Database: How many grenade launchers did Michigan police departments receive?

[Octafish]

Database: How many grenade launchers did Michigan police departments receive?

By Detroit Free Press staff, Aug. 17, 2014

More than $43 million worth of property has been transferred to law enforcement in Michigan from January 2006 through April 23 of this year. Nationally, more than $4.3 billion worth of property has been transferred to law enforcement since the program’s inception in fiscal year 1997, according to Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which oversees the Law Enforcement Support Office (or 1033) program out of its office in Battle Creek. More than 8,000 agencies participate nationwide.

SNIP...

A Free Press review of items transferred from the military since 2006 shows Michigan law enforcement agencies have received 17 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles or MRAPs, built to counter roadside bombs; 1,795 M16 rifles (5.56mm), the U.S. military’s combat weapon of choice; 696 M14 rifles (7.62 mm); 530 bayonet and scabbards; 165 utility trucks; 32 12-gauge, riot-type shotguns; nine grenade launchers; and three observation helicopters.

SOURCE: http://www.freep.com/interactive/article/20140817/NEWS06/140726001/database-militarization-police-michigan

Gee. How nice. How much money did your county receive to buy nice things? Nice pull-down menu there which breaks down amount of Pentagon money coming in, by state and county.

[NickB79]

1. Likely what they're lobbing all that tear gas with

40mm tear gas cartridges fit and function in those grenade launchers.

[Octafish]

4. Thank you! Excellent feature.

A versatile arm.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

2. At this point I'm beginning to wonder if they don't have land mines, flame throwers, bazookas,

mortars, artillery, napalm, C-4 plastic explosive, bunker buster MOAB bombs, and are negotiating for the purchase of small tactical nuclear weapons.

[Octafish]

5. Yes, except the tactical nuke.

Only Facebook friends of Dick Cheney who are members of Carlyle Group are eligible for that one:



What the Top 1-Percent Has Done For Us

[politicat]

3. Gah. Went looking at Colorado acquisitions.

Honestly, there's a lot of stuff I don't mind the cops having -- cold weather gear, first aid kits, more microscopes for the forensics labs. (The prices can be outrageous, but that's for another day.)

This, however:

CO ARAPAHOE MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE 1 Each $412,000.00 11/6/2013
CO FREMONT MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE 1 Each $733,000.00 2/13/2014
CO LA PLATA MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE 1 Each $658,000.00 9/18/2013
CO PUEBLO MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE 1 Each $733,000.00 2/13/2014
CO WELD MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE 1 Each $412,000.00 11/7/2013
CO WELD MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE 1 Each $733,000.00 2/13/2014
CO YUMA MINE RESISTANT VEHICLE 1 Each $658,000.00 10/24/2013

$4M to "defend" or intimidate under 1 million people. This makes absolutely no sense.

Arapahoe county: suburban Denver-Metro. Because ya know, we don't get enough potholes as it is. It's a big county, from Littleton through Aurora out to the plains. The only possible reason I can see to have an armored vehicle is because that area does include DIA, and if there ever should be a problem there, having an armored vehicle might be useful, but for the most part, no point. (And because they do have a bit of a history with psychotic upper middle class white boys and guns... but are those the ones they're stop n frisking? Naw, not so much.)

La Plata: Middle of nowhere SW of the state. Borders on the Navajo Nation. Obviously protecting against New Mexico and Utah invasion forces. Durango area. Population: 51,000. Also might be useful against resurrected dinosaurs from the fossil beds. Roads down there are shot anyway, so why not make them worse? If not Res land, then borders on it. Yeah, I see a problem with this, too.

Pueblo: used to be a steel town. Now, economically, it's shaky, but returning. Also, pancake flat. Population: 159,000 No known use of mines ever, except the ones from which coal is extracted.

Weld: More cattle than people. (750K to 255K.) Who, lacking thumbs, are unlikely to ever build mines. Where most of the fracking happens. Not exactly a hotbed of social unrest, either, except for the secessionists, who got trounced in their secessionist election. Does defend against the Empire of Wyoming. And they got TWO of them. Maybe they want Cliven Bundy?

Yuma: The OTHER fracking county with more cattle than people. Up on the Nebraska border, so obviously needed to keep the six people in that corner of the state from invading. Population: 10,000

Edited because I forgot Fremont County: This one makes a little sense. Fremont County is in the middle of the state, and is home to all the high security prisons, including the federal Supermax. 46,000 population. While mine resistance isn't all that useful if they have major prison problems (and ghu knows they try to incite on a regular basis), armored could be. Still, kind of a waste to have one when it might get used once a year, if that.

The problem with departments having toys is they will want to play with them.

[Octafish]

6. Excellent observation. What's the point in having such stuff if not to use it?

Same for foreign policy. What we do overseas eventually we bring home. For instance, Secret Spy Networks, first brought online to preserve America's empire, booty from the Spanish-American War of 1898. Prof. Alfred W. McCloy explains how "It's about blackmail, not national security."

Surveillance and Scandal

Time-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power

By Alfred McCoy
Tomgram, Jan. 19, 2014

For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.

For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.

What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.

[font color="green"]Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.[/font color]

A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside

Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables.

This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began. Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale.

CONTINUED...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175795/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy,_it's_about_blackmail,_not_national_security/

PS: Within the scope of their corporate leadership, journalists from The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News have done their part in trying to keep We the People informed.

Secret military device lets Oakland (Michigan) deputies track cellphones

What we don't know, though, could fill a thumb drive.