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posted by janrinok on Thursday September 04 2014, @01:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the time-for-a-rethink dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday September 04 2014, @05:09PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday September 04 2014, @05:09PM (#89411)

    screaming throw out all the illegals without ever thinking about how much money it will cost. To put it better, we have better things to spend our money on than chasing illegals.

    So basically, you're saying instead of bailing out the water accumulating in our boat, we should be tuning the engine to go faster. Hmm.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 04 2014, @05:49PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Thursday September 04 2014, @05:49PM (#89427) Journal

    Your analogy is apples to oranges. Unlike unwanted water or bilge in a boat, illegal immigrants can be converted to tax paying citizens. The economic engine is not tuned but fueled by this.

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday September 04 2014, @06:41PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday September 04 2014, @06:41PM (#89449)

      Technically there's plenty of useful things you *could* be doing with the water, but the fact remains that it's filling up your boat, which is undesirable.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05 2014, @01:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05 2014, @01:24PM (#89807)
    Seems to me a lot of the illegals are busy helping you bunch bail out the water. I don't know what your captain(s) are doing though - steering you bunch towards icebergs or reefs[1]?

    Where your boat is steered is going to affect your future a lot more. A lot of jobs the illegals are taking will be gone in the future anyway. Just look at plans for robot cars, burger making robots; the existing warehouse robots, automated factories, etc. Foxconn is aiming to replace more and more chinese workers with robots. Chinese workers took a lot of manufacturing jobs from the "expensive world" workers. So imagine those chinese workers as "robots" and ask yourself did as many new jobs really appear in practice for those jobs they took away? No? Then don't believe the idiots who say that robots will take away jobs but there will still be jobs for everyone (as long as they retrained, reskilled, worked smarter and harder).

    Where does all that improved productiveness go? Into making the 0.1% even richer? After a while they won't need most of us. They'd own the farms, the mines, the fishing fleet - they just need armies, a bunch of engineers, doctors and some servants. Why would they keep us around? We wouldn't have the money to buy the stuff they make.

    At least the more socialist countries have an "upgrade path" - they already provide for those who don't/can't work. They need to add one more thing - regulate reproductive rights or at least have laws with that contingency in case it becomes unsustainable in the long term (I'm aware that population growth is down in many of those countries, but some people are still having more children than they can support, so if you keep breeding/"selecting" for such people, after a number of generations you will have a problem).

    [1] I suspect most of them don't actually look far where the boat should be going. Many actually appear to be trying to give the voters AND the corporations what they want most, or at least appear[2] to be doing so ;). In many cases what the voters want most does not conflict with what the corporations want. How many corporations care about preventing/allowing same-sex marriage after all? How many voters care about copyright and patent laws? How many corporations care about the legalization of marijuana? So after a while when enough voters wanted legalization of marijuana bang you bunch got it. Same goes for other hot button stuff e.g. gun laws. You could say it's manipulative but "hot button" topics are by definition what matters most to the voters right?

    [2] when the voters say they don't want to be spied on, they cut the budget for "searching" (not for collecting and storing the data ;) ). Go figure how much search actually costs...