George Orwell, call your office !
If prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then city mayors follow a very close second. In fact, it occurs to me they may be the spiritual offspring of the aforementioned liaisons. Whenever there is loose change or unclaimed dollar bills laying around, mayors can smell them a mile away and if a Sugar Daddy offers free cash, they never stop to question what the vigorish might be. The urban emperors, suburban commissars, the hack and the highbrow, the Republican and Democrat, the apolitical and amoral, the exurban apparatchiks all assemble to line dance down Pennsylvania Avenue like ladies of the evening on the way to a golden score with Big Daddy.
The United States Conference of Mayors has assembled the most ridiculous and repulsive example of government excess I think I have ever seen. Here is a PDF file of the document which stretches to 344 pages. One of the most alarming features of this civic gluttony is the gift list request for funds to buy military SWAT assault equipment for police forces like the examples offered here by Texas blogger and Reason.com contributor, Trey Garrison:
- Frisco wants $125,000 for an armored vehicle and $200,000 for a mobile command vehicle. You know, for all that gang tank warfare going on up in Frisco.
- McKinney wants $5 million for SWAT toys and stuff.
- North Richland Hills wants $51,000 for volunteer patrol volunteers. Let’s throw in $10 for a dictionary so they can look up the word “volunteer.”
- Irving wants $5 million for biometric scanners, digital cameras, RFID scanners — nothing Big Brother there.
- Grand Prairie wants $1.25 million for nicer landscaping around the public safety building.
- And finally, Arlington is really gearing up for urban warfare. Arlington wants $1.6 million for SWAT toys including more equipment for those deadly but camera-friendly no-knock raids, $56,000 for military grade carbines, $625,000 for unmanned aerial surveillance drones, and $130,000 for “covert ops.”
Here is the “Public Safety” wish list from the US Conference of Mayors.
Radley Balko, of The Agitator and contributing editor of Reason, offers these galling examples of cops gone Rambo:
• Sparks, Nevada wants $600,000 to purchase a “live fire” house its SWAT team can shoot up, and another $420,000 for a SWAT armored vehicle.
• Pleasanton, California wants $250,000 to buy a vehicle for its SWAT team.
• Gary, Indiana wants $750,000 for a host of “modernization” upgrades to its police department, including “sub-automatic machine guns” and an “armored vehicl” [sic].
• Hampton, Virginia wants a whopping $3.5 million for “Air Tactical Unit Support and Equipment,” which I’m pretty sure means they want a sweet helicopter for the SWAT team.
• Ottawa, Illinois (population: 18,307) wants $60,000 to purchase, among other things, five “tactical entry rifles.”
• Glendale Heights, Illinois wants $96,000 to purchase red light cameras, and another $67,000 to hire someone to monitor them.
• Toward a more Orwellian America! The following cities requested stimulus funds to supplement, initiate, or upgrade public surveillance camera systems: Brockton, Massachusetts; Buffalo, New York; Burnsville, Minnesota; Caguas, Puerto Rico; Cerritos, California; Columbia, South Carolina; Compton, California; Homestead, Florida; Hormigueros, Puerto Rico; Indianapolis, Indiana; Inglewood, California; Lewiston, Maine; Lorain, Ohio; Lynn, Massachusetts; Marion, Ohio; Merced, California; New Rochelle, New York; North Richland Hills, Texas; Oakland, California; Orange, New Jersey; Orem, Utah; Orlando, Florida; Pembroke Pines, Florida; Ponce, Puerto Rico; Riverdale, Illinois; Shreveport, Louisiana; Silver City, New Mexico; Sumter, South Carolina; Tallahassee, Florida; Warren, Ohio; and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Winston-Salem, North Carolina requested just under $85 million in security-related stimulation. But top prize goes to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is asking the rest of the country to stimulte its economy with a whopping $135 million in public safety-related requests.
All in all, America’s mayors asking for a little over $5.5 billion in public safety “stimulus.”
The city of La Porte, Texas has applied for $700,000 to build a “Lifestyle Center” while the city of Houston wants a whopping $175,000,000 to build the “Metro Houston Intermodal Terminal” in downtown Houston. I could go on, but I am nauseated by reading these documents. Readers will have to carry on in my absence while I try to recover.
Filed Under Front Page · · · · 
Print This Post
··
Comments
27 Responses to “Militarizing Police Depts. With Your Bailout Money”
Search
Our Sponsors
Poll
Loading ...LST Book Club
-
Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy
by Natan Sharansky -
Fear No Evil
by Natan Sharansky -
The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror
by Anatoly Shcharansky -
The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul
by Yoram Hazony -
Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks -
Snobbery: The American Version
by Joseph Epstein -
A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles
by Thomas Sowell
Texpat, take half a bottle of that PINK STUFF and continue on, since you being the LST big time contributor that you are and earn the BIG bucks. We will leave it up to you to continue the story and not I. Great post.
The police militarization pork is probably the single most disgusting aspect of the stimulus free for all.
It is bad enough that this stuff is wholly unnecessary and wasteful. But unlike other items of pork in the bill, these types of expenditures pose a physical danger to innocent civilians whenever they are deployed.
There are some completely offensive things in the pork bill other than this. But last I checked, condoms can’t be used to mow down innocent bystanders in a botched SWAT raid.
Looking on the bright side, the flash-bang grenades didn’t torch the house, the police didn’t shoot the dog, and the kids were apparently unharmed.
This was a gun bust, not a drug bust. Typically, when significant amounts of contraband are found (cash, guns or drugs) the raiding organizations go orgasmic and seek publicity for their achievements.
When they mum up about a bust, it typically means that they screwed up.
Also from Balko/Cato, this interesting Interactive map of Botched Paramilitary Police Raids: An Epidemic of “Isolated Incidents
Yes Virginia, there is reason for grave concern.
Texpat, I find this whole comparison to prostitutes to be patently unfair.
With a prostitute you know in advance what you are getting, and what it will cost. That’s truth in advertising and honest commerce.
To compare them to mayors or any other politician is grossly unfair and besmirches the dignity of prostitutes across the country. You owe every hooker in the land an apology.
Where are the requests for more prisons so the really bad guys can serve longer sentences?
Texpat, et al: I agree that the entire stimulus package monstrosity should be shot down [pun intended], and agree that the red light cameras are the most egregious subversion of criminal activity being shoved into civil court for the sole purpose of being a money grab (Since they’re put up by for-profit ventures, just why do they need funding?) for the primary purpose of collecting fines without the inconvenience of actually going to court. However, the rest of that stuff, speaking in large generalities, is not completely without merit. HOWEVER, it is certainly not the purview of the federal government. If it’s important enough to the local population, let them come up with the money.
As to the armored vehicles, etc; check again on what’s spilling across the border with Mexico.
Now, $60K for “five tactical entry rifles” (whatever those are) sounds rather expensive, on a per-item basis.
Clearly, the landscaping mentioned is not the job of the feds. (Hey, I use a lawn crew which works for $20 a pop.)
Actually, the “live fire” house is not such a bad idea. What do you think the military does for practice? Real bullets, real buildings.
There is, if you remember for a minute, very much some real-life experience of when the outlaws are better armed than the law enforcement.
To me, the whole answer revolves around the issue of who is supposed to be paying for it. And it is NOT the federal government.
my 2¢,
– Ken
They must also need money for dealing with unauthorized cow costumes.
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2009/02/08/schools-and-cops-a-dangerous-combination.aspx
Your welcome Phil
#2 Phil_M…for once I agree with you on this “cop-nonsense”…forget the goodies and the toys and add about a billion to my pension fund instead…now that is what I would call tax dollars well spent!
Enjoy…
Armored vehicles to a border county in New Mexico - A-OK. In addition to the criminal threat, there’s actually a use and a function for them there - APCs usually tend to be designed for off-road performance, making them ideally suited for making a bust against a heavily armed drug cartel in the middle of the desert.
But APCs for main street in Peoria? That’s a different story. There is absolutely NO legitimate law enforcement need for that type of weaponry in a typical populated area.
In addition to 50 cals on the border, I’d give them mortars and TOW missiles too. That’ll make the libs go crazy
#10 b45
Some 105mm Howitzers wouldn’t hurt, either.
Not that it should come as a shock to anybody in the militarized police state we live in, but a judge in Pennsylvania was just indicted for taking kickbacks to sentence juvenile offenders to privately owned boot camp facilities for minor crimes.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090211/ap_on_re_us/courthouse_kickbacks
In one case the judge sentenced a 16 year old to three months in boot camp for building a fake myspace page that made fun of her school principal.
Forget military industrial complexes. We have a police industrial complex in this country, and you can safely bet that the suppliers of all these police toys are firmly behind the pork package.
All this while the violent crime rate is down in most of the country and the border remains open. Flashback - at the time of the American Revolution, when the Second Amendment was written, the private citizens had the same equipment as the military. Do you think they would object to a call for parity?
#6 Ken Kelley
For 600,000 bucks, I’ll fly the whole Sparks, Nevada police department to Houston and let them shoot up 6 $90K houses.
Not wanting to dig through all the pages but it surprises me our own limo liberal Bill WHite didn’t have his hand out.
haven’t the mayors heard of the Militia?
If the Cy-Fair School district board had been smart they would have requested $80 mil to pay off that sport complex just to get their sorry asses out of trouble.
METRO Police Department is sending a group of officers to SWAT school and have a SORT division with bomb experts and a designated sniper.
Gunny Hathcock trained police snipers from all over the world when he was the instructor for the Virginia Beach PD. I asked him about Ruby Ridge once. He didn’t say anything, but he just hung his head and shook it back and forth. I didn’t ask him anything else, so what that meant is open to interpretation. But I took it to mean that the snipers employed there did a sorry job with their own personal conduct.
The worst part of this foolishness is it feeds the paranoid delusions of the FEMA-camp troofers.
Wow! This is not a good thing unless we are all going to help secure the border from the ILLEGALS/terrorists. Of course, we hope these police departments/enforcement groups will get the proper training so they will not accidentally self-destruct.
A couple months ago HS Precision firearms, a long range rifle manufacturer, received a product testimonial from Lon Horiuchi - the infamous sniper at the Ruby Ridge shootout.
Their customer base went nuts and they issued an immediate statement, dropping him from their future catalogs.
http://www.hsprecision.com/thenews/news.htm
Some here might also remember that the DA in Idaho indicted Horiuchi for manslaughter after the Ruby Ridge shootout. He pulled some strings in the “law enforcement community” and got a federal judge to clear him of any wrongdoing on account of sovereign immunity.
Once you open up the “Taxpayer” Bank, they all get in line for some “stimulus”. Heck how about giving some money to me to fix my car that’s just as good a reason as any and besides it was MY MONEY anyway.
I’m MUCH more cocerned about the 4 Plus Billion For ACORN .
concerned opps
It’s done . . . we can whine all we want, we’re screwed.
I’m just gonna pray that 2012 does bring a change in energetic levels, instead of the core of the earth shooting out into space. And plant a big garden, hehehe!