[edit] Never mind. CLWheeljack beat em to it.
No shit. I think of times when I have played CS or Battlefield when no one else is home. I have my speakers and large subwoofer turned way up. My gaming room sounds like a war zone with loud gunfire and explosions. That could be problematic with armed police entering my house with frayed nerves.
-Todd
The last thing I’ll wonder when the bullet goes through my brain is how white privilege didn’t stop that chunk of lead.
Thanks, but I’ll set aside that statistical aura of invincibility and count my blessings if I ever have to survive a SWAT raid, God forbid.
It’s never a sure thing. That kid was lucky.
Another thing that was pointed out in the Reddit is that SWAT teams have a bad tendency to kill dogs.
The video makes wonder about SWAT procedure, why do they think having multiple people yelling conflicting commands is a good policy? The whole shock-and-awe thing might be a good tactic on enemy soldiers but police?
Oddly enough, there is no civil liability for police inaction.
Abuse of authority, yes. But not inaction.
Sounds to me like a certain pinko commie needs a little FREEDOM delivered to his home.
In all seriousness, what exactly makes you think the general public aren’t treated and viewed as enemy soldiers by the police?
My recollection from some readings is that this is fully intentional. The idea is that fewer people get shot when the occupants’ senses are essentially bombarded by loud, constant barked commands.
Basically, the noise and confusion stuns most people into inaction, which is exactly what SWAT wants.
(I’m not saying that it is justified, just that it is, I believe, intentional. Of course, that could also be simply a convenient theory to cover for the fact that many of these law enforcement people seem to be dicks on authority trips, and they just like yelling and frightening people.)
I’m trying to imagine being awoken in the middle of the night by SWAT and hearing all those people yelling different commands. I might just sprint out of the room like it was a nightmare.
The whole idea is to overwhelm with force. Using “command voice” instructions, flashlights, lots of drawn guns, and conspicuous armor is meant to put subjects immediately into submission. It’s the same way the Army taught us to enter occupied rooms in combat situations.
Pfff, what a load of crap, Armando!!1
Doh.
Don’t forget the flashbang tossed into the baby crib. Skipping that is a good way to get killed.
It’s the same way the Army taught us to enter occupied rooms in combat situations.
Woohoo, now it’s being used for no-knock raids of petty drug dealers!
Well, yes. I discussed this in the P&R thread we have going now, but the militarization of the police involves not just giving combat arms equipment to cops, but also using combat methodologies in day to day police work. You don’t just send two guys to knock on the door and arrest someone. You bust in with six guys, shotguns, armor, and yelling.
While the cops surely have to respond to these all calls, you would think they would develop a two-tiered level of response for SWAT actions:
- level of response when source of information is more than just an anonymous call;
- level of response when source of information is only an anonymous call.
Lack of granularity in police response is something that has come up in the Ferguson thread. A full-out tactical assault puts the “suspect” at a fair amount of risk, based on very little information.
Well darn, I missed all the interesting discussion then. That’s a great idea and simple enough for a police department to understand. I think the reason they do not do this is because society has failed to impose negative sanctions for false positives, for better or worse. People respond to incentives!
The particularly creepy thing for me is the increasing funding of law enforcement through criminal seizures, forfeitures, and penalties.
That’s one thing where I do not understand why it does not have more conservatives up in arms. Liberal, usually, are the ones decrying the police state. Of course, so are far-right militia members and similar bodies; it is typically the white-middle and upper class conservatives that think the police do no wrong and that anyone on the wrong side of the police probably had it coming, or that maybe some harm is done but it is necessary for societal security as a whole.
But even your standard economic conservative should understand, I think, the basic danger in giving monetary incentives to institutions to find criminal activity. One of the basic principles of capitalist economics is that people are incentivized by opportunities to get more money. Does it really take a rocket scientist to question whether we want a body that is supposed to enforce safety and justice to instead have a monetary incentive to find people guilty of crimes (because they then get to seize and keep their property)?
It really creeps me out that an institution with a lot of resources, including the legal ability to use force, has a monetary incentive to find me guilty of something, in that they literally get to take property from me.
The “slippery slope” theory may be trotted out a bit too often, but this is a case where I think it is applicable. It just feels like some feudal system where the local baron has an incentive to bump me off, because if I’m out of the way he gets to take my land.
Except in this case, if these adolescents in adult bodies with authority complexes find me guilty of something, they get to take my money and property and use it to buy more cool Call of Duty toys for themselves.
Really cold guy. I would be in the floor having a anxiety and fear attack, or a heart attack.
They don’t actually need to find you guilty, though! Just your property itself!
Or, take Tennessee, my home state (that I’m about to drive on the interstate to). Because of claims of illegal Mexican drugs entering the state for sale via I-40, multiple large-scale police task forces have permission to search cars going down the highway for drugs or cash and to take either (cash is justified by saying that obviously, only a drug dealer would carry $500+ in cash on him at any given time!). Curiously enough, they stop 10x as many cars on the “cash out” side as they do on the “drugs in” side, and make it virtually impossible for anyone to ever reclaim their stolen money/car/possessions. Curiously, they seem to target a lot of out-of-state folks for whom it’d be financially infeasible to continuously fly down (they learned their lesson about driving through TN!) to attend the mandatory court dates, so, whoops! Guess that insurance adjuster from New Jersey is just out his $2,000 bucks. Sucks to be him.
All of which, and the above thread-contents, go a long way toward my deeply held and fully original, uniquely phrased belief: Fuck tha police. If you’re not one of the fuckheads doing this shit, then you’re clearly not doing enough to stop the ones who are, which, in a really awesome way, actually kind of makes you worse!
Yes, that is just the additional insult. Again, in many places, it is essentially reaching the level of a Russian or Mexican like police shakedown. You do have to be guilty (you can technically get your property back eventually), but they basically can take it first and then make you work to get it back. Which, of course, seems like it is about 180 degrees from what the justice system in the U.S. is supposed to be.
The reason the conservatives don’t care about the police state is because they don’t relate to the people being targeted by the police. So conservatives in Tennessee won’t care because Tennessee cops don’t target them in their scams. The flipside of that coin is that to be against what the police are doing places you on the same side as those who the police abuse, and conservatives are not on ‘those’ people’s side. It all comes down to ‘if it ain’t happening to me, it ain’t happening’. How many people in mainstream America, conservative or not, are going to see themselves in this game player’s shoes? None is my guess.