Thread: The Ferguson Question

> it's the mind-set of a soldier at war.

Yep, and if you say anything about it, you're automatically sorted into the same group as people who think George Bush was a Soviet mole; people the Republicans think of as "far right", and who'd quote Ayn Rand if they could read.

Many PDs and their apologists actively assert they're at war. There's always a war on something; drugs, kiddie porn, parking violations, crime in general. Unfortunately many of the police seem to view anyone without a badge as "the enemy" and treat them accordingly.

Add to that, there aren't just "police" any more but practically every part of the various city, county, state, and Federal governments has its own police force and SWAT team now. The Department of Education has done "hostile entry" with armor and machine guns, kicking doors out of walls to inform people they're delinquent on student loans. Many small towns now have ex-military machine guns and armored vehicles. In my town, even building inspectors are now "Law Enforcement Officers", a group now so huge that actual policemen are probably a single-digit percentage.

> It's not the militarization of the police, it's
> the paramilitarization of the police, which is
> a lot scarier.

Now look up "fusion centers" and see why so many Americans get their full paranoid freak on.

"Yes, we'll form organizations to handle police intelligence, and also task them with anti-terrorist functions and political work, and fund them heavily, but since they're non-governmental organizations they don't exist in anyone's org chart and are exempt from any governmental oversight. But they'll feed intel back to the police, FBI, and NSA to make arrests on. What could possibly go wrong?"

> North Hollywood shootout

That wasn't an arms problem, it was a training problem. Police training in California drilled officers in shooting to "center of mass," held to be somewhere around the sternum. And for the most part, the officers involved did exactly that.

The idea of training is to do the right thing under stress without having to think about it. They did exactly that for nearly two thousand rounds. Unfortunately the people who devised their training program didn't consider body armor, and didn't consider that while under stress, their training might inhibit officers from doing something as simple as shooting an armed opponent somewhere else than the chest.

More powerful rifles and more magazine capacity wouldn't have changed things one bit, but the shootout was used as a justification for buying shiny new toys, just like the Miami FBI shootout. I don't know how or if California PDs dealt with the training issue, but the FBI's training was rebuilt from scratch, though that wasn't particularly newsworthy compared to the "buy new toys" part.

The US military has non-citizen soldiers. My niece, for example, became a naturalized American during her second enlistment in the US Army.

It's not like the old French Foreign Legion; naturalization isn't part of the deal. Some complete their enlistment and stay on as "Permanent Residents" or go back home.

"To Protect and To Serve" was prominently written just below the windows of the patrol car doors of a police TV show called "Adam-12", which was very popular about 40 years ago.

The motto was visible probably once every couple of minutes in every episode.

> This is a military weapon.

Yep. The Soviets found that out when they sent troops armed with fancy new 5.45x39 AK-74s against antique SMLEs in Afghanistan. The "obsolete" .303s picked off Soviet soldiers from beyond the range of their AKs. The Soviets had to scramble longer-range small arms out to the field... which turned out to be Mosin bolt actions, the Russian equivalent of the SMLE.

Just because a weapon is old, doesn't mean it's not effective, from SMLEs to Brown Besses to trebuchets to some grumpy individual hitting you in the head with a rock.

> he didn't start talking with the community immediately.

"Community" assumes a group of people living near each other, who more or less know each other, identify with the local area, and share social or cultural norms.

Americans, particularly young Americans, tend to move often, and where they sleep has little to do with their social group. A complaint going back to the 1950s is, "people don't know their neighbors any more." Well, duh. With a phone, a car, or other transit, you don't *have* to socialize with the people near where you might have a flat or a room... "community" doesn't mean much in America, other than one of the near-meaningless catch-words or phrases like "family values" or "freedom."

The closest I've seen to the kind of community they're talking about are gated communities and condominium apartments, where the owners form legally- recognized co-ops to gate off roads, lock doors, and create their own little enclaves. And even then, most of them don't associate with each other all that much.

> If, in the USSA something like 33%-&-rising of
> the populace are on the "criminal" database -
> how long before over 50% is?

Not just criminal lists, but the TSA's secret "no-fly" list, and the even less accessible "terrorist watch list."

There have been several iterations of the terrorist watch list going back to the early 1970s. In the mid-1980s various states merged their local lists into the main Federal list, which was managed by the FBI. That's when I found out that I was on it.

Arkansas, not having much in the way of of terrorists, was apparently looking a bit lame, so the State Police puffed the list up by adding entire groups of people they had other lists of. Mine was on the "registered owner of a legal machine gun" list. Despite Federal registration and FBI background check, fingerprinting, verified clean police record, filling out all the paperwork and paying the fees, plus complying with the little-known state registration procedure as well, I was obviously a threat to civil order, despite the fact that many police officers could not meet the requirements. But, hey, once you have a list, it's good for anything.

I still get junk mail for previous users of a post office box I rented in 1979...

There are some quite appalling stories of people who had been arrested and jailed for months at a time due to police database errors. But once the cuffs go on, nothing you say or do can affect your progress through the system, which moves at its own stately pace.

In the US, the police, the prosecutors, the courts, and the prison systems are all pretty much independent of each other as far as funding and accountability. You'd generally be arrested by the police or some sort of "law enforcement officer", at which point you're turned over to a lower court for a hearing, or to a prosecutor's office for charges. Then you'd be released, or passed on to the jail system (temporary detention) or you get to learn about the incestuous niceties of bail bonding, which is very nearly a criminal enterprise itself. Then you'll eventually go to the next higher court, formally charged, and back to jail if not released. Eventually your Constitutonally-guaranteed right to a speedy trial nets you a day in court, often within as little as three or four years of the time you're charged. Then, if found guilty, you're handed over to the prison system ("corrections" as opposed to "detention") for punishment. And the prison might not even be part of the legal system; privately owned and operated prisons are one of the largest growth industries in the USA.

There's a lot of room for stuff to fall in the cracks... when you hear Americans complaining about the police or courts, remember they're putting up with something more appropriate to a banana republic than a civilized nation.

> estimating from the population and makeup of
> where I live, we'd have a police force of ~24
> for a town of 21,000, not 53 like Ferguson.

My town is about 30,000, with 15 police officers. About as many firemen.

The reason for so many different types of police in the USA has to do with the political structure. The USA is union of legally-independent states, in principle similar to the European Union. Each of the 50 member states authorizes, funds, and operates its police as they see fit. Below state level you have counties/parishes/hundreds with their own governmental structures, by tradition or state constitution, most have some variant of the ancient English "shire reeve", whose authority comes from the local electorate. Their primary purpose is to collect taxes, their secondary purpose is as police.

Down at the town level, the local electorate might establish their own police force. How they're regulated varies widely across the various states. Below that are various forms of constabulary, generally operating in "unincorporated areas", which are places pretent they're cities but aren't, for tax purposes.

But wait! There's more! In the last few decades, "police" are probably a single-digit percentage of Federally-recognized "Law Enforcement Officers", all of which has "police" powers, but work for bureaucratic organizations, like city animal control departments, state wildlife control, Federal immigration officials, etc., whose legal standing is, in my opinion, dubious. Then there's the Fed itself, which has allocated itself police powers in general, as well as seconding them to almost every bureaucratic sub-entity. And then there are the various Indian tribal police, who technically have no authority of their own, except when it's convenient, when they're assumed to be under the umbrella of the FBI. Oh, and each branch of the military has its own police, as does the Department of defense.

All of these groups are authorized by, report to, and are paid by different organizations. We do have an "American Police Department" - that's the FBI, which not only claims authority over all US territory, but worldwide, to the consternation of places in South America and Africa that were operating under the impression they were recognized, independent nations. But the FBI has to compete with an array of other Federal police, ranging from the Secret Service to the National Park Police. Every group its own little bureaucratic fiefdom.

Getting confused yet? The situation for courts is similar.

> Almost every dictator from Caesar to Putin got
> their start either in their country's military or
> in the internal security services.

Notable exceptions:

Lenin: columnist, newspaper editor
Stalin: columnist, newspaper editor
Mussolini: newspaper owner and editor
Hitler: columnist, newspaper owner

The link between politics, war, and printing goes all the way back to Johannes Gutenberg. Cheap pampheteering was a key factor in what eventually became the Protestant Reformation, which led to some fairly serious wars just by itself.