The general trend within America’s police precincts has been toward greater militarization.
Keene, New Hampshire - A town with a murder count of two since 2009, Keene’s city officials surreptitiously accepted a $285,933 grant from the Department of Defense in 2012 to purchase a Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck, or BearCat. Unlike Keene’s BearCat, Columbia in South Carolina have a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle (MRAP) is valued at $658,000, but was handed off virtually free to the Columbia Police Department and it has a turret that can be armed with a 50-caliber machine gun. It’s also built to withstand any mine blasts it may trigger in the streets of the "Capital of Southern Hospitality.”
The Independent carries a story of the over-militarised police.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/shooting-dead-of-homeless-camper-sparks-outrage-again-albuquerque-police--the-department-who-kill-more-people-than-the-nypd-9226733.html
Since 2010, the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) has been involved in 37 shootings, 23 of them fatal. According to the group ProgressNow, its officers shot more people than the NYPD over the same period did in New York – a city 16 times larger.