Police or storm troopers: What’s become of U.S. law enforcement?

By David McElroy · November 17, 2011

In Montgomery County, Texas, the sheriff’s department has just bought a remote-controlled drone with money from the federal government. The sheriff is vague about exactly why it’s needed, but if you look at his men posing with it, above, you get the idea that these are people going to war, not protecting and serving everyday people.

The militarization of civilian police forces is a worrisome thing to me. With the change in tactics has come a change in attitude. Although police work could always attract an arrogant element who were interested in “showing who’s boss,” it seems that the culture is getting more arrogant and more aggressive.

Radley Balko wrote what I consider to be the definitive paper about police militarization five years ago when he was at the Cato Institute. “Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America” is still very much worth reading five years later. It’s even more chilling when you realize that the trend has gotten even more serious since then.

Look at the guns and gear of the soldiers — I mean, deputies — in the pictures above. Is this what we want our police to be? Is the police culture today so excited about this sort of “playing soldier” mentality that it doesn’t care as much about the more mundane things that matter most to everyday people?

So what does the sheriff of Montgomery County say his boys’ new toy will be used for? In various articles, he mentioned hostage situations, wildfires, drug investigations and hunting criminals fleeing from police. (Did you ever read “Fahrenheit 451“? Doesn’t that remind you of the Mechanical Hound? If you haven’t read the book, read it. Immediately. Seriously.) It sounds to me as though he’s throwing out everything the manufacturer’s marketing people could think of. Who knows what it will really be used for — other than for deputies to play with, I mean, “train on.”

It’s worth noting that police in nearby Houston were planning to use drones for writing traffic tickets — since the cameras on them are capable of reading tags from afar — until public outcry prompted a new mayor to cancel the project.

A suburb north of Birmingham has some sort of tank that the federal government gave to it. Since it’s not armed, I suppose it’s really just an armored personnel carrier, but it’s been referred to as a tank around the city. So why does a small police department in a sleepy Alabama suburb need an armored personnel carrier? A city official told me that the city had no use for it, but it was “free” — from the feds, of course — so why not take it? It just stays parked except for parades, as far as I can tell. (The picture here is from a similar vehicle used by police in Charleston, S.C.)

The job of actual community policing isn’t easy. I have respect for the officers who do it well and have the right attitudes about who they’re supposed to be serving. I don’t have any respect for this trend in law enforcement to build little armies for sheriffs and police chiefs to play with. It’s a distraction from what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s a ridiculously expensive game they’re playing. And it drives them all in a direction that’s damaging the civil rights of all of us — because if you have these toys, you’re going to find reasons to use them. (Making excuses to raid homes — and blaming the “war on (some) drugs” is the leading excuse.)

Support for police has been sacrosanct among most voters in this country, especially in more conservative areas. It’s time for those people to wake up to what they’re allowing to be build under their noses. It’s time to quit spending massive amounts of our money on toys for police that ultimately don’t make us any safer.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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