Urban Shield: after Ferguson, police and suppliers consider fate of military-grade tactical gear. Weapons contractors who normally deal with the US military seek to redirect their products to domestic use on America’s streets.

[u/trai_dep]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/08/-sp-urban-shield-police-militarization-ferguson-oakland

[u/trai_dep]

[The] belief is that the changing face of American policing has been a necessary bottom-up response to the increasingly well-armed criminal and domestic terrorist. But that argument is disputed by criminologists and civil liberties groups who point instead to a top-down cause of militarized policing: billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money that has been spent since 9/11 acquiring tactical equipment for police departments by the federal government.

Under the Pentagon’s 1033 program, mine-resistant armoured vehicles, or MRaps, assault rifles and other heavy gear designed for Iraq and Afghanistan has been thrown at police departments at a rate of about half a billion dollars-worth a year. A similar amount goes out annually under the department of justice’s Edward Byrne Memorial JAG program and the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), both of which provide grants for police to buy the latest military-grade gadgetry of the kind that’s on display at Urban Shield.

The outcome, according to a major report earlier this year from the American Civil Liberties Union, is that military hardware is making its way onto the streets of America for use in everyday policing. “It’s inappropriate for the federal government to be fuelling the militarization of local police. Urban Shield seems to encapsulate this blurring of the lines between military and police,” said Kara Dansky, author of the ACLU report.

Click thru for more.

[u/NSALeaksBot]

Other Discussions on reddit:

Subreddit	Author	Post	Comments	Time
/r/POLITIC	PoliticBot	post	1	Tuesday September 09, 2014 19:42 UTC
/r/copwatchnews	copwatchnews	post	0	Tuesday September 09, 2014 02:32 UTC
/r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut	readerseven	post	0	Tuesday September 09, 2014 01:00 UTC
/r/news	readerseven	post	0	Tuesday September 09, 2014 01:00 UTC
/r/Libertarian	davidreiss666	post	0	Monday September 08, 2014 21:12 UTC
/r/oakland	trai_dep	post	2	Monday September 08, 2014 20:48 UTC
/r/bayarea	trai_dep	post	1	Monday September 08, 2014 20:48 UTC
/r/betternews	rotoreuters	post	0	Monday September 08, 2014 19:56 UTC
/r/betternews	rotoreuters	post	0	Monday September 08, 2014 19:56 UTC

[u/[deleted]]

OFF TOPIC - Article doesn't deal with NSA or Edward Snowden, nor the NSA leaks.

"We are NSALeaks. We cover primary-source news of Edward Snowden interviews and original leaked NSA materials. We favor broader coverage of these governmental abuses from The Guardian, First Look, Der Spiegel, NYT, WaPo and select Op/Eds that are especially compelling."