Hightower: Officer Friendly Is the Policeman of the Past -- Now They Look Like Navy Seals

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/hightower-officer-friendly-policeman-past-now-they-look-navy-seals

Let's check our weaponry: 93,000 machine guns -- check! -- 533 planes and helicopters -- check! 180,000 magazine cartridges -- check! 44,000 night-vision goggles -- check! 432 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles -- check! OK, let's roll!

Only, this is not the U.S. military getting ready to head into battle in a foreign land. It's our local police departments patrolling our cities, towns and college campuses. Remember "Officer Friendly," the beat cops who were known as "peace officers" and were counted on to uphold our domestic laws, detect and investigate crimes, and be a helpful, non-threatening presence in our communities? The friendlies have largely been transformed into militarized forces, literally armed with and garbed in war gear and indoctrinated in military psychology, rather than the ethic of community policing.

From 1776 forward, Americans have wisely opposed having soldiers do police work on our soil, but in recent years, Pentagon chiefs have teamed up with police chiefs to circumvent that prohibition. How? Simply by militarizing police departments.

Twenty years ago, Congress created the military transfer program, providing federal grants so chiefs of police and sheriffs could buy surplus firepower from the Pentagon. Through those grants, in a stunningly short time, our local police forces have become high-octane, macho-military units, possessing a large armory of Pentagon freebies ranging from 30-ton tanks to rifle silencers. For ordinary police work, they've gone from peacekeeping beats to way over-the-top SWAT team aggression that's unleashed on the citizenry tens of thousands of times a year. For example, a gung-ho Florida SWAT team raided area barbershops in 2010 to stop the horror of "barbering without a license." And masked police in Louisiana launched a military raid on a nightclub in order to perform a liquor-law inspection. These were barbers and bartenders, not al-Qaeda or the Taliban.