7 ms·

As a Brit, watching the militarisation of the US police force is kinda scary. Hearing about successful push back and positive legislation is good. A quick bit

As a Brit, watching the militarisation of the US police force is kinda scary. Hearing about successful push back and positive legislation is good. A quick bit of Googling, I can't find any evidence of weapons a being placed on police drones in Illinois, so this seems preemptive, which is good to see! (Our own police force has many of its own problems)

smoldesu 3y ago
Wait until you see how we've militarized the domestically-incorporated information systems that we export.
femiagbabiaka 3y ago
I knew it was an issue when a rural town of at best 2000 people adjacent to where my wife grew up successfully purchased multiple Humvees for "riot control" through 1033 (a program instituted by a president from the equivalent of a blairite-ish labour party in our country, no less). More about that here: https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-1033-military-equipment-weapons/ https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-10...
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Nitpick about purchased “It’s a transfer, so that means that the agencies don’t have to pay for this equipment. So because the government has already possessed it, paid for it, it’s the Department of Defense’s property.” It seems technically it is still DoD property? But alltogether it is indeed worrysome. Here in germany we have the same trend, even though quite light in comparison. It is rare nowdays, that I see police without bulletproof wests and machine pistols are more and more common. It creates a very different impression ... Speaking of it: my car broke down once and I parked it on the side of a rural road (not in the way). It was weekend and I put a big note in it, saying it will be towed away very soon. Monday morning my wife with the baby were suprised by police on the door. And the first thing they see is the machine pistol and fighting gear. Surely totally necessary to get the same information, they could have gotten from the note in the car (that this very day it will be moved away). I seriously don't know what they were thinking. Probably nothing at all and war gear becomes just standard for engaging with potentially dangerous civilians, who park their car next to the road.
  - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
    Thank you, you're correct! Which makes it even worse. That story is horrifying.. it creates a scenario where the slightest misunderstand could escalate things to a point of no return.
- RajT88 3y ago
  Sort of like how Naperville has APC's, but also somehow is "The Safest Place in America". (That title is a fraud, btw, and the result of systemic non-prosecution, non-reporting, and reduction of felonies to lesser crimes. But they indeed don't have much of a gang violence problem - just major drug problems which go unaddressed.)
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    systemic non-prosecution, non-reporting, and reduction of felonies to lesser crimes. This has been going on ever since the F.B.I. started requiring police departments to report their crime statistics in a uniform way. I remember one PD took advantage of a flaw in the forms that only allowed one category per crime. So if someone got robbed and killed, they'd mark it down as a robbery, not a homicide.
    - RajT88 3y ago
      It happens at multiple levels in this case, in order to keep the area's super-low crime stats. I heard from a relative who's on a neighboring town's police force that the DA busts down first time felony offenders to misdemeanors nearly every time (this is at the county level). Except for the really bad stuff like murder, or selling drugs on a playground. I've heard anecdotally from friends that police just refuse to take reports of assault. This is domestic assault, or more "stranger danger" types of assaults (like late at night on the riverwalk). Both physical and sexual types of assault. This apparently doesn't count as "the really bad stuff" I described before. My sister knew a gal who got hit by a van while crossing the street, where there's a crosswalk and a yellow flashing light and a sign. Her leg was broken in a few places. When the police arrived, she received a ticket for jaywalking because she wasn't in the crosswalk. (A funny thing happens when you get hit by a van - you tend to move far away from where you were standing) That jaywalking ticket did not raise the crime stats like ticketing the driver would have. Bonus: It was potentially racially motivated, because the victim was black, and the cops have a reputation for harassing black people in town. Naperville is a fine place to raise your children if you're wealthy and white and your husband is not abusive.
LeFantome 3y ago
Axon has openly floated the idea.
FredPret 3y ago
What's scary is the number of CCTV cameras throughout Britain (not just London). I've never felt more surveilled than on a recent visit there.
- Zetice 3y ago
  How does one "feel surveilled"?
  - jonathanstrange 3y ago
    You've never felt like someone is watching you?
    - Zetice 3y ago
      I understand such a feeling is purely made up and not worth acknowledging, so I don't legitimize that thought.
      - omniglottal 3y ago
        Given the fact is legitimate, people legitimize the thought of it and self-censorship ensues.
        Zetice 3y ago
        It's not legitimate? As I said, being watched != being recorded.
  - SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
    It's a feeling you get when you suspect (or in this case know) that you're being watched or recorded.
    - Zetice 3y ago
      Being watched != being recorded, and there is no sense a human has that can detect the gaze of another human.
wyager 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. Last thing we need here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - wyager 3y ago
    That was not a pro-American comment. I thought that would be self-evident, but perhaps not
    - dang 3y ago
      The problem is that it was flamebait, not whether it was pro-American or not.
jessfyi 3y ago
After law enforcement successfully jury-rigged a bomb defusal robot with explosives to kill a cornered suspect in Dallas in 2016 [0][1] (with little to no pushback at the time) vendors and departments around the country have been pushing to formally adopt the tactic ever since. The first article noted (according to national head of their union) that SWAT teams around the country considered it prior to that incident. SFPD initially getting approval to do it brought national attention [2] to the practice, but unfortunately we're going to need a federal bill to stop its spread. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777/for-the-first-time-police-used-a-bomb-robot-to-kill https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/08/police-bomb-robot-explosive-killed-suspect-dallas https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/08/police-bo... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/san-francisco-decides-killer-police-robots-arent-such-a-great-idea/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/san-francisco-decide...
reaperducer 3y ago
As a Brit, watching the militarisation of the US police force is kinda scary. You should watch it from this side. Even people who aren't minorities and have never done anything wrong in their lives are starting to distrust and shy away from the police. It's one reason that so many (most?) police departments are understaffed.
Fernicia 3y ago
How do you balance this concern with the level of crime? Wouldn't be more excusable for a Johannesburg PD to be better equipped than Brighton? With that in mind, it doesn't seem right to paint the US with one brush when Chicago's murder rate is more than 5x higher than New York City's. For the case of small PDs having big budgets I agree it's wasted money, and maybe even damaging to the town. But in urban areas like Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago, it seems tone-deaf to focus on police violence when so many people are victimised by people the police could have locked up if they were better equipped. (Ignoring of course the weakness of courts to imprison violent offenders, which is also a huge issue in London.)

smoldesu 3y ago

Wait until you see how we've militarized the domestically-incorporated information systems that we export.

femiagbabiaka 3y ago

I knew it was an issue when a rural town of at best 2000 people adjacent to where my wife grew up successfully purchased multiple Humvees for "riot control" through 1033 (a program instituted by a president from the equivalent of a blairite-ish labour party in our country, no less). More about that here: https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-1033-military-equipment-weapons/ https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-10...

hutzlibu 3y ago
Nitpick about purchased “It’s a transfer, so that means that the agencies don’t have to pay for this equipment. So because the government has already possessed it, paid for it, it’s the Department of Defense’s property.” It seems technically it is still DoD property? But alltogether it is indeed worrysome. Here in germany we have the same trend, even though quite light in comparison. It is rare nowdays, that I see police without bulletproof wests and machine pistols are more and more common. It creates a very different impression ... Speaking of it: my car broke down once and I parked it on the side of a rural road (not in the way). It was weekend and I put a big note in it, saying it will be towed away very soon. Monday morning my wife with the baby were suprised by police on the door. And the first thing they see is the machine pistol and fighting gear. Surely totally necessary to get the same information, they could have gotten from the note in the car (that this very day it will be moved away). I seriously don't know what they were thinking. Probably nothing at all and war gear becomes just standard for engaging with potentially dangerous civilians, who park their car next to the road.
- femiagbabiaka 3y ago
  Thank you, you're correct! Which makes it even worse. That story is horrifying.. it creates a scenario where the slightest misunderstand could escalate things to a point of no return.
RajT88 3y ago
Sort of like how Naperville has APC's, but also somehow is "The Safest Place in America". (That title is a fraud, btw, and the result of systemic non-prosecution, non-reporting, and reduction of felonies to lesser crimes. But they indeed don't have much of a gang violence problem - just major drug problems which go unaddressed.)
- reaperducer 3y ago
  systemic non-prosecution, non-reporting, and reduction of felonies to lesser crimes. This has been going on ever since the F.B.I. started requiring police departments to report their crime statistics in a uniform way. I remember one PD took advantage of a flaw in the forms that only allowed one category per crime. So if someone got robbed and killed, they'd mark it down as a robbery, not a homicide.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    It happens at multiple levels in this case, in order to keep the area's super-low crime stats. I heard from a relative who's on a neighboring town's police force that the DA busts down first time felony offenders to misdemeanors nearly every time (this is at the county level). Except for the really bad stuff like murder, or selling drugs on a playground. I've heard anecdotally from friends that police just refuse to take reports of assault. This is domestic assault, or more "stranger danger" types of assaults (like late at night on the riverwalk). Both physical and sexual types of assault. This apparently doesn't count as "the really bad stuff" I described before. My sister knew a gal who got hit by a van while crossing the street, where there's a crosswalk and a yellow flashing light and a sign. Her leg was broken in a few places. When the police arrived, she received a ticket for jaywalking because she wasn't in the crosswalk. (A funny thing happens when you get hit by a van - you tend to move far away from where you were standing) That jaywalking ticket did not raise the crime stats like ticketing the driver would have. Bonus: It was potentially racially motivated, because the victim was black, and the cops have a reputation for harassing black people in town. Naperville is a fine place to raise your children if you're wealthy and white and your husband is not abusive.

LeFantome 3y ago

Axon has openly floated the idea.

FredPret 3y ago

What's scary is the number of CCTV cameras throughout Britain (not just London). I've never felt more surveilled than on a recent visit there.

Zetice 3y ago
How does one "feel surveilled"?
- jonathanstrange 3y ago
  You've never felt like someone is watching you?
  - Zetice 3y ago
    I understand such a feeling is purely made up and not worth acknowledging, so I don't legitimize that thought.
    - omniglottal 3y ago
      Given the fact is legitimate, people legitimize the thought of it and self-censorship ensues.
      - Zetice 3y ago
        It's not legitimate? As I said, being watched != being recorded.
- SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
  It's a feeling you get when you suspect (or in this case know) that you're being watched or recorded.
  - Zetice 3y ago
    Being watched != being recorded, and there is no sense a human has that can detect the gaze of another human.

wyager 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. Last thing we need here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- wyager 3y ago
  That was not a pro-American comment. I thought that would be self-evident, but perhaps not
  - dang 3y ago
    The problem is that it was flamebait, not whether it was pro-American or not.

jessfyi 3y ago

After law enforcement successfully jury-rigged a bomb defusal robot with explosives to kill a cornered suspect in Dallas in 2016 [0][1] (with little to no pushback at the time) vendors and departments around the country have been pushing to formally adopt the tactic ever since. The first article noted (according to national head of their union) that SWAT teams around the country considered it prior to that incident. SFPD initially getting approval to do it brought national attention [2] to the practice, but unfortunately we're going to need a federal bill to stop its spread. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777/for-the-first-time-police-used-a-bomb-robot-to-kill https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/08/police-bomb-robot-explosive-killed-suspect-dallas https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/08/police-bo... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/san-francisco-decides-killer-police-robots-arent-such-a-great-idea/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/san-francisco-decide...

reaperducer 3y ago

As a Brit, watching the militarisation of the US police force is kinda scary. You should watch it from this side. Even people who aren't minorities and have never done anything wrong in their lives are starting to distrust and shy away from the police. It's one reason that so many (most?) police departments are understaffed.

Fernicia 3y ago

How do you balance this concern with the level of crime? Wouldn't be more excusable for a Johannesburg PD to be better equipped than Brighton? With that in mind, it doesn't seem right to paint the US with one brush when Chicago's murder rate is more than 5x higher than New York City's. For the case of small PDs having big budgets I agree it's wasted money, and maybe even damaging to the town. But in urban areas like Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago, it seems tone-deaf to focus on police violence when so many people are victimised by people the police could have locked up if they were better equipped. (Ignoring of course the weakness of courts to imprison violent offenders, which is also a huge issue in London.)