Roast police militarization.

The long standing ghost of the Patriot Act, the War on Drugs and the new arm of the state. Long gone are the days when the FBI would kick down your door and blast you while you were asleep and then claim you were “armed” after pumping you with more lead than Roman waterworks. Now it’s the local SWAT team sent to your house doorkicking with nothing but a suggestion you might be “““at risk”““ from some twerp sending in an anonymous tip because you kicked his ass in Call of Duty: Warzones. If you are some verified twitter user lapping at the legs of modern journalists who spin lies about how guns aren’t the answer and you can trust the cops, remember shit like Ferguson. And yes I can hear you typing out a 50 page reply explaining to me in-depth how Michael Brown’s death was justified to save the soul of a cop who looks like a thumb with the nail removed, and I honestly don’t care. Because even then, with the town on fire, they did not need MRAP’s and plate carriers.

Militarizing police can be traced all the way to the 1930′s with the rise of violence from the Prohibition and Great Depression, with heavily armed gangsters outpacing cops. The Thompson and sawn off shotgun versus the riot gun and pipsqueak .38′s. But what takes the cop from the classic Andy Griffith to the modern MARPAT wearing thugs is the War on Drugs. Yep. Reagan again.

When the War on Drugs started in the early 80′s, the first bit of legislation signed in by Reagan was the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Agencies Act in 1981. The act allowed the US Military to assist LE with certain incidents, and more importantly allow LE to use bases and military equipment. It wasn’t anything new by this point, given the riots of the 1960′s usually involved the NG in some capacity. This was bolstered in 1990 by the 1033 Program under George HW Bush, allowing the sale of surplus military vehicles and equipment to police forces. And this plus the Patriot Act is the spiral that leads us to what we have now. In 2014, over 8,000 separate police departments have enlisted in the 1033 Program, allowing a transfer of upwards of 5.1 billion in military surplus equipment to police forces. Including MRAP vehicles, camouflage uniforms, rifles, helicopters and so on. And the incidents with these levels of equipment stack up over time. Ferguson. Baltimore. Jose Guerena. The Chicago PD’s “black sites”. And while Obama TECHNICALLY tried to reign in the sale of surplus equipment to police departments, the sales were on a case-by-case basis and that got undone by Trump and Jeff Sessions.

The war on police is a fucking sham by the way. I hope you ThinBlueLine guys realize that the pigs aren’t your friends and never have been your friends and are playing you like banjos.

Militarized cops are a threat to everyone outside of the very rich and privileged. Doesn’t matter who you are or anything about you, so long as there are militarized cops, the political establishment can and will use them to bludgeon any critique against them, and the cops will enforce whatever rules their commissioner gives them. Sugar coat it all you want, they’re a threat more-so than just a cop in his blues, and they must be reigned in. People pull the “there’s no reason you’d need an AR-15 card” a lot for gun owners, but they’ll ALWAYS give a free pass to the cops. Because they think they’re safe behind the walls of plate carrier pigs, even when they’re absolutely not. You’re a useful idiot to them. To subvert that old trope, no cop needs a plate carrier. No cop needs an MRAP. No cop needs bayonets. Cops shouldn’t be militarized, and it is a push against this that we as a society need to make. If the police can use this equipment to brutalize American citizens, I should be able to own an AR-15 to keep them from brutalizing me.