Civilian Cops

Our police are not part of the armed forces. They are civilians (even though the cops themselves refer to you and me as "civilians").

Restated: The police are not military, they are civilians.

Then why do the police carry military weapons? Why, in places that restrict the types of weapons that civilians can carry, do the cops get a pass? Why, in places where magazine capacity is limited, do the cops get to carry weapons with larger magazines?

The whole Dorner thing, from the way the cops shot up the pickup truck driven by the two women delivering newspapers, to the way they "handled" the siege of the residence that Dorner died in, was done with a use of arms more in line with a third-world military's "spray and pray" than anything else. From what I saw of the whole sorry affair, you could have knocked the sights off the cops' guns with a hammer and not changed anything.

Dorner was an asshole. He murdered a cop's daughter and her betrothed. I cry no tears for him.

But what Dorner did was expose, yet again, the over-militarization of the police forces in this country. Dorner drove home the "occupying army" narrative.

That needs to be changed.

I have seen things where various sheriffs and other officers have said that they will not step on the Constitution. Well, that is laughable. The last forty years of the "War on Drugs" have been nothing but a watering down of Constitutional guarantees.

More on that to come.