking out the DEMILIT project, but I think jla-x asks very valid questions.
Frustration?
Mexico does not give right to bear arms. They have very strict anti gun policies which is why crime is so low...wait no its not...
The Swiss have very high gun ownership which is why crime is so high...wait no, it's not. Lol
I don't support right to bear arms.
At least not in Los Angeles where I live. I don't trust many people out there have the level of intelligence and life experience, education to sort out who is really dangerous for them and who is not.
Many people of that sort out there already have bothersome disdain for my color, assumed and generalized ethnicity. It is bad enough, I don't want them to also wearing holsters in addition to their dicks (it is usually gender specific like that.) It is usually those kind of peeps who want to bear arms, the morans.
I deal with that ethnic divide and racism almost every day in one way or another. Do you?
They probably stop me for a traffic violation and arrest me with a suspicion of terrorism. Imagine they also find out I have an AK47 and few other guns in my house.
What do you say should I go get a gun? These are my problems, convince me.
Guns deter criminals. They also make criminals more deadly but criminals don't follow laws so the logic of lowering crime by banning guns is complete rubbish. The only way to decrease crime is to decrease poverty. Until then, gun ownership at least gives one a fightingchance against an attacker and keeps some (limited but some) balance between the people and the state. But I also agree with orhan that many people are incapable of using unbiased judgement. Keeping a gun at home however pretty much eliminates that risk because someone in your home is likely a real threat.
see link above jla-X or this one Article 10 from "Constitution of Mexico, Title One, Chapter 1, Individual Guarantees" sounds like rights to me...
this translation is from the 2nd link
Article 10. The inhabitants of the United Mexican States are entitled to have arms of any kind in their possession for their protection and legitimate defense, except such as are expressly forbidden by law, or which the nation may reserve for the exclusive use of the army, navy, or national guard; but they may not carry arms within inhabited places without complying with police regulations.
another link from from Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federacion.
Article 10
The inhabitants of the United Mexican States have the right to keep arms at home, for their protection and legitimate defense, with the exception of those which are prohibited by the Federal Law and those which are reserved for the exclusive use of the Army, Navy, Air Force and National Guard. Federal Law will state the cases, conditions, requirements and places where inhabitants can be authorized to carry weapons.
Btw, I am not afraid of guns. I grew up with them and know how to shoot. I can take a pistol or rifle apart and clean them. Used to make cartridges for my father's hunting rifle too.
Olaf, you are right that its a constitutional right, didnt know that, but i do know that there are many restrictions and the control laws are very strict which makes it very difficult to own / purchase one legally.
http://The Shortest Distance Between Palestine and Ferguson
The people most likely to be killed by your handgun are your family members.
Eliminating poverty is not the same as eliminating inequality.
Orhan your last post link is what I would call sloppy journalism and a sign of globalization of the counterculture and the struggle. Not just the media is to blame for this, but people as well thanks mainly to the medium of the internet -everything is an analogy now. So much so that some upper class white kid might feel like he can relate when he throws a brick through his fathers bank and gets arrested... If you can not find your oppressor there are thousand of others spread out throughout the world that agree with you on some unknown force, etc...in turn if you are not claiming a struggle or an oppressor you would be quick to presume the other is inventing it because your buddy was the rich white kid that threw a brick through his fathers bank and you believe you know who and not what is the problem,.... These things are local and loaded with history, its convenient to forget and choose a side.
Why you are calling this "sloppy journalism" ODN? In the article what you call "analogies" are well placed and actually connected by several facts down to Chief's training in Israel. Your analogy of banker's son on the other hand, is far fetched and, I won't call it sloppy.., weak. The black community in Ferguson does not sound like banking family to me.
Counterculture was always global. I don't know your age but, for example, growing up in an another country in 70's I remember the massacre at Kent State had a lot of resonance in the university campuses and public opinions around the world.
I see only sloppy readers here. No wonder they ask for cliff notes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 24,2011
St. Louis County chief will travel to Israel
St. Louis County police chief Tim Fitch will be traveling to Israel next month to learn how Israeli police, intelligence and security forces work to prevent terrorist attacks.
Fitch will visit for a week with other law enforcement officials from across the United States, including representatives of the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The trip is part of the Anti-Defamation League's National Counter-Terrorism seminar.
Fitch and the others will visit Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Tiberias, among other cities. The Israel National Police and senior officials from Israel's defense forces, intelligence and security organizations will meet with the Americans.
St. Louis County police houses the region's anti-terrorism center.
Apparently there's a documentary on this:
The Lab
Synopsis
Since 9/11, the Israeli arms industries are doing bigger business than ever before. Large Israeli companies develop and test the vessels of future warfare, which is then sold worldwide by private Israeli agents, who manipulate a network of Israeli politicians and army commanders, while Israeli theoreticians explain to various foreign countries how to defeat civil and para-military resistance. All based on the extensive Israeli experience.The film reveals The Lab, which has transformed the Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank from a burden to a marketable, highly profitable, national asset.
More on that documentary:
The Lab, combines interviews from arms dealers and developers, defense experts, and industry leaders to shed light on Israel’s largest export and obstacle to peace.
The documentary argues that Israelis have made massive profits from its controlled lab environments – the West Bank and Gaza – in which Israeli military leaders can test new weapons and military strategies on over 4 million Palestinian guinea pigs.
Yotam Feldman, director of The Lab and a former journalist with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, is not alone in his assessment.
Jeff Halper, who is writing a book about Israel’s contributions to the growing homeland security market, said: “The occupied territories are crucial as a laboratory not just in terms of Israel’s internal security, but because they have allowed Israel to become pivotal to the global homeland security industry.
“Other states need Israel’s expertise, and that ensures its place at the table with the big players. It gives Israel international influence way out of keeping with its size. In turn, the hegemonic states exert no real pressure on Israel to give up the occupied territories because of their mutually reinforcing interests.”
The roots of unrest in Ferguson, explained in 2 minutes
most of the video i posted is known information except one little detail pentagon stipulates on the supply of military equipment that the material, ammunition etc. 'must be used within a year,' that forcing police to use or create situations to use it. very troublesome indeed.
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.