Tuesday, May 6, 2008

How do you like your police officers with machine guns?

This past month on the 24th of April, the New York police department began patrolling the New York City transit system armed with 9mm machine guns, rifles and bomb sniffing dogs. This increased "security" is part of a 50% increase in a homeland security grant, but I beg to differ this makes anyone more secure.

First off, machine guns don't mix well with crowded settings, that is if you're actually trying to protect people, and then you're trusting the judgment of the officer. Do you trust the NYPD to act with caution, when time and again the police are cited for brutality? Look not further back than to the 2006 shooting of Sean Bell, the 23 year old groom to be, who, upon exiting a strip club was shot dead by three undercover police officers who'd been investigating an underground prostitution ring, claiming they thought that Bell had a gun. Bell was unarmed. The officers unloaded fifty rounds. All three officers involved in the shooting were just found not guilty by the way. These type of acts are condoned.

And this is just one example of police brutality. What we're really experiencing here is the formation of a police state, as our rights have already been eroded. We don't need police officers patrolling the streets with submachine guns. In fact, all this will serve to do is further desensitize the public to such types of "precautionary" enforcement. I mean why not militarize the whole of society? I'm sure we can find potential threats anywhere.

What I'm saying is that we're not that far away from a militarized existence, that were the class structures to break down from, I don't know, the collapse of the dollar, I could see this unaccountable government resorting to militarism. I mean, what would stop it?

What's to stop a submachine gun carrying police officer from misidentifying a potential threat? I know what the true threat is.