Comment by sailfast | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sailfast | Hacker News Reader

Let me get this straight - this author is trying to tie post-war US Spending to counter Soviet policies, fear of communist expansion, and the cold war, to the current state of police budgets and behavior in the United States? (so they can use the name Gulag in the title of the piece? - just speculating...)

First: It's completely within the power of communities to NOT fund their police, but most of them want to fund the police. I highly doubt it's because they believe their police are building gulags / exhibiting secret police behavior, or because, you know, "no matter what protect the thin blue line because we're conditioned as a police state!"

Second: Militarization of the police is much more a result of the recent terrorist attacks and surplus equipment and military training from the Iraq / Afghanistan wars than anything having to do with the cold war. (Focus on response to mass shootings with automatic weapons, requiring / wanting to wear body armor, etc vs. community policing approaches have different perceived risk profiles)

Third: I'll give you the prison industrial complex is a thing, but there is simply no data in the article presented about overall private prison usage vs. publicly funded prisons. I think private prisons should be outlawed, but a quick look yields 8.5% of people incarcerated are in private prisons. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

The hyperbole in this article is offputting, doesn't help the purpose of the author, and honestly misses so many facts about postwar military spending and WHY that it boggles the mind of any reader with any sort of background in this. Hard pass next time.

The is the Boston (or rather, "everything north of the Charles and west of the Mystic, out to 128") Review.

They have blurbs saying how great they are from Naomi Klein, JK Galbraith, Martha Nussbaum, Henry Gates and John Rawls. Do not expect anything written there to give an evenhanded look at the security and public-safety concerns of post WWII Americans.

It is still upsetting to see the equivocations in the article in question. These, by a faculty club Cambridge trot currently whining in absentia at Hopkins, would rise to the level of Big Lie material if there were not people still alive with firsthand experience of the Soviet system. As it is, it just makes him look silly and any student that buys it look like a rube.

>Second: Militarization of the police is much more a result of the recent terrorist attacks and surplus equipment and military training from the Iraq / Afghanistan wars than anything having to do with the cold war.

The thing I don't get about the "militarization" of police is that:

1. Police responses to mass civil disturbances is probably less militarized today than it has ever been in the history of the United States. See: Philly police dropping actual bombs on citizens, all of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, George Washington himself sending several regiments of the newly-formed US Army to pacify tax protestors, and everything in between.

2. Everywhere that keeps records going back several decades has seen police shootings decrease. In New York City in particular both shootings and deaths have decreased at a rate that exceeds the drop in crime and are the lowest they've ever been-- and NYPD is one of the most "militarized" police forces in the US (so I've been told).

In 1972, NYPD fired 2,510 shots during 994 incidents, injuring 145 subjects and killing 66.

In 2017, NYPD fired 52 shots during 242 incidents, injuring 9 subjects and killing 10.

3. Surplus military equipment has always been given to police forces. Some police forces used to have belt-fed machine guns and hand grenades in their armories.

A libertarian publication, Reason, used to maintain a meticulously-curated list of SWAT raids, with handy-dandy links to purchase their publications on the downward spiral of American society and the trampling of the rights of every citizen at the hands of the militarized police, which they terminated around 2012 when their own graphs showed incidents of police brutality falling off a cliff.

Today, the most police forces have to report every time they strike, tase, or shoot, a subject.

Back in "the good old days" when police "weren't militarized" they just sprayed bullets at people, dumped the corpses at the morgue, and went out for a drink.

One hundred years ago, during the May Day Riots and Red Summer of 1919 the police used the actual, literal, military (including WWI tanks) to kill protestors (mainly socialists and African Americans).

When were the police (and the overall response to civil unrest by authorities) LESS militarized than they are today?

I get the sense you two are talking about seperate things. That is, he is referring to the presence of military equipment and training while you are talking about the breadth of the discretion police have to use violence. It makes me wonder at differences in their impact.

You’re right - that said thinking about both of these aspects and their contributions is interesting. I appreciate you bringing up the distinction.

I agree with you in terms of overall violence. It’s improved mightily and generally I’d say corruption levels are not expected to be high.

I might disagree in terms of usage of heavy equipment, body armor, and prevalence of swat team raids (as a percentage) over older incidents. Beat cops often look like they’re ready for battle. I understand why but it’s not necessarily neighborhood policing, shaking hands, etc.

Tax protestors? The Whiskey Rebellion wasn't picketing with signs.

It's important to convince people that vice is virtue and virtue is vice.

For instance, prisons house people who broke the law and were convicted by their peers...but let's pretend prisoners are all somehow virtuous and blame the prisons. If only good law abiding people weren't so damn bad, they'd realize that prisons aren't a great place to be for prisoners.

Since we are in the process of flipping vice and virtue, let's also make freedom of speech unpopular. Once we do that, let's start by fining people $250K for using legal terms, like illegal immigrant to describe people that have entered the country illegally...because feelings.

https://abc7ny.com/using-term-illegal-alien-in-nyc-could-res...

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