Sunday, October 01, 2006

Among the problems with the militarization of police

is the same problem when mistakes happen in regular policing: all to often the officers and agency involved basically stonewall. No apology, no "We screwed up", basically pay for property damage- if they can't get around it- and continue on.

What brought this on was looking over at The Agitator earlier today. This particular section is on
SWAT-type raids on either the wrong address, or due to bad information from an informant. Get a chance, go read through it. It'll really, really piss you off. Both the idiocy of some of these raids('economic in nature' for God's sake), and the amount of money going into armored cars and APCs for law enforcement agencies.

It's bad enough when there's only property damage. How the hell do you tell kids to trust the police when, in a botched raid, they kill the dog? Or, using a SWAT team to arrest a guy on gambling charges, you kill him through negligence? And then cover it up with "A mistake was made" or "Normal procedures for a raid were used, so no charges will be filed"?

More of the cops that don't like this crap any more than we do need to start speaking out about this and doing what they can, because every time one of these idiocies happens, it makes their job that much harder.

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