Militarization of Police, part 2

If only the "militarization of police" would include instilling the discipline and professionalism that our military has, and our civilian law enforcement agencies so often show that they are lacking.

When soldiers and Marines in combat zones have more restrictive rules of engagement for dealing with armed enemy combatants than police officers in our own cities do for dealing with citizens suspected of criminal acts, there is a problem.

When military members step over the line and do illegal things, we tend to find out about it, because other military members step forward. Remember Abu Ghraib? When those reservists, most of whom were also civilian LEOS (cops and corrections officers) mistreated prisoners, another soldier notified his congressman and the press.

When civilian cops commit felonies - like assaulting a cameraman in a McDonald's, for instance - other civilian cops aid and abet them in that crime by not only refusing to arrest them for the felonies committed right in front of them, but also by helping them to hide their identities. At that point, every cop in that McDonald's needs to be arrested, stripped of their badge, gun, uniform, and pension, and put on trial for felony assault, false imprisonment/unlawful confinement/kidnapping, and other crimes (those who stood and allowed it to happen need to be charged as accomplices/accessories, as well as with criminal negligence, with depraved indifference) - all committed under color of authority, thus increasing the severity of the offenses.

Lessons from Ferguson, MO: Philosphy of Policing

We have seen two different approaches to police work in action in Ferguson, Missouri this week.

The first had the city and county cops playing soldier. They used dogs, tear gas, armored vehicles, and heavily armed officers with their uniforms, names, and badges hidden by mounds of tactical gear to disrupt and try to shut down what was a peaceful, but angry protest. Their actions escalated tensions, and their disruption of the protest event created confusion and chaos which allowed some people to riot and loot, while neither protest organizers or the police could effectively communicate with, or control them.

These same local agencies treated the media as a hostile presence, gassing TV crews and arresting and roughing up reporters.

People in the community - and all over the nation - lost a lot of respect for law enforcement due to the poor choices made by the Ferguson and St. Louis County Police.


Then, a professional police agency was brought in to restore order and rebuild public confidence and trust. With a smart leader, the Missouri State Police entered Ferguson wearing regular police uniforms, with their badges and name tags showing.- no dogs, no tear gas, no gas masks, no tactical gear, no armored vehicles, no "Rambo"s.

These officers mingled with the crowds, marched with the protesters, and told them that they could protest all night, as long as people didn't start burning or looting. The violence stopped as soon as the police started acting as peace officers and stopped provoking the citizens and escalating (if not causing) the tension and violence..


Time and time again, I have seen bad things happen when cops start covering up their badges and name tags. At that point, they become a faceless part of an occupying force, able and willing to break the law with little chance of ever facing the consequences of their actions, instead of police officers who people can deal with as human beings.

Teachers As Babysitters - Do You Really Want To Go There?

Now and again, someone will make the comment that teachers are overpaid, because they are often "just babysitters".

Please pay me babysitter wages to teach.

Babysitters commonly make at least $5 per hour per child.

With a class of 30, that's $150 an hour.

Even leaving out the time I would spend on paperwork (preparing lessons, correcting papers, doing administrative things like writing reports, contacting parents, meeting with social workers, etc.), that's at least five hours a day of directly "babysitting" the kids, making it $750 a day.

Multiply that by the 180 classroom days in a year and you'll be paying a starting teacher $135k per year - without ANY paid vacation.

Then you'll need to add more to cover all those other duties - let's call it four more hours a day at $10 per hour, which gets us to an additional $7,200 per year.

Since we haven't gotten into paid vacation or holidays yet, we need to add two weeks of vacation, and 13 holidays, for a total of 23 extra days, at the rate of $790 a day. That's an additional $18,170 per year.

Math time!

$135,000
+$18,170
+$ 7,200
= $160,370

So, please sign me up for your plan that will pay me a $160k per year starting salary as an in-school "babysitter".

You know that terrible "Common Core Math" thing?

Since you're on the internet, I'm sure you've seen some kind of post, comment, or meme that claims to show you a "Common Core Math" problem.    What you are seeing are actually problems from Everyday Math and other textbooks/curricular sources being touted as "Common Core Math". The CC are a set of standards used to guide the teacher (as well as the student and parents) to teach concepts that are developmentally appropriate for their grade level, and to a lesser extent, to measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

The curriculum is whatever means that a state/district/school/or teacher uses to teach those concepts.

This is analogous to your employer telling you that you and your team must attend meetings in Denver, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Boston, but allowing you to decide whether to take a plane, train, bus, or car. The standard is that you will meet with certain people in each of those cities. The curriculum is how you choose to get there. It is even possible that some team members will be more comfortable using a different means of transport to get between the meetings - just as different students respond to different methods of learning a skill.

While the Common Core standards are not perfect, they are an improvement over the previous standards in some states.   They also align the standards across many states, so that, if you move to a new state, your child won't be a year ahead in some areas, and a year behind in others.  This is why you might be hearing conflicting complaints that the Common Core is "too hard" and at the same time "dumbs things down".

http://www.corestandards.org/read-the-standards/

The Militarization of Policing in America

Some thoughts and sources for further study about the militarization of law enforcement in America. I used to study trends in law enforcement in Criminal Justice and Sociology classes, and for professional development in my prior career. I remember reading a couple of articles in LE professional journals over a decade ago that addressed the changing attitudes in the "younger generation" of police, and how that was causing a divide between LE and the citizenry. Some of the older LE professionals were worried about the changes in equipment, tactics, training, and attitudes they were seeing in the newer additions to the profession.

That problem has continued to grow over the past decade, and now has a name - the militarization of policing. Here's some of what a quick trip to google turned up...  

What is the militarization of law enforcement? Here it is, in a nutshell:

The police have become more militarized, more soldier-like in the last generation or two," explains journalist and author Radley Balko. "It applies to the weapons they are using, the uniforms they wear...to the tactics they use, to what I think is the most pervasive problem which is the mindset that police officers take to the job."

http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/08/0...itarization-of  

Why should military and LE be different?

To cast the roles of the two too closely, those in and out of law enforcement say, is to mistake the mission of each. Soldiers, after all, go to war to destroy, and kill the enemy. The police, who are supposed to maintain the peace, “are the citizens, and the citizens are the police,” according to Chief Walter A. McNeil of Quincy, Fla., the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, citing the words of Sir Robert Peel, the father of modern-day policing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/su...anted=all&_r=0  

Why can't LE have tacticool toys for use against the real badass villains? Because they end up using those toys on... everyone.

In some cases, the rationale for using military weapons and tactics on domestic soil seems obvious: look no further, proponents argue, than the recent hunt for the Tsarnaev brothers after the Boston Marathon bombings. But what’s remarkable is how routine these tactics have become as a means of pursuing nonviolent suspects and low-level investigations, particularly in the war on drugs.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...am-nation.html

 I see why citizens might be concerned, but why should this be a concern to a law enforcement professional?

Although the botched raid of my home and killing of our dogs, Payton and Chase, have received considerable attention in the media, it is important to underscore that this bill is about much more than an isolated, high-profile mistake. It is about a growing and troubling trend where law enforcement agencies are using SWAT teams to perform ordinary police work. Prince George’s County police acknowledges deploying SWAT teams between 400 and 700 a year— that’s twice a day—and other counties in the state have said that they also deploy their special tactical units hundreds of times a year. The hearings on these bills have brought to light numerous botched and ill-advised raids in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Howard, Montgomery, and Prince George’s counties that also have had devastating effects on the lives of innocent people and undermined faith in law enforcement. . . .

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/10/mili...next%E2%80%9D/  

What would you recommend that LE do, if not using SWAT teams for everything? Well, you old timers may remember this concept called "Community Policing", where the LEOs and the citizenry worked together to deter crime...

Community policing, actual officers walking the streets and interacting with civilians, instead of patrolling in cars or rolling-in armored response vehicles, has by far proven the most effective form of law enforcement – budgetary and statistically. The militarization of local police is inherently opposite of strategies that have shown the best results.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bradlock...-local-police/  

What should be the top priorities of any LE professional? What's wrong with "Officer Safety" being the primary focus of police work?

All of these policies have infused too many police agencies with a culture of militarism. Neill Franklin is a former narcotics cop in Maryland, who also oversaw training at the state's police academies in the early 2000s. “I think there are two critical components to policing that cops today have forgotten," he says. "Number one, you’ve signed on to a dangerous job. That means that you’ve agreed to a certain amount of risk. You don’t get to start stepping on others’ rights to minimize that risk you agreed to take on. And number two, your first priority is not to protect yourself, it’s to protect those you’ve sworn to protect. But I don’t know how you get police officers today to value those principles again. The ‘us and everybody else’ sentiment is strong today. It’s very, very difficult to change a culture.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3749272.html

The lie of "compromise" in anti-gun legislation.

It seems that whenever the anti-constitutionalist element wants to create more "gun control", they claim that their plan is a "compromise". What that really boils down to, in most cases, is "We'll let some people keep some guns". The "compromise" is always one sided, and provides no value for law abiding gun owners.

A real compromise would give something back to American citizens in return for taking away our rights. As it is, “gun control” does not reduce crime or improve public safety, and only serves to deny freedoms to the people.

How about this for a compromise – have background checks – “free”, “instant” background checks with no record of why the check is being made – and used for gun transfers, voting, employment eligibility verification, government benefits verification, etc. (because we actually do need to ensure that only law abiding citizens get access to these things). In return for us allowing such intrusions into our freedoms, we would – at a minimum – like to have the ability to buy or sell firearms in any state, and use CCW or other permits from any state in any state. This means that a Utah carry license would be valid in California, New York, Chicago, or Washington D.C..

We would also like for guns and ammunition to be exempt from sales taxes – as such taxes are an infringement in our ability to exercise our rights. To sweeten the deal, maybe we could also have a tax credit for citizens who attend firearms safety training and who can show that they practice firing their firearms a number of times each year.

When we are offered things like this in return for giving up our 2nd, and 4th amendment rights on the background check issue, then – and only then – is there any real compromise on the table.

The perceived divide between LEOs and non LEO gun owners.

There is a perception of a divide between LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers - aka "cops") and non LEO gun owners. This divide is a predictable consequence of gun laws that treat off duty LEOs differently than other citizens. It creates a disconnect between two groups in the gun owning community, breeds suspicion, and exempts LEOs from some of the laws that they enforce.

Once the initial disconnect is there, and people no longer see LEOs as standing beside the people, people give more credence to other reports they hear about LE behaving badly, and the divide grows wider. As the divide grows wider, LEOs tend to care less about what the citizens - now disdainfully referred to as "civilians" - think. And the vicious cycle continues...

The same disconnect between civilian gun owners and military gun owners doesn't exist, because military exemptions tend to only apply while on duty, and using government supplied weapons. There are also exemptions that allow non-Californians who are temporarily stationed here to keep possession of their legal and safe firearms - but these servicemembers are not Californians, don't vote here, and will most likely take those weapons with them when they leave California - so they aren't as important to the state.

While there may be good reasons for off duty and retired LEOs to have national carry rights (which are provided federally under LEOSA), there is no reasonable explanation for why they should be allowed to purchase firearms that the state deems "unsafe" (this actually creates an "officer safety" problem, if the CA handgun roster is legitimate, because now LEOs are using guns that the state claims "endanger" the LEOs), no reason that they should be allowed to personally own firearms that the state bans as "assault weapons" (this again creates "officer safety" issues, as it makes LEOs better targets for burglars who want to acquire "desirable" firearms), and no reason that they should need to have "high capacity" magazine when they are off duty (or even when they are on duty - since the party line is that LEOs are better trained with firearms, so shouldn't need more rounds to subdue a threat).

The distrust and bad feeling that we have seen developing between gun owners and civilian LEOs is working out exactly as planned by the anti-gunners. Civilian LEOs have been thrown enough crumbs that they don't speak out en masse against new gun control laws, and don't get their unions involved in fighting against gun control measures. Before antigunners included such LE exemptions in their bills, many rank and file LEOs would go on record as opposing gun control legislation, because they didn't want to have the right of the people - including themselves -to self defense infringed.

To some people, it seems that by granting LEOs privileges, the antigunners have muted LEO opposition to taking away the rights of the rest of the people.