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Techdirt reports
Two law enforcement agencies will be returning their Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) [vehicles] to Uncle Sam, with the announcements arriving almost simultaneously.
Davis, Calif., city officials have directed the police department to return a surplus U.S. military armored vehicle to the federal government after residents, citing images seen during protests in Ferguson, Mo., expressed fears of militarization.
The Davis Police Department now has 60 days to get rid of a $689,000 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicle, which police acquired through a U.S. Defense Department program, and must consider other rescue vehicle options.
[...]
Over in San Jose, CA, it's a completely different story. Rather than having an MRAP pried from law enforcement's clutches by city reps, the San Jose Police Department gave it up voluntarily to protect its relationship with the people it serves.
San Jose police spokeswoman Sgt. Heather Randol told KCBS the decision was made based on concerns for potential damage to the department's image and community relationships.
"We want to keep their trust. We don't want them to feel we are going off on another path with our police department," she said. "We want them to feel comfortable about the tools that we use."
(Score: 0, Troll) by SacredSalt on Thursday September 04 2014, @03:33AM
I don't know California politics, but I know the ones here in Missouri. Ferguson may have presented a bad TV image because of having a pair of armored vehicles and a sniper on top (searching for anyone well beyond the immediate protestors -- looking for people with molotovs, and the second one brought there in response to a person who opened up on law enforcement with a high powered rifle who came down from Ohio just to shoot at police ...), but the real story of those events is pretty far from what most media portrayed.
The media left out, by and large, the tremendously bad behavior of our wonderful subsidized housing black population that is warehoused all around the area where the protests, and riots occurred. The entire incident cost St Louis County (which is footing most of the bill for this) 13.5 million dollars in police salaries, helicopter time, damaged vehicles, and medical from injuries sustained - and may yet rise as one officer is still being treated for injuries sustained when a brick fractured his skull. Some of those police cars sustained damage from weapons fire, a few were torched, and others just smashed up from the crowd. You notice the armored vehicles don't have a scratch -- they are perfectly suited for that environment -- one of the cars next to it had a round penetrate both doors. Had they all been using those armored vehicles in response to calls during the incident, several officers would not have bullet holes in their cars. There were dozens of ambush events with fake calls to try to draw first responders out. The county didn't draw bring out its armored vehicles without reason. You should also note that the state police eventually brought in their armored vehicles in response to a gasoline bomb thrown from the area where much of the media had set up. Its only because of the response of police and luck that we didn't have officers killed or a full scale melt down such as LA had.
Our local section-8 population burned down a business thought falsely to have made the initial call reporting the robbery (really a shoplifting and assault), and burned down the liquor store that actually did make the call -- both of them tagged with comments about "snitches". All of this over two people who robbed a store -- were on their way to their drug dealer to buy marijuana for their blunts, got stopped by a police officer unaware of the assault and robbery they had just committed, assaulted an officer, one of which didn't have the good sense to run that his friend did -- who then turned around (according to multiple witnesses) and got himself killed attempting to assault the officer again. People who actually witnessed the event were far too scared to come forward initially because of the anti-snitching climate that prevails there (fear of their neighbors rather than the police) -- long before any armored vehicles, or robo suited police officers appeared on the scene. They only became unafraid of doing so with increased police presence.
If you think an armored vehicle is excessive for dealing with a population this out of hand -- you don't live here, nor have to deal with our local future inmate population, nor does your city have the demographics of Ferguson. Davis is predominantly White and Asian -- a city with less than 2% (and declining) African Americans in its population can afford not to have an armored vehicle -- it wont need it.
Lets talk frank about race and crime in St Louis, Missouri: 23% of the black men from the community, aged 18-34 will be caught committing a serious felony offense (Class A and B -- Which in Missouri is represented by the following general categories of crimes: murder, first degree kidnapping, forcible rape of a child under twelve years old, first degree robbery, high quantity drug trafficking, manslaughter [under certain conditions], aggravated rape, and first degree burglary[meaning armed]). This is not a population you can take your eyes off of if you are a police officer. If you expand that out to less serious felonies, it goes up to 34% for black men from St Louis and its suburbs just between the ages of 18-34. The solution to the problem has little to do with what police can do -- they clean up the garbage on the other end of it so you don't have to deal with it. The solution is reducing the number of serious felons in the black population who come from environments such as subsidized housing -- whose crime rates are so atrocious that White people flee, and decent Black people (who are still a majority of the Black population) also eventually flee. The problem repeats itself as HUD becomes willing to pay higher and higher prices to move the problem elsewhere as housing, and neighborhoods get destroyed.
The solution to this is not more anti-poverty programs that create more suburban ghettos. Its financial opportunity, incentives to marry and keep families together. It is also recognizing that there are real differences between races and their propensities for violent crime, trying to limit the population of blacks in public housing by offering incentives to not have more kids -- instead of offering incentives to have more kids. The solution may even include financial incentives to not have children out of wedlock period, and some type of birth control compliance system for minors. If we keep offering incentives to having kids out of wedlock, we are going to keep breeding a population that garners the same results. It may not be politically correct to say these things, but it is the reality. Until we are willing to deal with reality -- get ready for a lot more Ferguson type events. If Katrina didn't convince you of the difficulty in dealing with this population, and the LA riots were not enough for you to get the message ... I don't know what will.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Tork on Thursday September 04 2014, @04:07AM
The entire incident cost St Louis County (which is footing most of the bill for this) 13.5 million dollars in police salaries, helicopter time, damaged vehicles, and medical from injuries sustained - and may yet rise as one officer is still being treated for injuries sustained when a brick fractured his skull.
Lesley McSpadden lost her son.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @04:08AM
When the police refuse to do their jobs and are not held accountable for their many felonies, the citizens are left with no choice but to resort to vigilantism. Army Training Manual (TM) 31-210 and FM 7-8 will become important tools for the oppressed citizens if the delegates of the citizens' authority continue to run rampant and the rule of law is not restored.
(Score: 1) by SacredSalt on Thursday September 04 2014, @01:05PM
You mean people refusing to do their jobs like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccjMjqXEMxw [youtube.com] Where the police are reduced to running a catch and release program (much as they are in St. Louis City, and that fault lies with the judges), and the residents are trapped making repeated calls without any results to show for it! It would be equally easy to find examples from: Detroit, Gary (Indiana) or even Chicago ... (You likely also find similar problems in Oakland, but I haven't been there so I can only go by the stories I read in the paper, and I discount a lot of news from the media with good reason) I picked this example from Baltimore because its one of the cities I have also lived in, and seen the same things happen in. The areas around where the Ferguson riot occurred are indeed ringed by section 8, and subsidized housing. People drove in from surrounding neighborhoods, such as Dellwood, that are also filled with this same subsidized housing to loot and cause problems.
Baltimore and East St. Louis are what happens when police surrender to the problems I talked about rather pointedly in my prior post. St. Louis County Police, and thus far Ferguson police have not surrendered to this ... yet ... hence the extreme nature of the stop snitching program, and confinement of the drug markets to non-open air (largely) in Ferguson. To understand this, you need to understand many of the people that moved into Ferguson came from parts of St. Louis City where they understand reporting problems just means the person is back on the street the next day, the next week, and retaliation is quite a real factor by that persons associates if they do not get out for some reason. Which is why it took a commitment to increased police presence (by the way, St Louis County is back to supplementing the Ferguson police to honor this commitment) to make a few people feel safe enough to be willing to come forward as witnesses to the attack on the officer. The other "witness" spinning the far fetched tale of a police gunning down a person in cold blood on the street was a co-conspirator in the robbery of the store, and has convictions for false police reports among other things.
Of course the federal government will still continue its witch hunt for awhile longer, as will the county prosecutors office -- even though no charges are pending. I played in a band with a St. Louis City Police in the late 90's. In 1999 he had the misfortune of facing similar events. He was Asian, but that that didn't matter. Asian = White according to the newspapers and the NAACP, Al Sharpton, and Farrakhan are concerned. (Black racial agitators achieved the distinction or rather lack of distinction of the media ignoring actual race and going with White long before the Zimmerman case) The headline in the paper read "WHITE COP SHOOTS BLACK MAN FOR DRINKING BEER ON PORCH!" -- followed by the typical example of throwing years old photographs up, and beating the war drums by the press. This resulted in White people being drug from their cars in Tower Grove Park, but the media was clearly disappointed it wasn't able to generate the full scale riot it wanted. Not for lack of trying though.
Unfortunately, the headlines bore no resemblance to reality (just like this case). The police involved had spotted Mr. Ruffin (whom he had arrested before, and knew his local thugs well) and knew he was in front of a known drug house run by the Gangster Disciples (of which he was a member). He was drinking in public (which is no more than a ticket offense in St. Louis) and when the police called him out on it, all of the people left the porch of the house in different directions -- but they went after Mr. Ruffin as he was the only one they could visibly see was committing a crime at the time. The police officer chased him down a couple blocks, Ruffin ran into an alley, reached into his baggy pants, looked startled, and then took a lunge at the police officer. The officer fired a single shot, and over the next couple minutes Mr. Ruffin died.
The state investigated, the city police investigated, the FBI investigated -- he was cleared by all of them, but it was nearly a full year before Min was cleared on all of this because they couldn't find a weapon on Mr. Ruffin. This was not a trigger happy cop, he is the community liaison officer for Soulard now and has been decorated more than a dozen times for his ability to talk down people rather than resort to violence. If Min went for his gun, he had a genuine fear. This kind of thing can be destroying to a police. At a minimum, they go through the torture of dealing with having to take a life. Its torture to deal with, and they are enforced idle the entire time this is going on. I have seen up close, and personal what happens to police in cases like this. You can always tell a case like this is coming when they break out the old photographs and try to paint the child (even if they are well into their adult years they will be referred to as child) as a saint, and the story is so completely outrageous as to defy belief.
There is a world of difference between cities like San Jose (where Whites and Asians makeup 74.8% of the population, and Blacks paltry 3% of the population), and Davis (less than 2% and declining Black population -- also a majority White & Asian city) and Ferguson (70% Black, 27% White -- and the municipalities around it have similar if not Blacker demographics). Davis and San Jose are unlikely to find a genuine need for an armored vehicle any time soon. People in cities like San Jose, and Davis likely imagine that everyone behaves similar to how they do when dealing with things like: not dumping your trash in public lots, not robbing stores, not knifing people, not shooting people, not being a prostitute, not failing to pay your traffic tickets, not assaulting a police officers, not rioting because of imagined slights ... For an education in such matters I suggest a trip to your nearest majority-minority city that contains a large Black population (as you might find a majority Asian community that is law abiding, as Asians tend to be for the most part). Perhaps Oakland, where they are celebrating being dropped to only the fourth most dangerous city would be enough of an education without having to actually move to Detroit, St Louis, Chicago, or Baltimore. http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/4361-oakland-is-no-longer-2nd-most-dangerous-city-in-america [thebolditalic.com]
You folks that think an armored vehicle isn't needed have never considered things like: Your ambulance isn't armored -- what happens when first responders have to go through an active war zone to transport you out, but can't because the risks are too grave. If all it takes is a person getting shot for assaulting a police to set off a full scale race riot in the Black community -- what happens if the help you need is on the other side of that riot while you are having a heart attack or get injured from the rioters and police and paramedics can't get to you because they don't have one?
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Friday September 05 2014, @01:48PM
A minor tangent, but did anyone ever notice that no crimes ever seem to be committed with low powered rifles? I guess .32 rimfire just doesn't cut it...