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Or departments with more military gear are in more risky areas where the use of force is more likely. I could not read the article because it is blocked for me

Or departments with more military gear are in more risky areas where the use of force is more likely. I could not read the article because it is blocked for me.

ryandrake 6y ago
> Or departments with more military gear are in more risky areas where the use of force is more likely. Which, itself deserves a different study to understand whether risky areas lead to more use of force, or whether excessive use of force leads to police distrust, making areas more risky for police. There is probably no single causal path here. Use of force, aggressive police, police's fear of the public, the public's distrust of police, militarized training, military gear, socioeconomics, race, and crime are likely interrelated in complex ways, without an easy line to draw from one to the other.
- steve76 6y ago
  Or government officials from Cuba and Venezuela have a good old laugh when they see everyone in Atlanta dying from oxies. And a lot of people here in America join up. Rich spoiled fools far removed from the brutality they cause. Police do very little even with gun shots. Don't let the violence spread. Come back tomorrow morning and collect the casings. Smart, because if you brought what really happens to the public, it would get out of control. The American public beats to death every foreign agent in the street. China invades Taiwan, Venezuela invades Columbia, Russia invades Belarus or Poland and we have a full on nuclear exchange. Join up and stop it, or be quiet. You are in something way over your head. The people pushing this, like Soros, don't care. They care about the money and leave town first sign of trouble.
seretogis 6y ago
"Risky areas" sounds like a dog whistle to me, much like "bad neighborhood"... When you think of these "risky areas", what do the people within them look like? Do they deserve to have militarized police literally rolling armored tank-like vehicles through their neighborhood, and what sort of impact do you think that has on them?
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  I don't understand why this was downvoted.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Because the down voters agree that "risky areas" aka communities full of minorities like black and hispanic people, deserve military style occupation and tactics. If you think that's not true, ask yourself why analysis of that term is not welcome. There is a long proud tradition of terrible anti-human bullshit being hidden behind neat euphemisms like that. Because it sounds reasonable, and civil. It isn't.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ffggvv 6y ago
    i downvoted it because it’s not a dog whistle. people insist on seeing race everywhere. a risky area by common sense is an area with increased violence, regardless of the racial makeup. if you can’t see why somewhere with increased violence would possibly require police to have increased capabilities i’m not sure what to say. or how it’s magically a dog whistle
- malandrew 6y ago
  If you're using the term dog whistle to describe something, you're the dog in that situation. That accusation is just a submarine form of kafkatrap.
  - 8note 6y ago
    People can also hear dog whistles through technology. You don't have to be a dog to hear it, just get a microphone and a Fourier transform. Similarly, people can figure out how to spot dog whistles without being a dog.
- nojokes 6y ago
  I honestly do not know about how they look like. What I meant was higher rate of crime against people and police. But to give you an idea what might turn police force to want to have more serious weapons. Just few days ago there was a 2 hours long attack on the local police station in France. Attackers used fireworks. Police did not respond though and I do not have an idea why. Perhaps they were outnumbered and outgunned. In such situation, where criminals do what they like, would you prefer your police force have some serious weapons or you would think that it would be an overreaction?
matwood 6y ago
> Or departments with more military gear are in more risky areas where the use of force is more likely. Maybe. I know anecdotally where I live has very little violent crime, and the police department is fully militarized with mraps and the like.
- adwww 6y ago
  Plural? Like one could make sense, in a siege type situation or bank robbery in progress perhaps. The sort of event that might happen once a decade or so maybe. But how many sieges or bank robberies are they expecting to need multiple of these?!
  - malandrew 6y ago
    Bank robberies used to be more common, but inflation basically took care of that https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/economists-demonstrate-exactly-why-bank-robbery-is-a-bad-idea/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/economists-demonstra...
    - ArnoVW 6y ago
      Thanks for the interesting link. Ars at its best. Though my interpretation of the article is more that the risk / reward ratio simply has become too poor, nothing to do with inflation. I suppose it is easier to rob a 150k watch from an unprotected person on the street, of hold up a Chinese tourist (who often have their holiday money in cash), if you're into that sort of thing.
  - matwood 6y ago
    My city only has 1. I was mistaken because I saw a big police show and tell at an abandoned parking lot late last year, and saw multiples. The city next door has 2, and all the adjacent cities also have their own. Keep in mind these these cities are all basically considered the same large city. It's not like they separated by 100s of miles or anything.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
jakelazaroff 6y ago
The study controls for that variable: > The newspaper’s analysis used the military’s database and paired it with a database of fatal police shootings from across the state, controlling for statistical variables like community income, rural-urban differences, racial makeup, and violent crime rates. The article explicitly cautions against drawing conclusions about causality. My intuition is that there’s truth to both explanations: cosplaying as a military makes police more violent, and intrinsically violent departments are more likely to seek out military equipment. And frankly, the second conclusion scares me more. If the causal relationship is “equipment —> violence”, we can solve it by simply banning the use of military equipment by police. If the relationship goes the other way, though, we still have to deal with violent cops who want to hurt civilians.
- anthony_romeo 6y ago
  > If the relationship goes the other way, though, we still have to deal with violent cops who want to hurt civilians. If the problem is iterative, then I'd think in terms of adjusting probabilities in a Markov chain, and having the goal be to minimize instances of avoidable police violence over time. Anyway, it's not possible to eliminate violence from the police, unless we find a way to eliminate violence from human nature, so the goals should be about adjusting priorities, duties, and tone to minimize unnecessary violence.
- craftinator 6y ago
  Something I've long thought on is what types of people are attracted to the US police force. If you look at it economically, by what incentives are offered, it's a bit disturbing: 1) Power over others 2) Chance to stop violence 3) Little educational requirements 4) Access to cool gear 5) Immunity from law 6) Ability to help or hurt weaker people 7) Access to drugs, guns, etc... The list goes on, but I really see two types of people drawn to these: those that seek to help, and those that seek power. The defenders, and the bullies. The saviors, and the criminals. It's naive to expect that one type makes it through much more often than the other (the "a few bad apples" analogy). If I were in organized crime, or a gang, or a neo-nazi, or just someone who was a sociopath, what better possible job is there than being a cop? Would it be that hard to fake it through whatever screenings they use (which can be NONE in some PDs) to weed out the bad actors? No. We must expect some large minority or even a majority of cops to fall into the class of bad actors.
0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
> controlling for statistical variables like community income, rural-urban differences, racial makeup, and violent crime rates. So, they must have have data on low crime areas that also have similar military gear. On a related note, do surplus statisticians cause lying journalists?
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  They do: > A newly published article by a group of scholars with the Emory University Department of Political Science found no relationship between the presence of surplus military equipment and lower crime rates.
burner831234 6y ago
check out archive.is

Or departments with more military gear are in more risky areas where the use of force is more likely. I could not read the article because it is blocked for me.

ryandrake 6y ago

> Or departments with more military gear are in more risky areas where the use of force is more likely. Which, itself deserves a different study to understand whether risky areas lead to more use of force, or whether excessive use of force leads to police distrust, making areas more risky for police. There is probably no single causal path here. Use of force, aggressive police, police's fear of the public, the public's distrust of police, militarized training, military gear, socioeconomics, race, and crime are likely interrelated in complex ways, without an easy line to draw from one to the other.

steve76 6y ago
Or government officials from Cuba and Venezuela have a good old laugh when they see everyone in Atlanta dying from oxies. And a lot of people here in America join up. Rich spoiled fools far removed from the brutality they cause. Police do very little even with gun shots. Don't let the violence spread. Come back tomorrow morning and collect the casings. Smart, because if you brought what really happens to the public, it would get out of control. The American public beats to death every foreign agent in the street. China invades Taiwan, Venezuela invades Columbia, Russia invades Belarus or Poland and we have a full on nuclear exchange. Join up and stop it, or be quiet. You are in something way over your head. The people pushing this, like Soros, don't care. They care about the money and leave town first sign of trouble.

seretogis 6y ago

"Risky areas" sounds like a dog whistle to me, much like "bad neighborhood"... When you think of these "risky areas", what do the people within them look like? Do they deserve to have militarized police literally rolling armored tank-like vehicles through their neighborhood, and what sort of impact do you think that has on them?

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
I don't understand why this was downvoted.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Because the down voters agree that "risky areas" aka communities full of minorities like black and hispanic people, deserve military style occupation and tactics. If you think that's not true, ask yourself why analysis of that term is not welcome. There is a long proud tradition of terrible anti-human bullshit being hidden behind neat euphemisms like that. Because it sounds reasonable, and civil. It isn't.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ffggvv 6y ago
  i downvoted it because it’s not a dog whistle. people insist on seeing race everywhere. a risky area by common sense is an area with increased violence, regardless of the racial makeup. if you can’t see why somewhere with increased violence would possibly require police to have increased capabilities i’m not sure what to say. or how it’s magically a dog whistle
malandrew 6y ago
If you're using the term dog whistle to describe something, you're the dog in that situation. That accusation is just a submarine form of kafkatrap.
- 8note 6y ago
  People can also hear dog whistles through technology. You don't have to be a dog to hear it, just get a microphone and a Fourier transform. Similarly, people can figure out how to spot dog whistles without being a dog.
nojokes 6y ago
I honestly do not know about how they look like. What I meant was higher rate of crime against people and police. But to give you an idea what might turn police force to want to have more serious weapons. Just few days ago there was a 2 hours long attack on the local police station in France. Attackers used fireworks. Police did not respond though and I do not have an idea why. Perhaps they were outnumbered and outgunned. In such situation, where criminals do what they like, would you prefer your police force have some serious weapons or you would think that it would be an overreaction?

matwood 6y ago

> Or departments with more military gear are in more risky areas where the use of force is more likely. Maybe. I know anecdotally where I live has very little violent crime, and the police department is fully militarized with mraps and the like.

adwww 6y ago
Plural? Like one could make sense, in a siege type situation or bank robbery in progress perhaps. The sort of event that might happen once a decade or so maybe. But how many sieges or bank robberies are they expecting to need multiple of these?!
- malandrew 6y ago
  Bank robberies used to be more common, but inflation basically took care of that https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/economists-demonstrate-exactly-why-bank-robbery-is-a-bad-idea/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/economists-demonstra...
  - ArnoVW 6y ago
    Thanks for the interesting link. Ars at its best. Though my interpretation of the article is more that the risk / reward ratio simply has become too poor, nothing to do with inflation. I suppose it is easier to rob a 150k watch from an unprotected person on the street, of hold up a Chinese tourist (who often have their holiday money in cash), if you're into that sort of thing.
- matwood 6y ago
  My city only has 1. I was mistaken because I saw a big police show and tell at an abandoned parking lot late last year, and saw multiples. The city next door has 2, and all the adjacent cities also have their own. Keep in mind these these cities are all basically considered the same large city. It's not like they separated by 100s of miles or anything.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago

jakelazaroff 6y ago

The study controls for that variable: > The newspaper’s analysis used the military’s database and paired it with a database of fatal police shootings from across the state, controlling for statistical variables like community income, rural-urban differences, racial makeup, and violent crime rates. The article explicitly cautions against drawing conclusions about causality. My intuition is that there’s truth to both explanations: cosplaying as a military makes police more violent, and intrinsically violent departments are more likely to seek out military equipment. And frankly, the second conclusion scares me more. If the causal relationship is “equipment —> violence”, we can solve it by simply banning the use of military equipment by police. If the relationship goes the other way, though, we still have to deal with violent cops who want to hurt civilians.

anthony_romeo 6y ago
> If the relationship goes the other way, though, we still have to deal with violent cops who want to hurt civilians. If the problem is iterative, then I'd think in terms of adjusting probabilities in a Markov chain, and having the goal be to minimize instances of avoidable police violence over time. Anyway, it's not possible to eliminate violence from the police, unless we find a way to eliminate violence from human nature, so the goals should be about adjusting priorities, duties, and tone to minimize unnecessary violence.
craftinator 6y ago
Something I've long thought on is what types of people are attracted to the US police force. If you look at it economically, by what incentives are offered, it's a bit disturbing: 1) Power over others 2) Chance to stop violence 3) Little educational requirements 4) Access to cool gear 5) Immunity from law 6) Ability to help or hurt weaker people 7) Access to drugs, guns, etc... The list goes on, but I really see two types of people drawn to these: those that seek to help, and those that seek power. The defenders, and the bullies. The saviors, and the criminals. It's naive to expect that one type makes it through much more often than the other (the "a few bad apples" analogy). If I were in organized crime, or a gang, or a neo-nazi, or just someone who was a sociopath, what better possible job is there than being a cop? Would it be that hard to fake it through whatever screenings they use (which can be NONE in some PDs) to weed out the bad actors? No. We must expect some large minority or even a majority of cops to fall into the class of bad actors.

0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago

> controlling for statistical variables like community income, rural-urban differences, racial makeup, and violent crime rates. So, they must have have data on low crime areas that also have similar military gear. On a related note, do surplus statisticians cause lying journalists?

jakelazaroff 6y ago
They do: > A newly published article by a group of scholars with the Emory University Department of Political Science found no relationship between the presence of surplus military equipment and lower crime rates.

burner831234 6y ago

check out archive.is