De-Nazification of domestic police agencies could be a good place to start. From Digby:
Taking down and killing a 95-year-old WWII veteran USING A WALKER and, apparently, lying about him having a kitchen knife to cover it up.
Also from Digby, a storm trooper style SWAT assault on a humane society animal shelter to kill a contraband deer fawn.
The police in the United States have been militarized and are acting like para-military storm troopers. The style of policing practiced in countries where The People are seen as the enemy of the government and the oligarchs it exists to serve. FOX TV shows about cops have certainly not helped.
The "thin blue line". The "war on drugs."
ReplyDeleteThese things have faded from popular attention, but their implications have remained. "Reefer Madness" is now seen (if at all) as a very weird joke. Yet the attitude toward "drugs" remains the same. Nobody really cares about the "war on drugs" anymore (except people like Steve King, who use it for propaganda) but nobody really wants to stop it, either.
Militarized cops? Hey, long as they're not shooting at me, right? Remind me again how many bullets they fired at that boat Tsarnaev was in, and how many hit Tsarnaev?
Where did the rest of the bullets go? What was the effect of all that expensive militaristic equipment on the streets of Boston for a day? What was the cost? What was the justification?
And what did it end up reaping?
The best part of the fawn story, btw:
ReplyDeleteAnd when asked if they might have called ahead of time and gotten the full story their spokesperson replied that the DEA doesn't call up a drug dealer to ask them to voluntarily give up their drugs before a raid. Which tells you exactly how these backwoods Robocops see themselves.
Good grief. Because the Society of St. Francis "no-kill" animal shelter, is just like a Bolivian drug lord's headquarters.
Libertarian sites have been warning on this for years (back to the BBS days), but, hey, those evil libertarians- can't listen to those idiots, right?
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