We don't need the police departments of every city and town to mirror the capabilities of the National Guard and FEMA.
If some rapid-reaction military-grade response capability is needed, it could be provided at a higher level and wielded by an organization that has personnel who are trained and managed to military standards.
------
If you are carrying a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Blackwater ( whatever is current name change is) and Triple Canopy have trained thousands of police members,
from cities big and small, to military standards. ( Paid for by our taxes, of course)
Their training involves "Urban warfare" models
and the police Depts. justify this by saying our military/National Guard members are not available in case of terrorist attacks.
That argument had some truth during the insane invasions and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now that we supposedly have gotten out of those countries,the powers that be are sending our troops into Africa and
Europe ( esp. around Crimea areas).

Most significantly, it is not the problem with military trained police responding to military type incidents that worries me.
It is militarized police responding to citizens protests that is the problem.
The Constitution, what's left of it, says the military are not allowed to be used against American citizens.
Having police be copies of the military...that is legal.
And sure enough, there is the now famous photo in Ferguson Mo. of a policeman, who looks a lot like a German soldier, esp. the helmet,
sitting on one of those monster tanks, pointing a gun ( 50 caliber???) at the protesters.
I can't do photos,here is link to the pic:
http://tinyurl.com/kexhel4
and head on pic:
http://tinyurl.com/n5j2myz

Lots of hammers to be concerned about.

It is not a machine gun, and certainly not .50 caliber. Same with the second photo. Since there is a scope on the weapon, its equipped as sniper rifle, more or less. Every police department of any size has sniper rifles and officers trained to use them. Every scope-mounted deer rifle is pretty much a sniper rifle, and there are those in a good percentage of homes.

It is important to get facts right.

I asked because I have no idea of military guns.....

What does the helmet remind you of?

It's designed to protect the skull from small arms fire. It also looks pretty uncomfortable to wear for very long. I'm sure that guy is also wearing body armor. He's exposed up there, and I suppose if people were firing at him, he'd be more likely to survive, unless another sniper was shooting at him.

Frankly, it's not the gear that bothers me. It's attitudes and strategy. If he's supposed to shoot at people up there, I wonder what people he's supposed to shoot at. That we don't know. As I said, I don't believe that any sniper fired at anyone in Ferguson. So, he was not needed in the circumstances. Might he have been? I don't know. I don't believe any of the people in Ferguson were firing at the police, either. It turned out to be a major overreaction, and that's not surprising.

I'm not involved in law enforcement at all. Not in military stuff, either. So, I have no idea what the orders were that were given to all those cops in Ferguson. I'm not sure what that sniper guy was thinking about or looking for, frankly, but apparently he didn't see anything that required him to use his rifle.

Most people don't know what arms are being used or why that person is wearing the gear he is wearing. I don't think it was necessary at all, but it wasn't used, thank goodness.

Lots of tear gas, some rubber bullets, and plenty of excessive force was used in Ferguson, though. I'm more interested in that than in that guy sitting on top of that SWAT wagon.

the local police are the first responders and often the only responders. The National Guard and FEMA are not first responders in any way. Calling either up is a matter of days, not minutes or hours. That's the reason this stuff is being given to local law enforcement agencies who are now expected to deal with such situations as first responders.

Look at the Columbine or UVA attacks. There was only local police to respond. Multi-agency, but civilian police. It's not a normal situation, of course, but a response is required. Again, I'm not saying that I approve of this. I'm providing the scenarios that are used as justification for equipping local police agencies this way.

We've had several mass shooting incidents in the past few years. One of the difficulties is in getting law enforcement into the situation with some degree of safeness.

But it is local police who respond to such incidents. They are the only ones available for an immediate response.

and NOT use them and not be very likely to USE them unnecessarily, abusively or even criminally when faced with even the most casual of public annoyances (that they will surely label "threats&quot ...

then that person should surely expect some one to profit from that display of naivete'.




As to that hypothetical situation of driving the sucker up in a hostage situation or mass shooting--how likely does anyone think it would be that 1. the vehicle would be primed and ready to go when needed? 2. the vehicle would be proximal enough to the setting so as to be deployed quickly to the site when needed? 3. the trained staff to handle the vehicle will be available and ready to go in the very few minutes available to make this a reasonable response?

I'd say exceedingly unlikely...

the scene. It will be the same group of officers. The vehicles will be in the same place as other SWAT vehicles.

1. The vehicle will be full of fuel and the starting battery will be fully charged. Necessary equipment will be on board all the time. That's it. As soon as the response team is there, they leave for the scene.

2. The vehicle will be in the same place other emergency response vehicles are. SWAT vehicles, etc. Deploying it to the scene will be a local drive.

3.As for driving the vehicle, I've never been in one, but give me 60 seconds and I'll have it on the road, headed where it's supposed to go. It is a truck. It uses the same controls as a truck. You get in it, start the engine, put the transmission in gear and press on the accelerator. Then you drive it, just like you do any wheeled vehicle.

being used to justify it, and providing some factual information. I don't like the militarization of our civilian law enforcement one bit. There is a difference in providing information and endorsing something.

I can, however, see some possible legitimate uses for this equipment. Is it worth adding this equipment to local LEO? I can't really say. Most of it will be parked and used only for training and in some emergency situation or another. Most local law enforcement won't have any reason to use it at all. There may be occasions when it is useful

I'm offering information. If that information is incorrect, please let me know.

to maintain. Given those costs and stretched budgets to think municipalities will make the kind of 24/7 upkeep of these behemoths a priority is just naive' beyond belief.

Assuming that they were delivered in good order, and if they're not used much, there won't be much maintenance needed. Keep the batteries charged, keep the fuel tanks full, and start them up from time to time and drive them around the yard, and they'll be ready to go if needed.

If they're used a lot in adverse conditions, as they are on the field of battle, yes, they require a lot of maintenance and that maintenance is costly. Kept in reserve, though, and maintenance costs are not that high, frankly. Unused, they don't wear out. Keeping them operational in that situation is pretty easy.

these things than are needed. We're not fighting a ground war in Iraq any longer, and we're winding down our combat presence in Afghanistan. Apparently, we won't be using these vehicles in dealing with ISIS, either.

We brought a bunch of them back, and we have a bunch of brand new ones that are not needed. So, we're giving them away to local law enforcement agencies. The National Guard got some, too, along with the FBI, the US Marshall's service, the Treasury department and other federal agencies. They're surplus to the military's needs, but they've already been paid for.

So, assuming that the ones being delivered to these agencies are in good order, maintenance isn't going to be a big issue, as long as they're only used in situations that require them. If they're used and break down, my guess is that they won't be repaired anyhow by those local agencies.

An MRAP isn't much use for anything other than the operations it was designed for. So, the government is handing them out. It's pretty much that simple, really. Some law enforcement agencies want them. Some don't. Some want them, but won't ever have a use for them. It's all more for show than anything else. Guys like gear, it seems, and guys run law enforcement.

The city of Saint Paul has a couple of them, I know. So far they've only been seen on Law Enforcement Day and similar things. There was one at the State Fair on display, too. Beyond that, they're parked at the Police Department's vehicle yard. You can see them if you drive by, but that's probably the only time you will. Now, the SPPD and Ramsey County Sheriff's department also got a couple of helicopters from this give-away program. Those get used frequently to track down criminals fleeing felony scenes. I've seen them a few times overhead. Those require some very, very expensive maintenance, but they're used, so I suppose it's worth it. A big helicopter is a very, very expensive thing to purchase. They got theirs for nothing. A good bargain, I suppose.

The Army (of which the Guard is a component) doesn't want to pay for upkeep on them and is trying to draw down it's tables of equipment.

To mobilize a national guard unit, the Governor of the state must issue an order. Then, guard personnel are notified and ordered to assemble at the nearest NG armory. Only after that can they deploy. The process generally takes at least 48 hours before NG teams are on location.

If there are gunmen outside of a school or business, 48 hours is not an adequate response. As for local police, this equipment will be ready to go at any time. As with the SWAT team, it's a matter of a very short time before that team is ready to deploy, typically an hour or two. Regular officers with special SWAT training are on duty all the time. They just have to get to the SWAT area, gear up and they're on their way.

If your children or family members are in such a situation, I guarantee you will not want to wait for the National Guard to show up. You will want a fast and capable response and, if one doesn't show up, you'll be asking why. At every one of these incidents, there are already complaints about the response time.

doing storm evacuations. Neshama (the awesome disaster response volunteer group from Minnesota) got here a lot quicker than the NG.
Considering they had to load some 18 wheelers and mobilize hundred of volunteers and coordinate local lodgings for them, maybe we need to take a few lessons from them?
And yeah, cut our damned military budget.

organization. Normally, there aren't NG troops standing by, ready to go. Each member must be notified of being called up and given time to report to the armory. It's not like an army base. All of the personnel have jobs and families and are not on active duty. That's why it takes a couple of days to field an NG unit in an emergency. There's no real way to speed that up.

Local police departments, on the other hand, have on-duty personnel available at all time. There's a lot of cross-training. A regular patrol office does normal duty most of the time, but has SWAT training, or MRAP training. When needed, they are already on the job and only have to get to the operations headquarters, put on whatever gear is needed, climb into the SWAT truck or MRAP and they're on their way to the incident. There is simply no other rapid response agency, other than fire departments, which are not law enforcement and are not armed.

That's the logic in positioning these vehicles within local law enforcement. There will be training. Cross-training for regular LE personnel. When a specially-trained team is needed, they'll probably already be on shift and will simply change their function to meet that need. That's how SWAT works now. Yes, it will take an hour or so to assemble and deploy, but that's about it.

There probably is a role for this equipment in many urban environments. Most of the time, the equipment will be parked and maintained in operating condition. There will be training, and if the stuff is needed, it will be ready to go. It may well be abused in some jurisdictions, but that doesn't mean it won't be used appropriately in most jurisdictions.

Hell, it could save your life someday. Who knows?

if they got them cheap enough as take apart vehicles in car shop class.

tools to work on these vehicles. In the first place, everything is larger in scale than passenger vehicles. In the second place, they have large diesel engines, which require a different set of tools. Finally, very few high schools deal with diesel or truck maintenance.

Are there any examples of these things being misused? I'm trying to think of a way they could be misused, maybe if they drove it through a crowd of protestors or something I guess.

There's a guy with a sniper rifle on the roof of it, and lots of other guys in riot gear standing next to it. But it looks like the vehicle is parked, with nobody in the driver's seat. I suppose some of the people there arrived in it. It's intimidating, maybe, but it's not being used as anything but a platform for that guy on its roof. I don't think he ever fired a shot, anyhow. It looks like all of the personnel there are standing in an "at ease" position, too. It was a bigger response than was needed, it appears to me.

Sure, it's parked. Maybe some people arrived in it (why?). And so on. That's all completely beside the point.

The point is that it was deployed to intimidate and cow the protestors. Others may disagree but I find this sort of behavior on the part of public officials to be reprehensible. Vile. Antithetical to a free Democracy. There need not be any other use of these vehicles and other donated military equipment to make their existence in the hands of civilian governmental agencies a perversion of our freedom.

I'm not endorsing the use of MRAPs by cops. I'm providing the arguments made for them. Information.

it is a civilian Bearcat armored vehicle use for SWAT purposes. The junk on top is a hydraulic lift that is actually a ladder of sorts and it helps do do 2nd/3rd story entries.

Used for raids, casualty evacuation, entry into 2nd story floors, inserting officers while under fire etc...

Or as a roadblock like these guys are using it. My theory is they figure to put this there as the molotovs wont burn it up and bricks wont trash it like they would a patrol car or other unprotected vehicle. Also provided elevated platform for the sniper to observe the crowd. Enables much easier identification of people with weapons, crowd agitators and people being assaulted within the crowd.

Most snipers do not ever shoot anyone in their entire career. Their primary job is observation and reporting current activity / intelligence to the incident commander.

I was on a SWAT team years ago and we didn't have these or much of any of the equipment they have now. Would have been nice as we got shot at quite a bit trying to get up to a barricaded suspects location. We actually had an old armored car (like the kind they pick up cash from banks in) but it was a nightmare to keep running so it wasn't used much.

An MRAP is nothing special- in fact it would be harder to deploy from than a Bearcat would be due to height.

MRAPs are nt military assault vehicles, Bradley's are. MRAPs primary mission is as a vehicle to move troops with a v-shaped, mine -resistant hull. The old humvee was evaporating in IED blasts and the casualty levels from that were unacceptable....as if any are acceptable, but the military does use casualty rates or anticipated casualties as a measure of success and planning purposes. In many cases they will say..."oh only anticipated 10% casualties?? Perfect, execute the mission."

Ferguson, recently. That's not their designed function, and they only increase the sense that the police is militarized. That is not a good use for these vehicles, frankly. They are very limited in their usefulness, and the three scenarios I mentioned are about the only ones where it would make sense to use them.

They are designed for one primary function, and that is to get armed personnel into situations where there is live fire going on. The armor protects the personnel from small arms fire, so the vehicle can position itself and the personnel where they will be most useful. In a live fire incident, when normal police vehicles show up, they cannot simply drive past the shooters' positions and establish a safe place for personnel. An MRAP can do just that. It can also drive up and push vehicles out of the way, or other debris or barriers. It can go over uneven terrain, push down walls of light construction, and do much more. It can go through standing water, flooded streets, and many other places, all the while protecting those inside from small arms fire and even light IEDs.

For that matter, it can drive up and over a barricaded position where hostile fire is coming from, as long as small arms are the only weapons in use. These vehicles are very large, very heavy, very powerful, and very well armored. Against small arms fire, they provide almost 100% safety for the personnel inside of an MRAP.

You can find videos of MRAPs in operation on YouTube. Pretty impressive capabilities.

The earliest vessels to sail on the waters were used for fishing, or trade. Then they were used to transport people, then armies. If you are transporting soldiers, why not fight other ships supporting the enemy? If you have it, use it.

The Bow was developed not to hunt men, but to hunt animals that were otherwise too fleet of foot to catch. The Bow gave the hunter the advantage. The bow allowed the hunter to bring down a creature too large, or too fast to catch otherwise. Then the bow was used against other humans. If you have it, use it.

The same application of this flawed logic has been used on every invention. Atomic power was discovered. Then atomic power was turned into a weapon. Any hesitation to use this horrific weapon was met with the same application of the flawed logic. If they had one, they would use it on us. We used incendiary bombs on Dresden, because we had them, and we could use them. We firebombed an entire city scientifically to make sure that we wiped out as many people, and structures, as possible. First we targeted the water works. This destroyed the ability of firefighters to stop the spread of the blazes. Then we dropped the incendiary bombs in a specific pattern, to get the fires going the way we wanted. The reports from that city, and Tokyo which also suffered the application of our science, are horrific, heartbreaking, and show the inhumanity of this applied science. But we had it, and we intended to use it.

The MRAP is not a good vehicle to use in a natural disaster. Yes it has high ground clearance, but so do many other vehicles that are far better suited for assisting people. Take a look at one of these. While the MRAP may be able to ford a swollen river, for a bit. The ARGO can swim across the river, and the depth doesn't matter, only the speed. That can be managed with ropes and other techniques. The ARGO floats, and can carry a thousand pounds of supplies. It can carry a stretcher, and it can be moved into the area by air. In other words, a Helicopter can put one down where you need it, instead of hoping to be able to drive it there. The ARGO is much cheaper to buy, cheaper to operate, and has all terrain capability that the MRAP pretends to possess.

As a people, we have become fascinated with technology. We pat each other on the back when our scientists create a new way to do something they shouldn't be doing in the first place. From tapping fiber optic cables to listening to cell phone conversations from orbit. We achieve the impossible on a daily basis. If we have it, we use it.

We limit the ability of the public to own fully automatic weapons. We have a law enforcement agency that has as it's primary purpose, the regulation of those items. The BATFE. But we waive those regulations for police, the cops can have all the full auto they want, and they use it, because they have it.

The problem is that we stopped asking why. The Police use rifles to raid homes. Why? Aren't rifles less maneuverable in tight confines like the average home than a pistol? The answer is yes, a pistol gives you faster movement from area to area. But we never ask why, and the reason is obvious. The Military developed tactics for use in such situations. The Military trained the police departments on these tactics. Military Operations in Urban Terrain uses tactics developed for the Military, which does not issue pistols to every soldier, and those tactics are the best they can come up with for military operations in urban terrain with the available equipment, rifles.

The Police saw this, and decided that they had to have rifles to execute these tactics. So they came up with SWAT which used Military Tactics and we were told at the time, in only the most extreme of circumstances. The one in a million event. The FBI wanted a team, so they got HRT. Now, every agency in the world wants a SWAT team, and they come up with reasons to get them. Once they have them, they use them. The Department of Agriculture has a SWAT team. The Department of Education has a SWAT team. The IRS has a SWAT team.

Now SWAT isn't enough. The Military tactics have evolved to include the MRAP and other armored vehicles. Well. The Police training shows that they need this stuff, because the Military is still training the cops. So the book of tactics says they need an MRAP, and we give them to the Police. Then we are surprised when they once again apply the same old standard logic lie to the tools they've just been given. If you have it, use it.

The MRAP is designed to stop a .50 Caliber BMG round. It's designed to protect soldiers from IED's on a battlefield. How many IED's have the cops run across at our neighborhood schools? It will stop a LAW rocket. Other than Dirty Harry movies, how many cops have been shot at with a rocket launcher? Grenade Launchers?

It's more than an MRAP. It's the entire military mindset of our law enforcement. It's the mindset that prepares our cops to go ultra violent in moments. it's the mindset that trains the cops to use the routine lies to use the maximum use of force. Physical Force was once considered the last resort. Now, it's the first action taken. They have it, they will use it.

Take away the military crap. Take away the MRAP's, the Grenade Launchers, the automatic rifles. Take away the Night Vision Goggles. The black uniforms, and the assault vests. Put cameras on the cops. Because if we give them the other crap, they will use it.

I wonder when the cops will swear they need an armed drone? This way they could safely apply the military tactics and remove dangerous criminals without any risk to themselves. Sound silly? So did the idea of giving the cops armored trucks that were set up with turrets for automatic weapons on the roofs and with ports in the side so the people inside can fire out at the enemy.

I'm presenting the reasons that are given for making this equipment available, not advocating that.

Will they be misused? I imagine they will, by some agencies, but not by others. That's a local matter, really.

The likelihood that they will be needed is small, overall, at least under current conditions. So, are they needed? I'd say that they aren't, generally. It's not my call though, and the reasons I'm giving here are the reasons that are being used to justify their deployment. I thought I made that clear enough.

a military threat that needs to be suppressed by a militarized police force? Are you sure you don't know?

I know that there are right wing militia types who are enemies. I know that there are mass shooters who are enemies. You are not, and I am not. But yes, there are dangerous enemies around us. If you don't know that, you have not been paying attention. Sorry.

Who would have thought?