The Quartering of Troops | Police Militarization

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I'm out of the loop on this one. What's the show/film being referenced in this?

Great video as always!

👍︎︎ 37 👤︎︎ u/_Scarecrow_ 📅︎︎ Jul 02 2020 đź—«︎ replies

I really liked this video. My husband is security forces in the air force and whenever I tell him about the police situation right now, he just doesn't get it because they are trained so hard to use deadly force as a last resort, just as KB stated. Its crazy that we let them have so little training but all the big boy toys.

👍︎︎ 16 👤︎︎ u/ALMONDandVANILLA 📅︎︎ Jul 02 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Copy-pasting my comment from YouTube.

I’ve been waiting for his video for a while, and it’s even better than I thought it would be. Fantastic work!

It’s especially interesting to get your take on it as a veteran. If there’s one perspective people should be paying attention to when it comes to police militarisation, it’s the military service members that they’re ripping off. I had no idea about the steps of military escalation of force. Had that been standard police training protocol, Philando Castile might still be alive.

👍︎︎ 48 👤︎︎ u/WATCH_DOGS_SUCKS 📅︎︎ Jul 02 2020 đź—«︎ replies

This vid as pretty intriguing, partially because of where I’m from. I’m from Northern Ireland and our police force (the P.S.N.I.) is the most armed police force in the UK, because of the IRA and paramilitary activity that still bubbles away in the background. However, even though they are the only police force in the UK that actively carry firearms (mainly pistols), it’s rather rare for them to actually be used and officers use tasers more often instead. In the US though, it seems like they are a lot more brutal in their use of firearms to enforce the law compared to over here, and we’re the ones with a terrorism problem!

👍︎︎ 34 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Jul 02 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Great video, in addition to your points I’d like to see a push for mandatory body cameras.

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/Bad_ralph1988 📅︎︎ Jul 02 2020 đź—«︎ replies

I thought the overall video was good, and agreed with the vast majority of the points he made, but I am a bit worried about how KnowingBetter's videos have drifted more into the commentary genre while still being presented as informational videos. Yes, they do contain information which he uses to support his positions, but they are framed within a narrative designed to convince the viewer, rather than inform the viewer.

Another issue I have with this video are KnowingBetter's short foray into institutional discrimination without expanding to cover the topic in even bare bones detail. He briefly mentions cash bail, but fails to explain in more detail, or cover the other ways in which the poor are discriminated against in the legal system, such as fines as punishment, and the apathy of public defenders, or the under enforcement of white collar crime. He also quickly goes over the differences in punishment for crack and powder coccaine, but fails to make the meth comparison. The different punishments for crack and powder coccaine can be argued against with class arguments, and the common misocnception that crack is more harmful. Methamphetamine is objectively more harmful than crack, but is generally considered the drug of poor white people, and it was punished lighter than crack until the 2000's. Even now meth only has an equal punishment despite being more harmful.

My last real issue with this video is that, while I agree with the narrative he presents, he does play it slightly fast and loose with the facts to strengthen his argument. He does this through lies by omission. At one point he says (paraphrasing) "black people and white people commit crime at the same rate." That statement is untrue, a true version of the statement would be "black people and white people, of the same socieoeconomic background, commit crime crime at the same rate." His misstatement also hides one of the most important aspects of discussions about crime: the vast majority of theft, and drug crime, is the result of people trying to survive in situations which systemically keep them down.

In my opinion KnowwingBetter should have either taken the time to do justice to the topics relating to crime and instotutional issues in the justice system, limited the extent of his video to the topic of police militarization. Poorly informing people is often more dangerous than not informing them at alll.

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/FenrirUnshackled 📅︎︎ Jul 03 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Fascinating video, especially the rules of engagement bit gave me perspective on this I didn't have before.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/elsjaako 📅︎︎ Jul 02 2020 đź—«︎ replies

I think the escalation of force steps is the easiest to implement in these times, alongside a line-item review of the toys we give the police departments to, um...rescue us with.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/IowaJL 📅︎︎ Jul 02 2020 đź—«︎ replies

You mentioned on one of your streams how you disliked a lot of your old videos for flying right over historical topics that could be a whole video. I would assume this video has about 12 hours worth of those.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Tankninja1 📅︎︎ Jul 02 2020 đź—«︎ replies
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I hope I’ve made it clear on this channel that my views have shifted over time. The world is always changing and so is my perspective. As part of my anniversary stream a few weeks ago, I was watching some of my older content and was somewhat embarrassed by my casual dismissal of part of the Bill of Rights. Now to the Third Amendment, stick with me, this one gets a little weird. And then there’s the Third Amendment, the one everyone forgets regarding the quartering of troops. Like many people, I disregarded this amendment as a quaint relic of our distant colonial past. And like many people, I was wrong. This video was brought to you by CuriosityStream and Nebula… The soldiers are not what they seem. Much like my understanding of that show, my understanding of the third amendment has taken some strange turns as well. Since this amendment is often forgotten, it’s worth reminding everyone of what it actually says… No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law. This is the third amendment; it comes before unreasonable search and seizure and protection against cruel and unusual punishment. So, it’s safe to assume this was pretty important to colonial Americans, but why? The common answer is that in the years after the French and Indian War, British soldiers were quartered in people’s homes – it’s even one of the complaints in the Declaration of Independence. But there’s actually very little evidence that that ever happened, certainly not on any large scale. The Quartering Acts allowed British troops to be housed in taverns, inns, alehouses, and even stables. Anywhere potential revolutionaries might want to gather. So, it’s somewhat easy to understand why a bunch of rebellious Americans would think this is important enough to include as one of the ten Bill of Rights – but how is this at all relevant to present day? I’ll answer that question with another question. What did the police look like when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution? I’ll give you a moment to think about that. Are you ready? Was it this? The King sends 4000 Redcoats to Boston to enforce his laws. When the Founding Fathers wrote “No Soldier shall in time of peace” blah blah, there was no distinction between the military and the police. Soldiers were the police and had been for centuries. Modern police forces trace their origins back to specialized military units in Ancient Rome. Since that’s where history seems to start for everything in the west. Most famous of these were the bodyguards to emperors and generals, known as Praetorians, who often functioned as a secret police and were heavily involved in Roman politics. Even occasionally picking the next emperor. And that’s pretty much how it was for most of human history, the military or some specialized guard detail kept the king’s peace. But now it was supposed to be the people’s peace. The first civilian police unit, created specifically to be separate from the military, was founded in London in 1829. And to distinguish them from the army, they wore blue instead of red. The idea didn’t make it over to America until 1845, when the first permanent police department was established in New York. Other northern cities like Boston and Philadelphia followed a few years later. Before police departments, laws were enforced in the community by the citizens themselves. And I’m not talking about mob rule. Most every county in America had one primary law enforcement officer – the sheriff. Damn good coffee! The sheriff is another idea we borrowed from Britain, the shire reeve, it’s basically the county-level equivalent of a mayor. It’s an elected position, accountable to the people. But back in the day, it was mostly an administrative role, collecting duties and taxes, they didn’t really fight crime. They delegated that to the people. Either through deputizing citizens or posting bounties – those aren’t just side quests in Red Dead Redemption, that was how the law was enforced for centuries. And that was everywhere, not just the Old West. If they really needed the help, they could call up a posse of citizens or even the militia – which is why the Second Amendment exists. The Founding Fathers were against having a standing army. After a few decades, capitalism did what capitalism does and private police agencies, like the Pinkertons, were formed. But as you saw in Red Dead, they were basically accountable to no one. Everything changed during the Civil War, as the military was called up and used to keep the peace in the North and South. Even well after the war. Once the Confederacy lost, the federal military was left in the southern states to ensure that the rights of recently freed slaves were protected. And for the most part, it worked. But Reconstruction ended in 1877, when federal troops were removed and the Posse Comitatus Act prevented the US Army from ever being used in a domestic law enforcement capacity again. Except in rare circumstances. That doesn’t apply to the National Guard though, which is more accurately described as a state militia when it’s under the command of the governor. But we’ll get back to that. Without the presence of the military in the South, there were no dedicated groups of armed white men roaming the neighborhood “keeping the peace.” So many cities in the South created their first police departments. At that point, many larger cities had some form of firefighting, night watchmen who might handle petty crime... but mostly caught runaway slaves. Which they simply rebranded as the police. While they existed all over the country at different times, many modern-day police forces in the South can directly trace their origins to those slave patrols. Which only policed slaves and hunted runaways. Unlike the elected sheriffs, these new police departments were mostly unaccountable patronage positions with no training. And they had almost no effect on crime. Which is an important concept we need to spend some time thinking about. What is a crime? If I asked you to list everything you would consider to be a crime, there would probably be a few obvious ones like murder and theft. But most everything else wasn’t a crime 100 years ago. In 1920, the United States federal government decided that the production, transportation, and sale of alcohol was now against the law. Something that was legal in 1919 was now a crime. This is when the vague cultural concept of crime was formed because people still wanted to do that thing that was totally fine just a year ago. They’re not murderers or thieves, they’re just… criminals. If you’re at all familiar with history, this is the part where I tell you that capitalism did what capitalism does and a black market arose to supply that demand. People still wanted to drink. This took the form of small-scale moonshiners in the woods and the mafia and organized crime in the cities. Making something illegal created criminals. Most things we consider to be crimes are only crimes because we arbitrarily decided to make them illegal – they’re consensual acts that generally have no victim. Prohibition is widely regarded as a massive failure. By labelling something consensual as a crime, they turned many previously-innocent people who were minding their own business into criminals. And by extension, created organized crime. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Exactly fifty years later, Nixon declared a War on Drugs as part of his broader “law and order,” tough-on-crime initiatives. Which were just a way to crack down on anti-war and civil rights protests. This is Woodstock 1969, I’m willing to bet every single person in this picture is high on something and none of them were criminals. A year later in 1970, all of them would be labelled criminals. Those people had a right to peacefully protest under the First Amendment, so the Nixon administration had to find something else to arrest them for. Even if that meant taking something they were already doing and arbitrarily declaring it illegal. They chose drugs because like alcohol, they were morally questionable, and had the added benefit of being everywhere. Crossing state and international borders. They intentionally took the weakest and most widely used drug – cannabis – and put it in the most restrictive category. Because if that’s illegal, nothing else can be legal. Throughout the drug war, they adjusted the importance of and punishment for different drugs… Usually based on race. There is no pharmacological difference between powder cocaine and crack, they have the same effect on your body, the only difference is how it gets into your body. And which racial groups prefer which method of ingestion. If they’re basically the same drug, you would expect that getting caught with a gram of powder cocaine would result in the same punishment as a gram of crack… And you would be wrong. If you were caught with five grams of crack, you would get a mandatory minimum of five years in prison, you would need 500 grams of powder cocaine to get the same sentence. White people tended to use powder cocaine, while Black people tended to use crack. To help fight the Drug War, Nixon created the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement or ODALE, a police unit with federal jurisdiction over drugs. It was one of the precursor agencies to the DEA. They began the use of heavy-handed “Nark Strike Forces” to take down drug offenders in over 1400 raids in just over a year. Which averages to over three a day. By tying federal law enforcement funding to drug policy, the Nixon administration encouraged the states to follow suit and adopt the same laws. Which they did. Before the Drug War, a few states had made a few drugs illegal, but now they were all illegal, everywhere. Now that you can see the forest growing, you should see the individual tree. Rewinding a bit, during Prohibition, police departments were virtually indistinguishable from their organized crime counterparts. Basically behaving like state-sanctioned street gangs. So, in the 40s and 50s, there was a push to professionalize law enforcement and structure it in a similar way to the military. With squads, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains. Along with that came consolidation; all over the country, metropolitan areas combined their various community police departments into large, single jurisdictions. That’s why there’s an NYPD, rather than a Bronx or Queens PD. What this meant in practice is that police officers no longer had to live in the neighborhoods they patrolled, they could live in Brooklyn while working in Manhattan. They no longer had a stake in the community. In 1965, a traffic stop in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles escalated to a physical altercation… And then a full-blown riot. It lasted for six days and was only stopped when 14,000 members of the California National Guard were sent in. Which is how things had been done for decades. The police would handle small scale crime and if things escalated out of their control, they would call for the state militia’s help. With varying degrees of success. But after the Watts riots, a commander in the LAPD named Daryl Gates thought that the police should have a special unit that handled civil unrest. He called it the Special Weapons Attack Team. His superiors told him that the civilian police shouldn’t have anything called an “attack team” and made him change it. Special Weapons and Tactics, more commonly known as SWAT teams. He had them train alongside the Marines using Hollywood sets instead of real-world buildings. They earned the nickname the “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” Boys. In preparation for the 1984 Olympics, he bought two armored personnel carriers for his SWAT team, which he was only allowed to keep after painting them blue and labelling them as “rescue vehicles.” A tactic still used to this day, but we’ll get to that. In 1991, a traffic stop in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Los Angeles escalated to a physical altercation… Which was caught on tape. The video showed five LAPD officers violently kicking and beating Rodney King well after he had been subdued; but at trial, they were acquitted. Which resulted in full blown riots in 1992. The looting and destruction lasted five days and earned then-Police Chief Daryl Gates the 1992 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for his “uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together.” How did his SWAT team perform in their first real test? Miserably – the riots only ended after 10,000 California National Guard troops, 2500 US Army troops, and 1000 Marines took control of the city. A militarized police unit, that still needed help from the military. But SWAT had a second purpose, during the 60s, the country seemed to be plagued with rogue snipers and armed bank robberies. They wanted a heavily armed unit for those rare emergencies. In 1997, the largest gun battle in American police history took place – the North Hollywood Shootout. A bank robbery turned hostage situation, which has been dramatized in movies and TV shows multiple times. The robbers wore full body armor, so police weapons, including rifles, were completely ineffective. 2000 bullets were fired over the course of 44 minutes, it only ended after one robber shot himself and the other surrendered and eventually died of his wounds. LAPD SWAT was on-site and didn’t do anything that the regular police didn’t do. One SWAT officer double-tapped a robber in the chest with his AR15 and he barely even flinched. Most every fictional depiction of this event rewrites history and shows SWAT saving the day. This is an example of Copaganda, which has wildly distorted police effectiveness in the public consciousness. Two years later, the worst school shooting in US history took place at Columbine High School in Colorado. And as a result, the number of SWAT teams in America grew exponentially. Every police department in America needed one just in case that happened at their school. But… there were at least six SWAT teams at Columbine. Two students entered the school and started shooting at 11:19am, the first cop arrived five minutes later, and the first SWAT team twelve minutes after that. At 2:15 in the afternoon, students taking shelter in one of the classrooms put up a sign signaling that their teacher had been injured and needed help. SWAT finally got to them at 2:40pm – the teacher had already died. It took them so long to reach the injured because it was too dangerous to risk officer safety. Yeah, that’s your job though. If you want the prestige and respect that comes from being a hero, kicking in doors and saving lives, then you better do that when the time comes. Otherwise you’re just dressing up and playing army. I was in the Army, and while I didn’t experience the situation on the ground as it happened, I can assure you that it would never take six military squads three hours to clear a high school. Especially when you consider the fact that the shooters killed themselves at 12:08pm. Meaning that for the last two and a half hours, there was no active threat. The quickest way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to wait for that bad guy to stop themselves. More often than not, school shootings end when the school shooter decides to end it – even if there’s a police officer on campus, they just run and hide like everyone else. As was the case in Parkland in 2018. When Daryl Gates first came up with the idea for SWAT, their primary purpose was to deal with civil unrest and active shooter situations. Have they ever succeeded in that mission? Probably. But the high-profile examples that the police used to justify their proliferation during the 90s are not valid examples. If anything, they show SWAT’s ineffectiveness. Despite that, most people, including myself, can’t shake the feeling that the police should have some sort of armed emergency response team. And nowadays, almost all of them do. Looking at small towns in America, 25% of them had a SWAT team in 1984, 52% in 1990, and 80% of them by 2005. Of cities with over 50,000, 90% of them have one. Even federal agencies like the Department of Education, the FDA, and NASA have a SWAT team. What are they being used for? This surge was mostly justified to the public by citing the Rodney King Riots, the North Hollywood Shootout, and Columbine. But only 7% of their deployments are for situations like that. Most of the time, SWAT teams are used for drug enforcement; as a funny coincidence, Daryl Gates is also the mind behind DARE. Just say no. Active shooter situations fall under state jurisdiction, so if a police department wanted federal funding, they had to do it under the guise of federal drug enforcement. Regardless of the reasons they gave the public. If you went to Congress asking for money to start a SWAT team for a possible emergency, they would give it to you on the condition that you also participate in the War on Drugs. The problem is that there just aren’t that many fortified drug labs in the US. Of the 50,000+ SWAT deployments in the US each year, 80% of them are to execute search warrants. Mostly on low-level drug offenders. Up until this point, the United States followed the Castle Doctrine, another idea borrowed from Britain – your home is your castle. And the government can’t come in without permission. If they wanted to come in, they first had to knock, identify themselves, announce their purpose, and then wait for the owner to open the door. This is the Fourth Amendment at work. It also protects the police, if they don’t announce who they are, what’s to stop the homeowner from assuming they’re a trespasser? The whole point is to avoid violence. But if the government is fighting a war on drugs and you’re a drug dealer, what’s the first thing you’re going to do after the police knock and announce? *Flush* You’re going to get rid of the evidence! So in 1970, as part of the same crime bills that started the Drug War, Congress authorized the use of No Knock warrants. Which quickly became the norm for all search warrants involving narcotics. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If someone told the police that you’re growing cannabis in your closet, without warning, your doors and windows might explode as a SWAT team comes charging in – even if you don’t have drugs. Nowadays we call this Swatting, but it’s been a problem since the beginning. And that’s assuming they get it right, of all the raids conducted by NYPD SWAT in 2003, 10% of them were on the wrong address – sometimes it’s apartment 11 instead of apartment 12, sometimes it’s the completely wrong street. No Knock warrants violate the presumption of innocence in multiple ways. They assume you do in-fact have drugs, they assume you will try to destroy them, they assume you’re armed and dangerous or that you might try to escape. All before you’ve even been charged with a crime. It’s important to note that throughout the War on Drugs, both Republicans and Democrats supported these policies. Here’s then-Senator Joe Biden bragging about one of his crown achievements. We changed the law so that if you are arrested and you are a drug dealer, under our forfeiture statutes, you can, the government can take everything you own. Everything from your car to your house, your bank account, not merely what they confiscate in terms of the dollars from the transaction that you’ve just got caught engaging in. They can take everything. This is known as Civil Asset Forfeiture, it had always existed on some level and really took off during the 70s. In 1983, Biden changed the law so that you don’t have to be found guilty, if there’s reasonable suspicion, the government can keep your stuff. Then it’s on you to prove that property innocent. Imagine you own a thousand acres, and unbeknownst to you, someone grows a dozen cannabis plants on your land. The government can seize all of your property. Biden wasn’t exaggerating, Civil Asset Forfeiture is a huge source of revenue for police departments, sometimes generating millions of dollars. Which further incentivizes more drug enforcement and more SWAT raids. Throughout the 80s and 90s, crime was the most important political issue, Republicans and Democrats both ran on tough-on-crime platforms. The crime rate peaked in 1991. But again, I want you to ponder this fundamental question… What is a crime? Did crime actually rise or did our definition of crime expand? At the same time, did the punishments for those crimes increase? What used to be a silly teenage behavior that used to get you a slap on the wrist or detention is now a life-ruining event. We are all guilty of crimes. I know some of you will recoil in defense when I say that, but if you really think about it, you have done things that if you were caught, would have landed you in jail. Have you ever explored an abandoned building? My friends and I used to ride our bikes around the school at night because it was dark and creepy, one time we got caught by the neighborhood watch and the guy with his flashlight told us to go on home. If we weren’t white, he probably would have called the cops. If you’ve ever talked your way out of a ticket or done something with the expectation that you would get let off with a warning, that’s a privilege not everyone gets. Because in the end, it’s up to the cop’s discretion who they arrest. By now, you’ve probably seen this video of a police officer freaking out about having to wait a few minutes at a McDonald’s drive through… So I told her I said don’t bother with the food, because right now I’m too nervous to take it. This person is entrusted by the law to determine when someone is “acting suspiciously.” Which is all it takes to Stop and Frisk someone. If a cop decides to take a look at you and figure out what crimes you’re committing… they will find one. This is generally referred to as Proactive Policing. Instead of waiting to react to a crime after the fact, they go out to try and stop it before it happens. Yes, just like Minority Report. But since they don’t have any of the futuristic technology, cops just have to use their gut instinct and maybe past crime statistics. So, which neighborhoods did they target for proactive policing? White people commit crimes at pretty much the same rate as black people, but racial profiling policies like Stop and Frisk had cops looking specifically at minority communities. And if you’re looking for a crime, you will find one. For various historical reasons, minorities tend to be poor, so they don’t have the ability to mount a successful legal defense. Leading to higher conviction rates. You’ve likely heard borderline-racist arguments about how minorities are more likely to commit crime based on incarceration rates. Some of those people were probably guilty of crimes. But minority communities are disproportionately more likely to be proactively policed, which results in more convictions, which results in more proactive policing. This cycle has been pretty much unbroken since the Civil War. The overall crime rate in the United States peaked in 1991. At the same time, the incarceration rate grew exponentially and then levelled off. The easy explanation is causal, that by putting so many people behind bars, they weren’t free to commit crimes. The only way you could think the relationship is if it’s the same set of criminals repeatedly committing all of the crimes and we caught all of them – there are no new criminals. We apparently won the war on crime. But as soon as you realize that the population of the US has grown at the same rate throughout this entire period, it’s clear that something else was going on. The United States isn’t the only country with crime, we’re not the only country whose crime rate peaked in the 90s and then dropped off. We’re also not the only country with drugs. We are the only country whose prison population grew like this though. Why? I am not racist… but… Some people make the argument that it’s our country’s unique racial composition and that some people are just naturally more inclined to be criminals. And those people are wrong. We’re not the only country with a diverse population and long history of racial segregation. So, what really happened? Why did the prison crime rate spike in the 90s and then drop as the prison population grew? Well, I hope by now you can see that the crime rate never actually rose, we just expanded our definition of what constitutes a crime and what constitutes a jailable offense. We’ve talked a lot about the drug war in this video, but this holds true for all crime – it was legal to rape your wife until the 90s, there was no drinking age until the 70s. We just made more things illegal. The inflated crime rate led to a drastic expansion in the number of police on the streets. More cops looking for crime results in more found crime. The war on drugs and broader war on crime jailed everyone they could get away with before public opinion turned. Which ended overt racial profiling practices like stop and frisk. This led to an apparent drop in the crime rate. But there were also policies which set unreasonably high bail, keeping people in jail while they await trial – known as Preventive Detention. Almost a quarter of all incarcerated people in the US have yet to be convicted of any crime. The establishment of drug courts in the 90s prioritized treatment over prison, which helped level the incarceration rate. And thanks to mandatory minimums and three strikes laws, many people convicted during the War on Drugs are still serving excessively long sentences. These harsh punishments and the number of police on the street rose throughout the drug war, but especially under Clinton as part of the 1994 Crime Bill. And I remind you that last year we passed a very tough crime bill: longer sentences, "three strikes and you're out," almost sixty new capital punishment offenses, more prisons, more prevention, 100,000 more police. All of these variables interacted with each other at different times to produce an overall drop in crime while growing the prison population – it is a complicated answer. Made even more complicated by the fact that some minority communities wanted an increased police presence to deal with the perceived crime and drug problem. But, we’re the only country that punishes drug use like this. We’re also the only country with a militarized civilian police force that still drives around in armored “rescue vehicles.” This is a Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected vehicle or MRAP. It gets about 3 miles to the gallon and weighs at least 15 tons, since that’s spread across four wheels instead of eighteen, it’s too heavy for most bridges in the United States. It also has an incredibly high rollover risk. We used these as our lead convoy vehicle in Iraq, which was a warzone… this is a town 20 miles outside of Atlanta, in peacetime America. How on Earth did they get one of these? During the tough on crime 90s, in response to the artificially inflated crime rate and the high-profile police emergencies we discussed earlier, Clinton created the 1033 Program. Otherwise known as the Law Enforcement Support Office of the Defense Logistics Agency. Early versions of it started when crime peaked in ’91, but it became a permanent fixture in 1997 and allowed surplus military equipment, weapons, and vehicles to be transferred to police departments for the purposes of drug enforcement. And later, counterterrorism, which is even more vague. Basically, the federal government gave local law enforcement store credit on any repurposed military equipment as long as they used it to enforce federal policy. Including assault weapons, bayonets, grenade launchers, and eventually MRAPS. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. With everything we’ve discussed, the increase in police presence, the shift and expansion of policy, and the addition of military equipment, is anyone really surprised at the current state of things? And now we all have cameras, so there’s no denying it. The police have been approaching every situation as if they’re in a war zone. Because that’s what they’re trained to do. I’m not going to get into police training, because Some More News made a video diving into that aspect specifically, I recommend checking it out. Especially if you’re a veteran like me. I’m not going to show any of the numerous videos of police violence here, but as a veteran, I am horrified by what I’m seeing. A few days ago, I was reading a reddit thread talking about recent events and a discussion between veterans really stuck with me. It suggests to me that police officers, too often, want the power and prestige of military members without any of the requisite training or responsibilities. If I, as an American convoy security gunner in Iraq, were to shoot someone who was running away, even if they were armed and might pose a threat later… I would be in prison. If I were lucky, it would be an American prison. While we were deployed, we had to memorize the Rules of Engagement and a series of steps known as Escalation of Force. Escalation of Force Step 1: Visual. This can be flashing lights, a sign, hand waving any visual method of getting someone’s attention. Step 2: Sound. Whether it’s a siren or a verbal command, any auditory way of getting someone’s attention. Step 3: Non-lethal. As a gunner in Iraq, this meant a flare or tracer rounds shot off to the side, but this can also be a taser or mace. All of these can be lethal, but that’s not their intended effect. Step 4: Warning shot. One shot, down at the ground, not into the air, gravity still works on bullets, don’t be stupid. Step 5: Kill shot. One shot, you don’t empty your whole magazine into someone, that’s a literal war crime. It’s against the Geneva Convention. Now, looking at this list and thinking of all the police shootings you’ve seen, how many of these steps do they even attempt? As a soldier in an active warzone, if you couldn’t demonstrate that you went through this list, step by step, you went to jail. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Unlike the police, there is no qualified immunity or soldier’s union to protect your job if you mess up and kill someone. And no generous severance package either. If you’re kicked out of the military, you’re done, you have to check that box on every job application for the rest of your life. You even lose your second amendment rights. If you want to dress up and play army and have the same prestige and respect as the military… You apparently need real stakes. The other option is to take all of your new toys away and probably disarm you. Which I know is a tough sell. But we are currently asking the police to respond to every situation with a hammer. There’s no reason why someone with a gun needs to do a VIN inspection. There’s no reason why armed people need to show up at your house to do a wellness check because you haven’t shown up to work in a few days. According to a recent New York Times article, police only spend 4% of their time responding to violent crime. And if you ask me, those are the only times they should have a gun. Disarming the police lowers the danger level of literally every interaction – including traffic stops. Other countries have done it, we can too. But if you’re still resistant, another option exists which you’ve undoubtedly heard in recent weeks. Defund the police. That doesn’t mean drop their funding to zero, it just means shift the majority of that funding to some new agency that handles society’s non-violent problems. I don’t care what you call it, a Community Response Agency. I would much rather have an unarmed “Community Responder” handle a mental health crisis or a noise complaint. *Stomp Stomp Stomp* Those who do not learn from their history… should go to curiositystream.com/knowingbetter. CuriosityStream is a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles that you can access across multiple platforms. Learn more about the founding of the United States in this documentary on George Washington, Father of a Nation. From the Declaration of Independence to the writing of the Constitution, get a better idea of what they originally intended. If you sign up using the link below, you’ll also get access to Nebula, the streaming service built by fellow youtubers to allow us to create without oppressive oversight, just as the founding fathers intended. Check it out by also signing up for CuriosityStream, if you use the promocode knowingbetter at checkout, you’ll get the first month for free, and remember… The soldiers are not what they seem. The founding fathers would be horrified if they saw the current state of policing in our country. How do I know that? The second amendment created an armed citizenry for the purposes of defense and even citizen policing. That was the original intent. The third amendment talks about the housing of troops in people’s homes, which may seem like an antiquated line from a bygone era… But the original complaint in the Declaration of Independence looks more relevant to the present day than ever… For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us; For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States. If the Boston Massacre were to occur today, they would describe it as a police shooting of unarmed protestors. The rest of the Bill of Rights are about the justice system, no unreasonable search and seizure, speedy trials by jury, and no excessive bail. Things that we’ve also let erode over time. It makes no sense for there to be one random amendment about the quartering of troops right in the middle of this list. Unless the concept of the police didn’t exist yet. When the framers of the Constitution wrote about soldiers living amongst us, they were trying to prevent a militarized police state. Which… look around. The decision to militarize the police and get tough on “crime” didn’t happen all at once, it was incremental. So, no single solution will solve the problem. That’s compounded by the fact that there are almost 18,000 separate police departments in the United States. And almost no national standards. It’s going to take a lot of work to reframe our understanding of crime and the role of the police, but it is possible, because now, you know better. I’d like to give a shoutout to my newest Golden Fork patrons, Aqhat and Luke. If you’d like to add your name to this list of Community Responders, head on over to patreon.com/knowingbetter, or for a one-time donation, paypal.me/knowingbetter. Don’t forget to detain that subscribe button or the join button if you’re feeling especially frisky. Check out the merch at knowingbetter.tv, follow me on Twitter and Facebook, and join us on the subreddit.
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Channel: Knowing Better
Views: 1,003,418
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Keywords: knowing better
Id: n7Rm3tuMFTI
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Length: 33min 26sec (2006 seconds)
Published: Thu Jul 02 2020
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