"Hence the need for cops who are really soldiers."

[phantom power]

The warrior cop. The writer of this WSJ piece, Radley Balko, has strong Cato ties, so caveat lector. Still, he raises good points. Social pressures have applied a strong blur to the line between the beat cop and the soldier.

The number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units has grown accordingly. In the 1970s, there were just a few hundred a year; by the early 1980s, there were some 3,000 a year. In 2005 (the last year for which Dr. Kraska collected data), there were approximately 50,000 raids. Some federal agencies also now have their own SWAT teams, including NASA and the Department of the Interior.

Are we more violent than we were then? No. So then -- why the rising numbers?

The militarization of our police may have subterranean links to this Facebook (sorry!) offering by Robert Reich...

Why is the nation more bitterly divided today than it's been in eighty years? Why is there more anger and vituperation than even during Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, the Vietnam war, the Watergate scandal? Political scientists say the gap between the median Republican voter and the median Democrat is wider today on a whole host of issues than it's been since the 1920s. And those on the regressive Republican right might as well be on a different planet.

But I think the deeper reality has economic roots. For more than three decades now, the middle class has been losing ground. The median wage of male workers is now lower than it was in 1980, adjusted for inflation. And all the mechanisms we have used to cope with this descent -- young mothers streaming into paid work in the late 1970s and 1980s, everyone working longer hours in the 1990s, and then borrowing against rising home values until 2007 -- are now exhausted. Wages are still dropping -- the median is now 4 percent below what it was at the start of the so-called recovery. And upward mobility has become a cruel joke.

The right-wing media infrastructure exists to make sure that the proles blame everything and everybody other than those who deserve the blame -- the Wall Street ueber-capitalists and the militant anti-Keynesians.

Eventually, though, the pressures may build to the point of explosion. Hence the need for cops who are really soldiers.

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2013/08/endgame-and-more.html

[ewagner]

1. Over the top?

or simply recognition of a trend?

I'm trying to be rational about this but I'll have to say that the "observation of the facts" matches the thesis.

[phantom power]

3. I'm actually dubious that conservatives said "let's swat-ify our police in case...

we need to put down a revolution."

However, I do think that a militarized police force might end up being used that way, now that we have one.

[ewagner]

4. "...now that we have one."

Exactly.

When have you ever seen a tool/weapon developed that simply sat on the shelf?

I don't know what movie it was, but there was a line in it used by a General that went something like, "An un-used weapon is a use-less weapon!"

I think this is what bothers me, that and complaints I am getting from local citizens about the increased militancy of our local cops....(I'm a local-yokel elected official)

[Fumesucker]

2. Of course NASA has a SWAT team

What if terrorists hijack the ISS?

Or even worse, Occupy ISS.