New York Times headline (1/29/15):
NYPD Plans Initiatives to Fight Terrorism and Improve Community Relations
Gothamist headline (1/29/15):
New NYPD Anti-Terror Unit Will Get Machine Guns to Police Protesters
Neil deMause
Neil deMause is a
Brooklyn-based journalist who is the author of two books and innumerable articles for a multitude of news outlets, some of which even still exist.
► Next Post Centrist Anxiety at the New York Times
Comments
Why do these lyrics come to mind?
“One headline
Why believe it?
Everybody wants to rule the world”
Who says that the System doesn’t work? With apparent impunity, city employees have publicly turned their backs on their putative boss, Bill de Blasio, and have been rewarded with machine guns. What a Country!
Having read Extra! for decades, I know FAIR understands critiquing mere headlines — while not addressing actual articles — is not substantive, intelligent news media analysis. From its reporting to its columnists to its own editorials, the Times has well-earned a reputation for advocating against police/public safety interests. I understand that police resort too frequently to military equipment. But I also acknowledge that patrol sedans and nightsticks are insufficient matches for AK-47s. I suspect FAIR wants police — and, by logical extension, the public’s legitimate safety interest — to suffer losses.
If you click through to the Times article, you’ll see that it quotes Bratton as saying the machine guns and other militarized gear are for “dealing with events like our recent protests” — pretty sure nobody there was packing AK’s. The Times didn’t bother to take note of this discrepancy, though it did find room for an anecdote about Bratton pausing his shoeshine to call the police on some hoodlums with “booze stuffed in phone booths.” (Apparently Bratton lives in 1928 and/or is Underdog.)
So let me get this straight. US citizens who are exercising their right to protest will now be met by {military} police with machine guns. The militarization of local law enforcement is complete. And De Blasio brought us Bratton.
The faulty logic being fed is that the protests existentially caused the killing of two police officers by a single disturbed individual who was on the run for another shooting in Baltimore, and even though the police were not shot in the vicinity of any active protest at the time.
But, yes, either we acquiesce to greater police militarization or we then become culpable for any ensuing, however irrelevant, assaults on police officers. Nevermind that it may be exactly this ‘us v. them’ polarization that is escalating the conflict, much less that the police have an explicit de-escalation responsibility. This is simply coercion not to protest.
Spin and headlines aside, the formation of a new “elite” unit (reminiscent, perhaps, of the “elite” Street Crime Unit that gunned down Amadou Diallo) whose primary task is to handle the twinned threats of (1) military-style “terrorist” attacks, and (2) peaceful demonstrators, implies a worrisome linkage.
Hey, maybe it’ll work out that the terrorists get treated in a way suited to demonstrators, rather than the other way around. Anyone care to bet on it?
@DC Larson:
So you didn’t bother to read the Times article.
Those militarized police (which already exist a bit in some patrols) are to patrol protests, that would include things like Occuy Wall Street.
So a totally inappropriate place to use this kind of policing.
The New York Times was lazy with this reporting.
And no these machine gun armed patrols would not have save lives in the 2 actual terrorist attacks, separate, in NYC in the fall of 2001.
@Janson Croley:
Good point that’s the “logic” they (Bratton and DeBlasio and the Times) want people to believe.
cf. DCLarson “police resort … to military equipment. But … nightsticks are insufficient matches for AK-47s. I suspect FAIR wants police … to suffer losses.”
Have you quit beating your wife? What AK-47s? Show me a wholesale, retail or even incidental attack on police anywhere with people armed with such weapons, automatic or otherwise. What FAIR does is to try to stop people from inhaling the propaganda that you seem to have.
It appears the Police in our country have turned into a subculture of their own, and a particularly ugly one – that one wishes there were “a police force” to contain! I want the Police to be DISARMED – leave the actual need for armed force to S.W.A.T. and stop officer Joe from feeling he needs a trigger finger, or being able to act upon it when he does.
Where’s your sympathy for the innocent victims of Police Death Squad members – who consider it an offense to be AWB, alive while Black? If that crap keeps up then I would just as soon see the population armed with AK-47s in //self-defense//. The Panthers and Malcolm X were absolutely correct that nobody should have to put up with unaccountable authority confronting their civil and human rights. By the time it becomes /necessary/ to have an AK-47 to defend one’s right against the Police, even you too will ask what the hell happened to “the Police”. Disarm them and relabel them as Public Safety Officers and remind them that the Public comes first – and not their paranoia, malevolence and trigger-happiness.
There is no doubt whatsoever that some people with power look forward to increased civil strife as the excuse to introduce a Police State. Rather than rising to the bait and allowing that to happen, we should defuse things now, and to do that, step one is to disarm the Police. Step two is to embarrass and disempower everyone who wants the Police State scenario.
@Jay – sorry, but “9/11” was a hoax. The same (kind of) people who murdered JFK, MLK and RFK also murdered Wellstone and pulled off “9/11”. Meanwhile the neocons who still run the country are doing their level best to PRODUCE actual terrorists who match their fantasies of such already marketed to the public – and they are succeeding, as we saw in Paris.
There is no valid reason for any soldier from any Western nation to be in Afghanistan, and the West by its own pretended standards has no business trying to engineer the governments of any nation in the Middle East or elsewhere.
Get the Rich out of power worldwide and we would discover that the world has, to a small margin of error, actually been at peace for decades – we’re just not allowed to live that as a fact, so that %0.1 percent of the population can continue to play Realpolitik with the world for their continued amusement while the rest of us live in the shadow of the limit becoming 1984.
@ Jay, De Blasio is powerless, due to all of the proverbial ‘blood on his hands’. He’s too compromised to deny the NYPD request.
@Arthur Nonymous:
And what does your claim of “hoax” have to do with my point?
Did I say peep about the US invading Afghanistan?
The fact remains that some party flew planes into the World Trade Center.
And then a month later some party mailed anthrax to various news organizations in NY, also the capital in DC.
In neither case, “hoax” or no, would heavily armed police have been any help whatsoever.
As for your claims about “hoax” be careful, that can be read as a claim that nothing struck the towers and that no one died that day.
@Janson Croley:
Claiming DeBlasio has blood on his hands is giving to much legitimacy to Giuliani and Jack Lynch, etc.
The NYPD already has heavily armed units, some out on the street a what they conceive of as targets.
More officers with machine guns are not how to confront the next Occupy Wall street or Eric Garner protests. And protesters didn’t kill the officers sitting in their car.
How is this new “Strategic Response Group” discussed in the articles any different than the counter-terrorism units ALREADY in place for that very purpose… other than this new group gets to walk the streets carrying machine guns for the purpose of supposedly “investigating and combating terrorist plots.”
HUH? How exactly do machine guns help in the investigation and combat of terrorist plots???
Then Bratton has the audacity to say, “I truly believe when cops embrace their neighborhoods, their neighborhoods will embrace them back.”
What is wrong with this idiot? Is he that out of touch with the people?
This “counter-terrorism” guise is nothing more than an attempt to suppress our constitutional right to protest, further propagating the fascist police state already under way. This is madness.
@ TeeJae:
Yep, and there already are NYPD officers out on the streets with machine guns and bullet resistant vests.
Usually in high profile places like the bus terminal.