ACLU Launches Nationwide Police Militarization Investigation

[11B4V]

I went to happy hour with a Korean dude.  He's a prevert and has 8 total fingers.  Funny as hell, though.

That's bizzare 

[OttoVonBismarck]

So Berkut, you're a strict constructionist then?

I know limousine liberals like Minksy abhor the judgment, but read the Heller decision, I think it would be instructive for you.

You'd probably be surprised how much you agree with it, based on what you're saying here, except for a few key points. For one, the Heller decision doesn't in anyway support your contention that "the Amendment only covers arms as they were known at the time the Amendment was written." That's really a very strict constructionist argument that only really conservative constitutionalists hold to strictly (even Scalia deviates from it as he wishes.) I have a suspicion you'll object to my characterization of your argument, but after reading you go over it for 10+ posts I'm still not 100% clear on what you meant, so if I've misinterpreted let's just agree to move on and not e-rage about it.

Instead it establishes what I think is a pretty good, sane, reasonable concept. "The government cannot blanket ban arms that are in common usage." I think that's a reasonable approach. It doesn't say you can't regulate them, so it would actually (and does, IMO) allow for a lot of proposed gun control legislation. Where it would draw the line on magazine limits is hard to say. I think if you said any magazine over 7 rounds is strictly banned, it could fall afoul of the "common usage" standard because it's pretty common to have weapons with larger magazines.

We'd have to see another ruling to know how it would go. Sadly I imagine Obama's next justice will overturn Heller, but I do think the concept is a good one. You can outright ban some weapons if you want, but they can't be weapons in common usage. Additionally, it elaborates a fundamental right to self defense and owning guns in general for that purpose.

A lot of the most meaningful gun regulations are the regulations I've always pushed for, I don't believe in unlimited gun rights. Over the years I've become more and more elitist, right now I'm at a place where I think I personally should be able to buy any damn gun made in the world. However, I also think there should be very strict licensing and registration requirements such that 95% of the country would not fall into this category with me. Strict licensing requirements, storage requirements, and meaningful enforcement mechanisms for both would do a hell of a lot more in my opinion than magazine limits which are just liberals attacking the hardware instead of the licensing regime (which is where most meaningful reform will come.) The hardware limitations between the U.S. and say Sweden/Norway/Germany actually isn't all that dramatic, but those countries are serious about licensing/registration and who is allowed to just go buy a gun and how they store a gun. I think that's a much bigger difference than limits on bullets in a magazine. For some reason American liberals have never gotten serious down that path and instead want to go down the hardware regulation path, a failure of an approach that does nothing to stop gun crimes.

But to go back to the SC, Heller leaves us able to pass almost any kind of storage/licensing/registration requirement while adding a "common usage" clause that would prevent just banning popular arms. So that seems a pretty reasonable place to start with in terms of what the 2nd Amendment protects. According to the SC the 2nd Amendment protects owning a firearm for home or personal defense and owning weapons that are in "common usage." What the Founders intent was is irrelevant as modern day SC rulings take precedence.

[dps]

Additionally, it elaborates a fundamental right to self defense and owning guns in general for that purpose.

Strict licensing requirements, storage requirements, and meaningful enforcement mechanisms for both

How do you establish strict licensing requirements if there's a fundamental right to own guns for self defense?  And what would constitute meaningful enforcement of storage requirements other than periodic inspections of how people are storing their guns inside their homes?

[OttoVonBismarck]

You can still regulate purchases and ownership, you can say "you need a license to own or buy this thing." Heller only banned, explicitly, blanket bans of arms in common usage. The provision on a fundamental right to self defense invalidated a portion of D.C. law where if you went through the Byzantine process in D.C. that allowed you to own a gun pre-Heller you had to store it in a totally inoperable state. That was seen as incompatible with an individual's fundamental right of self defense in their home. But there's nothing in the text of Heller that denies a jurisdiction the power to create a comprehensive licensing regime.

Like with other rights see: Abortion, most likely if your licensing regime was just a clever de facto ban the current court would strike it down, but it's less clear they'd strike down a strict licensing regime requiring law enforcement interviews, testing, etc.

Storage is the more difficult one. In Germany you cede some of your protection from government searches if you own a gun, as the local police are allowed to periodically come into your home to inspect your gun storage. I'm not 100% sure if that law could get past fourth amendment protections in the U.S., and if not storage laws would only really be enforceable "after something happens." Ex make it a felony to store a gun in a manner a child could easily access it, a kid at your house gets a gun and shoots self, you're now guilty of a felony when in the investigation the police find you had no gun safe or etc in your home.

On the self defense angle it's questionable if trigger locks or gun safes wouldn't be seen as similar to the old D.C. requirement that you store you gun in an inoperable state. Personally I think there are some good "quick open" options out there for pistols where you punch in a four digit combo and the case pops open, that would be sufficient for any realistic home defense scenarios, but who knows what the current court would say.

[CountDeMoney]

invalidated a portion of D.C. law where if you went through the Byzantine process in D.C. that allowed you to own a gun pre-Heller you had to store it in a totally inoperable state.

Store it, or just transport it?  I don't recall that particular aspect for storage unless it was during transportation.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Thank god I've never been a district resident so I won't say for sure, but I thought if you jumped through all the hoops to get a gun license in D.C. during the pre-Heller days you had to keep it basically disassembled in your home. Maybe for handguns only, and you were allowed to store shotguns and rifles however you want?

[jimmy olsen]

The results are in.

I think this kind of thing is in part responsible for the acceleration of the marijuana legalization movement.
https://www.aclu.org/war-comes-home-excessive-militarization-american-policing

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/jun/24/military-us-police-swat-teams-raids-aclu

US police departments are increasingly militarised, finds report

• ACLU cites soaring use of war zone equipment and tactics
• Swat teams increasingly deployed in local police raids
• Seven civilians killed and 46 injured in incidents since 2010

    Ed Pilkington in New York
    theguardian.com, Tuesday 24 June 2014 05.01 BST   
    Jump to comments (349)

Link to video: Minority Report meets the Wire: how New Jersey police use military technology to fight crime – video

At 3am on 28 May, Alecia Phonesavanh was asleep in the room she was temporarily occupying together with her husband and four children in the small town of Cornelia, Georgia. Her baby, 18-month-old Bou Bou, was sleeping peacefully in his cot.

Suddenly there was a loud bang and several strangers dressed in black burst into the room. A blinding flash burst out with a deafening roar from the direction of the cot. Amid the confusion, Phonesavanh could see her husband pinned down and handcuffed under one of the men in black, and while her son was being held by another. Everyone was yelling, screaming, crying. "I kept asking the officers to let me have my baby, but they said shut up and sit down," she said.

As the pandemonium died down, it became clear that the strangers in black were a Swat team of police officers from the local Habersham County force – they had raided the house on the incorrect assumption that occupants were involved in drugs. It also became clear to Phonesavanh that something had happened to Bou Bou and that the officers had taken him away.

"They told me that they had taken my baby to the hospital. They said he was fine he had only lost a tooth, but they wanted him in for observation," Phonesavanh said.

When she got to the hospital she was horrified by what she saw. Bou Bou was in a medically-induced coma in the intensive care unit of Brady Memorial hospital. "His face was blown open. He had a hole in his chest that left his rib-cage visible."

The Swat team that burst into the Phonesavanh's room looking for a drug dealer had deployed a tactic commonly used by the US military in warzones, and increasingly by domestic police forces across the US. They threw an explosive device called a flashbang that is designed to distract and temporarily blind suspects to allow officers to overpower and detain them. The device had landed in Bou Bou's cot and detonated in the baby's face.

"My son is clinging to life. He's hurting and there's nothing I can do to help him," Phonesavanh said. "It breaks you, it breaks your spirit."

Bou Bou is not alone. A growing number of innocent people, many of them children and a high proportion African American, are becoming caught up in violent law enforcement raids that are part of an ongoing trend in America towards paramilitary policing.

The American Civil Liberties Union has released the results of its new survey into the use of Swat teams by police forces across the country. It concludes that policing has become dangerously and unnecessarily militarized, literally so with equipment and strategies being imported directly from the US army.

The findings set up a striking and troubling paradox. The Obama administration is completing its withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the US is on the verge of being free from war for the first time in more than a decade; yet at the same time the hardware and tactics of the war zone are quietly proliferating at home.

The ACLU's report, War Comes Home, looks at 818 Swat incidents that were carried out by more than 20 law enforcement agencies in 11 states. The raids spanned the period from July 2010 to last October.
swat team seattle washington maurice clemmons Heavily militarised equipment, such as APCs and flashbang grenades, are increasingly entering police arsenals. Photograph: Marcus Donner/Reuters

At the very least, the ACLU finds, the growing use of battering rams to smash down doors is causing property damage to the homes that are raided. At worst, people are dying or being injured by police teams deploying the techniques of the battlefield.

The survey, which covered only a small snapshot of what is going on around the country each year, found seven cases where civilians died in connection with the deployment of the Swat teams, two of which appeared to be suicides. A further 46 civilians were injured, often due to use of force by officers.

The victims include Aiyana Stanley-Jones, seven, who was killed in 2010 when a Swat team threw a flashbang grenade like the one that injured Bou Bou into the room where she was sleeping. The device set fire to Aiyana's blanket and when officers burst into the room they shot at the flames and hit her.

Then there was Tarika Wilson who was shot dead by Swat officers as she was holding her 14-month-old son in Lima, Ohio; the baby was injured but survived. And Eurie Stamp, a grandfather of 12, who was sitting watching baseball on TV in his pajamas in Farmington, Massachusetts, in January 2011 when a Swat team battered down his door, threw a flashbang device into the room and forced him to lie facedown on the floor. One of the officers' guns discharged and killed Stamp, who was not the man they had come to apprehend, as he lay there.

Also in 2011, Jose Guerena, a veteran of the Iraq war, was shot 22 times in his kitchen at home in Tucson, Arizona, by officers in a Swat team that was searching the neighbourhood for drugs. Nothing was found in the Guerena home.

Swat teams were a late 1960s invention that emerged out of the Los Angeles police department. Initially, they were designed to help officers react to perilous situations such as riots, hostage taking and where an active shooter was barricaded into a house.

But they have developed into something entirely different. The ACLU survey found that 62% of Swat team call-outs were for drug searches. Some 79% involved raids on private homes, and a similar proportion were done on the back of warrants authorizing searches. By contrast, only about 7% fell into those categories for which the technique was originally intended, such as hostage situations or barricades.

"Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using paramilitary squads to search people's homes for drugs," the ACLU writes. It adds: "Neighbourhoods are not war zones and our police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies."

Research by Peter Kraska, a professor at Kentucky University, has tracked the exponential growth in the use of paramilitary tactics in the US. In the 1980s there were as few as 3,000 Swat raids a year, but by around 2005 that number had leapt to 45,000.

Such a rapid proliferation has been actively encouraged by the federal government, particularly by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, and by the Defense Department. The Pentagon channels military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan to domestic police forces under its 1033 programme, which the ACLU found had transmitted 15,000 items of battle uniforms and personal protective gear during the survey period.

The amount of equipment handed over can be substantial. North Little Rock police force in Arkansas, for instance, was granted 34 automatic and semi-automatic rifles, two MARCbot robots from Afghanistan that can be weaponised, helmets for ground troops and a tactical armoured vehicle.

Armoured personnel carriers, or APCs, have proliferated dramatically under the 1033 programme. About 500 law enforcement agencies believed to have received military vehicles built specifically to resist roadside bombs. The local police for Ohio state university even has an APC for use on American football match days.

Once the equipment has been handed over, the temptation is to use it. That certainly was the case for the mayor of Peoria, Illinois, who in April sent a Swat team to search the house of someone who had poked fun at him in a satirical Twitter account.

As the ACLU notes: "if the federal government gives the police a huge cache of military-style weaponry, they are highly likely to use it, even if they do not really need to."

As for the infant, Bou Bou Phonesavanh, he remains in intensive care after having been through a series of operations. "Everything is touch and go. Nothing is determined, nothing is decided," Alecia Phonesavanh said.

The Phonesavanhs' lawyer, Mawuli Davis, said the Swat team should have known that young children were present in the room they were raiding as there were clear tell-tale signs: a playpen outside the door and a van parked outside with four child seats in it. "We have to address the way that police in this country are armed as if they are invading a foreign land," Mawuli said. "It's disturbing, and innocent people are hurting."

A few hours after the raid took place, police located the suspect they had been seeking at a different house in the neighbourhood. The officers knocked on the door, the suspect opened it, and agreed peacefully to come in for questioning.

[Admiral Yi]

Thank god I've never been a district resident so I won't say for sure, but I thought if you jumped through all the hoops to get a gun license in D.C. during the pre-Heller days you had to keep it basically disassembled in your home. Maybe for handguns only, and you were allowed to store shotguns and rifles however you want?

My understanding of the old DC laws is:

1) only longarms

2) transport only in your trunk with the bolt removed

3) only transport between your home and a shooting range

[KRonn]

The Swat team that burst into the Phonesavanh's room looking for a drug dealer had deployed a tactic commonly used by the US military in warzones, and increasingly by domestic police forces across the US. They threw an explosive device called a flashbang that is designed to distract and temporarily blind suspects to allow officers to overpower and detain them. The device had landed in Bou Bou's cot and detonated in the baby's face. 

What a horror story. An adult wouldn't do so well either with that crap going off in their face! Cops need to learn how to properly use such equipment, and when to use it. Damn, that's just nuts.

[Berkut]

The Swat team that burst into the Phonesavanh's room looking for a drug dealer had deployed a tactic commonly used by the US military in warzones, and increasingly by domestic police forces across the US. They threw an explosive device called a flashbang that is designed to distract and temporarily blind suspects to allow officers to overpower and detain them. The device had landed in Bou Bou's cot and detonated in the baby's face. 

What a horror story. An adult wouldn't do so well either with that crap going off in their face! Cops need to learn how to properly use such equipment, and when to use it. Damn, that's just nuts.

They do learn how to use it properly. That isn't the point.

User in the safest possible manner, throwing a fucking grenade into a room with people in it, even a flashbang, is still going to have some cases of people getting hurt. It isn't a training problem. More training won't make SWAT teams being used constantly a-ok.

[CountDeMoney]

had deployed a tactic commonly used by the US military in warzones, and increasingly by domestic police forces across the US.

And just where does the author think law enforcement has been getting the majority of its applicants from the last 10+ years? It was always a common practice, but it's getting ridiculuous now.

[Jaron]

What kind of name is Bou Bou? 

[CountDeMoney]

It's French.  And obviously criminally negligent.