Book Review.... "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces"

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bblhd672
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Re: Book Review.... "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces"

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Post by bblhd672 »

Abraham wrote:I'm almost finished with the book.

Over the years, I've read a lot of horror from H.G.Wells to Stephen King to Clive Baxter and on and on...

Of all of those books, this is the MOST horrifying!

I had no idea...
I've been working on reading this book for several weeks now. It is very difficult because of a number of "truths" I believed in are proved to be nothing but petty politics and power trips. This is a perspective changing book.

It's fairly easy in 2017 to look back at the "war of drugs" as revealed in this book and say that the "war" is a failure. You would have thought that politicians and law enforcement would have learned something positive from Prohibition, yet it is obvious that the lessons learned was that the people can and must be subjugated by those in power by any means necessary, regardless of the protections provided by the Constitution.

Elected officials at all levels of local, state and federal government, senators, congressmen and presidents have all trashed liberty in favor of power over the people. Judges at all levels from local to SCOTUS have been complicit in trashing liberty and freedom.

America has slowly become a police state and I don't know if we can ever vote ourselves back to having liberty and freedom. Very sad for future generations who may very well experience the boot of government upon their necks.
The left lies about everything. Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value, but it has never been a left-wing value. People on the left say whatever advances their immediate agenda. Power is their moral lodestar; therefore, truth is always subservient to it. - Dennis Prager
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Re: Book Review.... "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces"

#17

Post by The Annoyed Man »

C-dub wrote:I've been thinking about this for a couple of days now since finishing this book. One of the arguments the author makes is that illegal drugs are a victim-less crime. I would mostly agree with this were it not for the other crimes drug users commit to pay for their habit and the numbers of kids that get drawn into drug use and become addicted and or die, but that sure doesn't warrant the use of force described in this book that escalated over the past four decades in the "war" on drugs.

The author also links the jargon and sentiment to the "war" on terror today. After the attacks yesterday on London the talk is again all about what LE needs to do to prevent these types of attacks. I now hesitate when I think about what that will mean and what new power or authority LE will be given to attempt to do that.
There's a program series running right now on one of the channels like NatGeo, or Discovery (I don't remember which), which chronicles the War on Drugs up to the present, and its effect on various people. For instance, there's an episode on the rise and fall of El Chapo. The series even touches on Fast & Furious......not in any great detail, but as a corollary to the War on Drugs, which I will call "WOD" from now on for typing's sake. The problem is that, in an effort to eradicate a societal scourge, gov't is serially violating the Constitution in a number of areas. Examples: Asset Forfeiture is a specific product of the WOD which robs people of their property rights without due process; Fast & Furious tried to use the WOT as a thinly veiled attempt to attack the 2nd Amendment rights of people who had nothing to do with the WOD.....in fact, directly causing the deaths of innocent people who had nothing to do with the WOD; the WOD has been serially used (as pointed out by the book which is the topic of this thread) to abuse the 4th Amendment in other ways besides Asset Forfeiture, to the point where it resulted in the deaths of innocent homeowners with total lack of accountability on the part of their murderers. These gov'tal attitudes have carried over into the WOT, where people are spied on by NSA and other agencies, without their being "persons of interest", let alone under specific suspicion of anything. People are placed on the "no-fly' list, without any explanation for why, without a shred of due process, and without any legal recourse to rectify the situation which is within the financial means of most citizens. I could go on.

What generally gets left undiscussed in any detail by conservatives, liberals, and the Democrat Steno Pool (AKA "the media"), is what will happen if the WOD were somehow ended. The demand isn't instantly going to go away. We have a WOD because there was first a demand for drugs, and in the strictest sense, El Chapo (I'm told that's Spanish for "the Chapo" ;-) ) and his ilk are merely being good capitalists and fulfilling the demand. This speaks to two things, what is so all-fired bad about the real world that people can't deal with it and need that chemical vacation, and what happens to all those people who are currently poisoning themselves? They are not going to go away. They are going to continue using, and in the cases of those who are more completely addicted, they are going to continue committing robberies, prostitution, and other criminal violations of the law in order to obtain the money necessary to support their addictions. Do we throw ALL of them in prison? Do we agree to spend a portion of our annual enforcement/prosecution/incarceration budget on detox and addiction treatment instead? Are there structural issues with our society and culture which need to be examined and addressed in order to eradicate the demand? And over and above all of that, are we willing to abandon the constitutional principles on which the nation is founded, if that is what it would take to accomplish a transition from "war" to "peacetime" status with regard to drugs?

I don't think it is possible. In the same way that a single comet strike might have been a global dinosaur killer, it may turn out that the WOD was a bullet in the heart of the Constitution, and the WOT is the "el presidente" between it's eyes.

This is a separate discussion, but it seems painfully obvious to me that the gov't is out of control. If the voters won't or can't rein it in at the polls, and if politicians campaign promises don't extend past Election Day, then sooner or later The People are going to get out of control, and it is going to be really, REALLY ugly. And as has been pointed out elsewhere in other threads and articles, the current effort by the left to nullify the election is a de-facto challenge to the voters whose votes won that election. When you tell half the country that their votes don't count when they legally won, according to constitutional guidelines, then you've also told them that they have no other recourse but violence. As it happens, the side that is being disenfranchised by the nullification efforts is also the side that owns most of the guns - FAR more guns than are owned by LEO agencies or the military, or any other source of federal force that the left mistakenly thinks that it can count on to enforce that disenfranchisement and make it stick.

So far, the violations of rights documented in this book are largely unopposed by the citizenry. Oh sure, the individuals affected and their friends protest mightily.......on Facebook and other Internet forums.....but so far the great body of The People has been unwilling to do much more than shout words. What is really needed are some "Battles of Athens" breaking out all over, which would either signal to gov't that it is time to back down, OR signal to The People that it is time to resist......with violence if necessary. So far, I don't know that the American citizenry has what it takes to do that. BUT..... if the left (or the right, for that matter) succeeds in nullifying elections that have been won fair and square by constitutional means, then Katy bar the door.

I've had to learn to find my optimism in other things, because I have no confidence that either the WOD or the WOT end with more freedom for Americans.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"

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Re: Book Review.... "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces"

#18

Post by thatguyoverthere »

Just finished this book. Wow! I suppose the best single word to describe this book for me would have to be "SHOCKING."

Like many others here, I highly recommend this book. It will be a very interesting volume for anyone curious about the history of policing, the rise of SWAT, the withering of the 4th Amendment and how we got to where we are today.
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Re: Book Review.... "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces"

#19

Post by bblhd672 »

Balko’s latest expose: Little Rock’s dangerous and illegal drug war
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opi ... 0b7f1f7ef5
The left lies about everything. Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value, but it has never been a left-wing value. People on the left say whatever advances their immediate agenda. Power is their moral lodestar; therefore, truth is always subservient to it. - Dennis Prager
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