The videos below come secondary to the facts and figures that have been researched and will utterly astound those that deny that the United States of America has rapidly turned their police forces from “protect and serve” to an “above the law,” military police state.
Business Insider Australia provides the numbers, the cold, hard proof that the US government, via Department of Homeland Security, has deliberately and systematically given monetary incentive to local and state police departments across America to turn them into military police states.
First the “then and now” data:
Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year.The first video shown directly below was put together by ScariestMovieEver111, showing what police used to be, compared to what they are now and fair warning, the images, the beatings, the abuse, are graphic and very disturbing to watch, but it is important to see in order to understand what the US has become.
Civil Libertarian Radley Balko, author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” provides more data from his research, which found over 50 examples of innocent people who have died as a result of botched SWAT raids.
Two examples from the article shown below:
Officers can get jumpy and shoot unnecessarily, or accidentally. In 2011 Eurie Stamps, the stepfather of a suspected drug-dealer but himself suspected of no crimes, was killed while lying face-down on the floor when a SWAT-team officer reportedly tripped, causing his gun to discharge.Householders, on hearing the door being smashed down, sometimes reach for their own guns. In 2006 Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman in Atlanta, mistook the police for robbers and fired a shot from an old pistol. Police shot her five times, killing her. After the shooting they planted marijuana in her home. It later emerged that they had falsified the information used to obtain their no-knock warrant.
Between 2002 and 2011 the Department of Homeland Security disbursed $US35 billion in grants to state and local police. Also, the Pentagon offers surplus military kit to police departments.
The concluding paragraph over at Business Insider Australia pretty much says it all:
No one wants to eliminate SWAT teams. Imminent threats to human life require a swift, forceful response. That, say critics, is what SWAT teams should be used for: not for serving warrants on people suspected of nonviolent crimes, breaking up poker games or seeing that the Pumpkin Festival doesn’t get out of hand.There is no doubt that there are police officers that are disgusted and astounded at what their fellow cops do, have done and continue to do. Good cops that watch in horror the nightly, weekly and monthly examples of those hired to protect and serve treating the citizens they are meant to protect as if they were enemy soldiers in a war, to be beaten and killed.
The high profile actions of the abusive, murdering police create an atmosphere where the officers that are trying to protect and serve and do their jobs with honor, are now in more danger than ever because those horrid examples shown in the videos above.
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