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> You went back and edited your comment after I replied to it. After editing and posting I saw no replies. I left for work. > Most of the changes in police ta

> You went back and edited your comment after I replied to it. After editing and posting I saw no replies. I left for work. > Most of the changes in police tactics are motivated by specific incidents, many of which involved officer deaths. This is indeed a selling point of militarizing cops but the justification doesn't jibe well with generations of decreasing police death rates. > You’re positing some imaginary world where the police adopted SWAT tactics and gear for literally no reason... Not for no reason. Unions, agencies/depts, pols and police industries have crafted many reasons. Universally those reasons exclude the super critical part about generations of decreasing police deaths. > in reality, it was because of deadly incidents [cites incidents that long, long predate the spikey part of decreasing police deaths]. It's kind of hard to draw a parallel between widely disparate events - some so historical that people involved in them have died of old age - and the much more recent amping up of police aggression. > Each of these incidents resulted in changes in equipment, training, and procedures. I would agree that LEO events from 50 years ago eventually contributed to the 40 year decline in police deaths that continues today. A big one is the Church committee's exposure of FBI domestic surveillance. That pressured the agency to refocus on it's law enforcement duties. And that coincides with the sharp reduction of domestic terror attacks, from the historical 1970 high of ~400/year to decades of much, much lower DT rates.

philwelch 3y ago
> This is indeed a selling point of militarizing cops but the justification doesn't jibe well with generations of decreasing police death rates. Your argument still makes no sense. Law enforcement is just like any other job—the death rate goes down over time as more and more safety measures are adopted. They went down, in part, because of the safety measures. > It's kind of hard to draw a parallel between widely disparate events - some so historical that people involved in them have died of old age - and the much more recent amping up of police aggression. More recent? Most of the SWAT stuff dates back to the 1980’s and 1990’s at the very latest, the “War on Drugs” era. And I’d be sympathetic to the argument that these measures are excessive when it comes to drug trafficking, but this is a domestic terrorism case.

philwelch 3y ago

> This is indeed a selling point of militarizing cops but the justification doesn't jibe well with generations of decreasing police death rates. Your argument still makes no sense. Law enforcement is just like any other job—the death rate goes down over time as more and more safety measures are adopted. They went down, in part, because of the safety measures. > It's kind of hard to draw a parallel between widely disparate events - some so historical that people involved in them have died of old age - and the much more recent amping up of police aggression. More recent? Most of the SWAT stuff dates back to the 1980’s and 1990’s at the very latest, the “War on Drugs” era. And I’d be sympathetic to the argument that these measures are excessive when it comes to drug trafficking, but this is a domestic terrorism case.