How heavily armed are the police?
Many small-town police departments now boast the same weaponry once wielded by U.S. military units in Afghanistan — including tanks with 360-degree rotating turrets, battering rams, and automatic weapons. Those weapons are today deployed against Americans suspected of crimes in their own homes. Every day, Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams connected to local police conduct 124 paramilitary-style raids in the U.S., according to a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union. One of them recently drew national attention when a SWAT team in Atlanta burst into a private home and threw a live flash grenade into a 2-year-old's crib, severely injuring the toddler. Most raids by SWAT teams are conducted against suspected drug dealers, but they've also been deployed against a private poker game; a gay bar in Atlanta; a New Haven, Connecticut, bar suspected of serving minors; and even people suspected of credit card fraud. "Neighborhoods are not war zones," says the ACLU in its report, "and our police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies."
And some interesting dollar figures;
How do police get military equipment?
In recent years, the Department of Homeland Security has provided $35 billion to local police throughout the country to help buy weapons for "the war on terror." The rest can be traced to the Pentagon, which has off-loaded $4.2 billion of surplus armored vehicles, rifles, and equipment to police departments as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down. Cash-strapped police departments obtain these weapons for free; all they have to do is pay for the shipping. SWAT teams have obtained tens of thousands of machine guns, night-vision goggles, silencers, armed helicopters, and armored vehicles. The Utah Highway Patrol, for example, owns a 55,000-pound, mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle, or MRAP, complete with a gunner's turret. "I can drive this thing right through the middle of a gunfight," said Highway Patrol Lt. Alex Lepley.
Are SWAT tactics an overreaction?
In many cases, yes. Of the 124 SWAT raids conducted daily, only 7 percent meet the original LAPD criteria. About 62 percent of the raids are mounted to conduct drug searches — many of them based on tips from unreliable informants. Most are undertaken to investigate nonviolent offenses. In Orlando in 2010, for example, heavily armed SWAT teams raided nine barbershops and arrested 34 people for "barbering without a license." Adrenalin-fueled SWAT teams have often been accused of overexuberance: In 2011, an Arizona paramilitary police unit riding in military vehicles — including a tank driven by special deputy and action movie star Steven Seagal — drove straight into the living room of an unarmed man suspected of staging cockfights. Such "no-knock" operations are now commonplace — often with tragic consequences.
http://theweek.com/article/index/265...mericas-police
This remionds me of reforger (return of forces to Germany), where all the assets needed to fight the Russians is predeployed in Germany. Abrams, Bradleys, mraps, you name it, it's there. All they have to do is fly the crews and troops to Germany and it's on. But in this case it's not there, it's here since the predeployed assets have been carefully smuggled right into our neighborhoods.
So thousands of mraps, billions of rounds, what are they prepping for?
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Originally Posted by 5.56NATO
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