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Comment by runawaybottle | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see a problem with cops getting better equipment. I see a problem with cops being untrained to leverage the equipment and understanding which situations call for it.

No knock warrants in swat gear to handle local criminals might be a no no.

Can someone please link the bank robbery where some dude showed up in a bullet proof vest and. Ak47, where the cops literally lacked the equipment to handle the perp?

https://youtu.be/I_1IvZFwj0M

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Under what circumstances would a police department require an armored personnel carrier? Especially in a country that's spanning half a continent, with allies on both sides. And a potentially-soon-to-be has-been world superpower? Even if it turns out to be necessary or practical, it certainly won't be the solution to the problem that necessitates having an APC.

A situation where 10 white nationalist militia members kidnap the mayor with stock bumped ar-15s.

Or when someone blows the window out of a Casino hotel and lays fire to a festival.

Or when the kids go nuts and shoot up the school.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but America has a unique mass shooting issue.

Running alongside an APC would at least give you cover in the Vegas shooting. I guess my point is, you cannot demilitarize one side one when the other side already militarized, that ship has sailed in America.

Edit: I’m getting downvoted on this, but I’d like to hear some counter points for these exact scenarios that happened (or almost happened) in the last 4 years.

99.9% of policing is non-violent, simple things. Just because you can come up with a few exceptions doesn't prove most cops need such things: It more proves that cops might need a special force that can come in if things get bad.

I'm not convinced any situation you bring up would have been helped by the immediate availability of gear. Some of these could be better with better training: Some things could be somewhat prevented if we did things like make sure there was mental and physical health care, a safety net so folks didn't get so far down, and had reasonable gun laws.

oh, and not have cops posing as oppressors with military equipment. We are the picture of oppression right now, and if it were happening in one of "America's Enemies", we'd bemoan them for not being free enough or use it as the ills of socialism or communism.

The gear is not for 99% of situations. Neither are guns. But we give every single one of them a gun, don’t we?

You get the gear so you can handle all possible scenarios. That isn’t the issue. The issue is something else. We can debate the real issue or muddle the pool and avert it.

“Dressing up as oppressors” - you know, narrative building has no bounds. This is a new one. That’s all subjective, I don’t see it as oppression theater as you do.

You don't actually have to have all police have all the things. You just need some specially trained forces to have training for the 1% of situations.

I don't think cops should carry guns on their person as a rule, either: I think they should stay locked in their cars, with paperwork to be filled out every time they unlock that lock. I think cops should be respectful of the public when possible, even if the public isn't. We expect this out of retail employees, after all. There should be thought behind every single time a cop takes out a gun, before they grab it.

I've seen MRAPs/APCs deployed a few times, it's always during a protest, blockade, or occupation under attack. They may use them to drive over a barricade or into a crowd to force them to disperse, or just idle and crawl behind a line of cops with a sniper in the roof turret.

It’s to disperse the crowd. I went to inner city public school where when fights broke out, it became a riot. The cops would show up with horses because it always made the crowds disperse. Yeah, horses, in the middle of Queens.

Sometimes they are used to breach walls of buildings to provide alternative entry points. They also are useful for providing bulletproof cover when a SWAT breaching/entry team is approach a building.

Though a department doesn't need many. And, they could be shared within a county or metro area rather than every department having their own.

It's not about training. A chainsaw isn't "better" equipment for surgeons. A tank isn't "better" equipment for police.

The problem with "better equipment" is it needs to continuously be justified. That means it needs to be used.

Armored and heavily equipped cops are not what’s causing police brutality by and large. It’s your run of the mill guy with a simple handgun racially profiling and using deceptive tactics to drum up charges. We can keep our focus exactly where the issue is (for once we identified it exactly), or we can emotionally extrapolate it into the larger narrative.

Armored cops are a much bigger deal in China where the CCP uses them in places like Hong Kong to enact quasi martial law.

> Armored and heavily equipped cops are not what’s causing police brutality by and large.

I agree with this, but wonder if it's more a law of averages than anything. The guy driving the local PD tank does not have nearly as many interactions as the beat cop or the traffic cop.

The classic example here is Arlo Guthrie's song/story "Alice's Restaurant". For those who haven't heard it, the protagonists are guilty of littering, and the local cops wind up using dogs, tire-track analysis, and even aerial photography to make their case. As the song puts it, "They was usin' up all kinds of cop equipment that they had hangin' around the police officer station".

Recommended if you haven't heard it, or even if you haven't heard it for a while.

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