{"id":30549,"date":"2012-06-27T14:26:52","date_gmt":"2012-06-27T18:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=30549"},"modified":"2012-06-27T14:35:36","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T18:35:36","slug":"up-armored-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=30549","title":{"rendered":"Up-Armored Police"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at The Danger Room<\/a> reports that police departments across the country have gone fifty-one-fifty buying up surplus military equipment to deck themselves out in unneeded tactical finery. Tanks, helicopters, assault-style weapons that mostly collect dust. Thermal sights and infra-red and night vision goggles all lay unused on the shelves or in the trunks of patrol cars;<\/p>\n

The Nebraska State Patrol has three amphibious eight-wheeled tanks. Acquired almost three years ago, their highest achievement has been helping with a flood last year and with a shooting a couple of weeks ago. Overall, it has been deployed five times. At least, officers love driving them. \u201cThey\u2019re fun,\u201d said trooper Art Frerichs to the Lincoln Journal Star in 2010. And the ride, according to Patrol Sgt. Loveless, \u201cis very smooth.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, yeah, I know “if it saves one life, it’s worth it” – but three tanks? Seriously? If it’s so much fun to drive tanks around, why do all of the tankers I know scowl all of the time? I’ll admit that I liked tooling around in a Bradley – but that’s why I joined the Army and not the Nebraska State Police.<\/p>\n

Personally, having a bunch of untrained yahoos running around with assault rifles and night vision gear doesn’t make me feel all that safe. We had a company of trained experienced tankers open fire at night on a Bradley platoon, and they lived with those thermal sights every day and night, still they didn’t correctly ID their targets.<\/p>\n

Now they get the stuff at a discount – they get it free and just pay the shipping charges – just like the “free” stuff you get on TV, but that doesn’t always work out for them;<\/p>\n

In Tupelo, Mississippi, home to 35,000, the local police acquired a helicopter for only $7,500 through the surplus program. The chopper, however, had to be upgraded for $100,000 and it now costs $20,000 a year in maintenance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m sure taxpayers are excited about that price tag. But, a helicopter at least has some daily use potential. Tanks and night-vision hardware, not so much. Nothing ever scared me so much as a private on the night fire range with NVDs for the first time. Imagine a whole police department of untrained privates running through your neighborhood with that shit on, fingers on their triggers of their assault weapons with large capacity magazines. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at The Danger Room reports that police departments across the country have gone fifty-one-fifty … Up-Armored Police<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}