09.13.14

The MRAP, big hardware for the culture of fear

Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 11:32 am by George Smith

Chagrined over having to get rid of it.

Today the New York Times ran a story that’s been floating around California for a couple weeks, fallout from the Ferguson riots and the national discussion on he arrival of heavy armored cars on American streets.

The city of Davis was perhaps not the best place to shove an MRAP into, it being the town where a peaceful student protest was painfully put down in now famous imagery of security blithely hosing down young people with pepper spray.

From the NYT:

The police department of this modest college town is among the latest California beneficiaries of surplus military equipment: a $700,000 armored car that is the “perfect vehicle,??? the police chief told the City Council, “to perform rescues of victims and potential victims during active shooter incidents??? …

But the City Council directed [Chief Landy Black] last month to get rid of it in the face of an uproar that had swept through this community, with many invoking the use of similar equipment by the police against protesters in Ferguson, Mo., after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.

“This thing has a turret — it’s the kind of thing that is used in Afghanistan and Iraq,??? said Dan Wolk, the mayor. “Our community is the kind of community that is not going to take well to having this kind of vehicle. We are not a crime-ridden city.???

Kudos for having the fortitude to make an emphatic stand and statement.

While some police in very large metropolitan police departments can make a case, not necessarily always a good one, about the need for what is a heavy armored fighting vehicle, most of the burgs, which is where many of them are now, can’t.

The country’s medium-sized and small towns do not need combat-tested armor nor are they likely to. Mines and artillery barrages are not coming to this country and the number of deployed MRAPs now far outweighs, out guns and out numbers the potential for terrorism or the need to be ready to put down insurrection with overwhelming force.

Fear is what has driven the spread of the MRAP. The theology is that there is always the potential for some terrible criminal or terrorist assault somewhere in America and that these are the things, along with many others, that must be around to guarantee the safety of the police and the public. It is a nationwide view that feeds itself. Under this logic there can never be an end to the acquisition and stockpiling of weapons.

This well done video, with a point — When Did Americans Become the Enemy — nicely shows the ridiculous (and really now kind of oppressive) nature of the Department of Defense’s giveaways to small town America.

The New York Times includes the argument made by in Los Angeles about the infamous North Hollywood shootout of 1997. Now seventeen years past, two bank-robbers armed with fully automatic assault rifles and kitted in bullet-resistant clothing, engaged the police in a firefight that was carried on television.

In the battle, they were killed. Eleven police officers were wounded.

However, the passage of time and history have shown this is an outlier. Not a sign of things to come but that kind of event that may happen once or twice in a lifetime. (For a laugh, re-watch the movie Predator 2. Released in 1990, it is cast in the Los Angeles of 1997, the beginning throwing the movie-viewer into a pitched battle in downtown Los Angeles, one between machine-gun and grenade armed “Colombians” and an, of course, out-gunned police detachment. Even the North Hollywood gun battle that actual year wasn’t as apocalyptic. And since, Predator 2’s Hollywood interpretation of a future LA looks increasingly anachronistic.)

Newly released information from the DoD shows that Los Angeles County police forces field nine Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles.

The Pentagon’s MRAP program was a consequence of the war based on fraud in Iraq. In essence, it was free money to arms manufacturers globally, if they could come up with vehicle impervious to roadside bombs and large buried mines.

The result of the program was a number of only roughly similar vehicles, the commonality being they were all huge, heavy, armored and expensive, ranging in price from around 700,000 to over 900,000 dollars.

Search Google images and you can see the various models like the MaxxPro or the Caiman, the latter coming in four-wheel and six wheel models, optimized for the US Marine Corps but now plainly visible in police departments.

The Davis MRAP is, I think, a MaxxPro. The link above shows the city of Guthrie’s Caiman. The town, population 10,600 or so, is in Logan County, Oklahoma.

These vehicles are a burden on the taxpayers of such towns, one of the reasons the DoD wanted to offload them while still maintaining ownership. It would seem they must be covered by a special kind of insurance and they must be maintained. Can just anyone in small town America maintain a Caiman MRAP? Where do the spare tires come from and what do they cost?

“The Council’s decision set off waves of concern among police officials across the state and highlighted the fact that California — whose crime rate, like those of many other states, is on the decline — has one of the highest concentrations of surplus military equipment in the nation,” writes the Times.

Ultimately, little will be done, except perhaps at the local level as in Davis, about MRAP distribution. Legislation to control or stop police acceptance of such things will die in Congress, as everything does.

And while the President has indicated he supports looking into whether or not DoD gear to police departments ought to be slowed, will not pursue it. The obvious reason, again, is it will immediately be a political millstone. The other side will predictably tell its base that the President, the socialist foreign-born tyrant, is trying to disarm the police.

The presence of the MRAP is not only a product of America’s Culture of Fear. It’s a WhiteManistan thing, too.

Don’t believe it. Look at all the pictures of them in police departments. Note the majority of faces, when shown.

It is within this context that the decision made by the city of Davis is a remarkable one. For various reasons, one mentioned previously,
occasionally other towns have decided they will disengage, too.

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