Get those war toys off our streets!

Or don't bother talking at all.

get to keep it. And use it.

"The federal government also is exploring ways to recall prohibited equipment already distributed."

So maybe.

The President is due to be right across the river from Philly in Camden, NJ, home to Campbell's Soup





and previously home to well-known corps like RCA-Victor -





Let's hope this is the start of de-militarizing the police.

As I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, I watched how Camden really began to decay like so many other cities, while new housing developments continued to be built at a furious pace, cutting through thousands of acres of farmland (particularly in Jersey and thanks to Toll Brothers builders). People eventually fled the cities for the nice new homes and office parks in areas that were surburbanized. The last gasp was Nixon's "benign neglect" of the cities that lead to the crumbling of places like Camden.

Now some 50 - 60 years later, those "suburbs" are "old", and there is actually an in-migration back to the cities as they scrape off the "rust" and find shiny new steel underneath of them.

Yeah, that's exactly why people are reverting to the cities. The cities are being stolen from their current inhabitants, the poor, and gussied up by gentrification and Disneying.

it IS a steal with the gentrification. It is happening in Camden, it is happening here in Philly, it is happening in Detroit.

"They" want the cities back and now all of a sudden, the city inhabitants are being "welcomed" out to the suburbs (after all the red-lining kept certain demographics out over the past half-century) - where they can enjoy the broken septic tanks, dry wells, radon gas, sump pump requirements, and large unmaintained trees that fall on power lines in every storm.

Also I am delighted that the military equipment is going.

to go to the smaller suburban towns like Willingboro and maybe Voorhees, which are probably cheapest compared to some of the other towns all around Camden, which are insane with the property taxes already. I don't think too many have come across the river to Philly although some may have also headed to Wilmington, DE too (depends on how long they want to commute).

Edit to add that here in Philly, many have gone into Delaware County and a few "rim" townships in Montgomery (e.g., Cheltenham Twp, former home to Bibi) & Bucks County (e.g., Bensalem and Bristol).

to deal with it. If our economy does not improve for the workers we are all going to be poor.

They just "move them" somewhere else so they are not "seen".

One of the issues of dealing with jobs was that when they built all the office parks out in the suburbs and moved the jobs from the cities to them, they then declared - "Okay, come out here to work". Yet they provided no public transit to get there. And naturally, many could not afford a car, let alone the gas or insurance for one (where the car insurance here in Philly is obscene, although if you live just across the city line, it drops by about 1/3rd). Now that the office park luster has worn off and the cities are starting to get revamped, those businesses are slowly migrating back again, but the gentrification is driving the lower-wage population away to the now "cheaper" 'burbs and older small towns with cheaper housing. And so it's a perpetual cycle.

Instead of Toll Brothers building tens of thousands of "McMansions", they should have been building "affordable" housing. Philadelphia's famous "row homes" were just that (affordable, working class) back in the '30s and '40s when large-scale home-building projects wre underway to meet the market demand. These communities surrounded places like Taskykake (Nicetown & Pulaskitown) and Bond Bread (Lawncrest) and Schmidt's Brewery (Brewerytown) -all Philadelphia neighborhoods. Similar happened in Camden surrounding Campbell's Soup and RCA. But now the new version of that style house is called a "town home" and the price is literally 10 times what the same used to sell for 30 years ago.

now give me fast track authority.

body armor, night vision stuff, and communications gear esp. for mass causality events.

start reading that economic thread again!

I am against giving any gear. Why do cops need heavy body armor and night vision goggles?

If you want to give someone radios for mass casualty events, give them to fire departments. Real heros that dont feel the need to murder minorities and the poor in a routine basis.

SWAt teams can be called out to take down heavily armed shooters like in the North Hollywood shootout:
(the bad guys had both automatic weapons and body armor)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout

Night vision gives them a advantage in night ops during hostage rescue missions or active shooter calls.

They didn't seem to bother with all that in Waco, TX at the O.K. Corral in the parking lot of a restaurant and Bed, Bath, and Beyond yesterday - http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/local/texas-news/2015/05/17/multiple-deaths-reported-in-waco-restaurant-melee/27498095/



The SWAT teams were "on stand by" and not even near the scene. There were 9 killed and 192 arrested and this confrontation (dubbed a "brawl" versus a "riot&quot had been building for some time.

Yet once you have protesters in urban areas with plenty of people of color, and voila! You get the Full-Court Press treatment with plenty of war materiel - including APVs and flak jackets.

This should be an OP.

I loudly applaud the move by the administration to do this. It is a good first step. Now let's have a discussion about engagement of civilians.

When was the last time there was something like the North Hollywood shoot out? And why was there a ahoot out at all? Wouldnt it have been more prudent to just track there car and arrest them later?

And when was the last time any cops did a "hostage rescue"? Shouldnt that be something you would call the FBI in for? Maybe have a trained negotiator talk them out before uaing a bunchnof military hardware to go in guns blazing?

Sorry, no lwhit need for any local police to have any of this stuff.

i dont see it

I'll be very interested in the task force report too.

Sickos, weapons are not toys!

is in private hands, at this time??? Just asking..... Something is slowly developing in this country...it doesn't 'feel' good at all....

weapons of mass destruction in the hands of local police, many of whom have shown themselves to have no control over their actions regarding the public? Definitely NOT a good idea in any scenario.

Or, at least any new ones. The ones already in their possession get to stay, I take it? It is long past time the cops are demilitarized. They squandered their extra gear by using it to bully people. I can guarantee they won't see it that way, though.

You need it for tear gassing buildings and for stand off from crowds.

said: To the police, civilians are citizens to protect. To the military, we are a population to be subdued. Wars can temporarily override the Constitution. When the Justice Department walks into Congress with requests for money and new laws to fight a war, it is going to get a different response than if it came in with a story about fighting crime.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/555866/obamas-new-rules-police-actually-ban-just-new-piece-equipment--bayonet

Yesterday, President Obama made headlines announcing new rules to limit the federal government's sale of military equipment to local police departments. As The Week's Peter Weber reported, the ban prohibited the Pentagon selling "tracked armored vehicles, weapons or ammunition of .50 caliber or higher, camouflage uniforms, grenade launchers, or bayonets" to police.

Unfortunately, an investigation by The Washington Examiner found that only one of the items on Obama's ban list (the bayonet) is actually affected by the rule change — the rest were already banned, some for more than two decades.

Meanwhile, Obama's rules do not ban the sale of other military equipment, notably mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles — the armored vehicles that became a defining image of police militarization in Ferguson, Missouri — to local police. And though the Obama Administration says it will consider having police departments return some of the equipment they've already received, it's worth noting that some departments have already tried to do this, only to have their returns refused by the Pentagon.

Finally, it is potentially significant that Obama's prohibition targeted the "sale" of military equipment to local police, but past equipment transfers have typically been loans or gifts provided free of charge without a sales transaction.