Quantifying the additional killings commited by cops when they get military weapons

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 1:39 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Quantifying the additional killings commited by cops
when they get military weapons
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


[Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]

Quantifying the additional killings commited by cops when they get military
weapons
By Cory Doctorow
Jul 1 2017
<https://boingboing.net/2017/07/01/cops-are-civilians.html>

The US Department of Defense's 1033 program sends "surplus" military
equipment to US police forces ("surplus" in quotes because military
contractors lobby for the US military to buy more weapons than they need in
order to feed materiel to the program), which has created a situation in
which cops show up in their communities literally clad in the armor of an
occupying army.

This is reflected in many ways, such as the use of "civilian" to denote
someone who isn't a police officer. Police are also civilians, which is why
the military police are called "Military Police" -- to contrast them with
"civilian police." If your police force considers you a "civilian" then
they, perforce, consider themselves to be military occupiers, not community
peace officers.

A academic trio consisting of a political scientist, a psychologist, and a
social scientist examined the use of force records from similar police
forces with differing levels of military equipment and training transfers
under 1033 to determine whether militarizing the police results in
increased use of force by the officers.

Conclusion: "We find a positive and statistically significant relationship
between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings
across all models."

Moreover, they used clever methods to determine that the causal arrow runs
in the direction they hypothesized, showing that it wasn't that cops in
violent communities got more military stuff and were thus involved in more
violence -- rather, getting military goods made the cops more violent.

[snip]

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