The Police: Institutionalized Terrorists?

Your post is right on target, in this brave new world we find ourselves in there are no longer Police Officers, they are now the POlice FORCE..
Just look at the uniforms, the covered faces, the huge amonts of military equipment now being placed within the local police departments.

We are in deep trouble from every direction....

From Local Police to Occupying Army, or LESO: The Greater of Many Evils
by William Norman Grigg
by William Norman Grigg
There are Peacekeepers deployed in US cities, but they're not under UN command.
They're armored personnel carriers supplied to “local” police agencies for little or no cost through the Pentagon's Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), established in 1995 as part of the Defense Logistics Agency.
Since that time, the LESO has made huge amounts of military hardware – from boots to helmets to ammo to helicopters and the “Peacekeeper” APCs – available to local and state police agencies, often at little or no cost.
If you're interested in watching the Pentagon's promotional video for the LESO's campaign to militarize “local” police, go to this page maintained by the DLA. At the bottom of the links you'll find one leading to “LESO Get With The Program Video.” Follow that link, and – assuming you can withstand the barrage of really obnoxious whitebread canned pseudo-funk PSL music – you will have the entire program explained to you.
One cop said of the use of a Military vehicle, “Well, it sure ain't an RV: This "Peacekeeper" Armored Personnel Carrier is listed by the Charleston, S.C. Police Department as a "Patrol Vehicle."

Fred Baille, a boileplater-spewing spokesdrone for the DLA's Distribution Realization Policy Directorate (a suitably Soviet title for a police-state agency), explains that through the LESO program, “local” law enforcement agencies can receive “excess” military gear of practically any description “as if they were a DoD organization.”
What this means, in practical and tangible terms, is that your local police has the same access to military hardware as any branch of the armed services. In everything but brand name, they're domestic appendages of the Pentagon.

The “Get With The Program” video demonstrates how easy it is for police agencies to snag the swag: Simply call up the LESO website, fill out a form “justifying” the order, and send it in. And getting “surplus” Pentagon equipment is depicted as a civic-minded thing to do, since getting the federally subsidized military gear actually helps keep taxes low.
Not discussed in the video are hidden costs of that subsidy. The monetary costs are borne by taxpayers nation-wide. But a much larger price is paid when communities no longer control their own police agencies.
When local police are supported by local tax funds, they are locally accountable. When those police are materially and financially supported by Washington – to any extent – the locus of control and accountability shifts there. That is the principle recognized in the Supreme Court's 1942 Wickard v. Filburn decision.
The Bush Regime is trying to expand that principle in the case of Joshua Wolf, a videoblogger imprisoned on federal contempt charges last fall for refusing to surrender videotape sought by federal prosecutors.
The Feds claimed that Wolf's video contained footage of an attack by rioters on a San Francisco Police Department squad car during a July 2005 protest. Wolf maintained that he didn't have the footage sought by prosecutors – which allegedly showed the squad car being put on fire – and that under California's shield law, he didn't have to surrender the tape. The Feds countered that because the SFPD receives federal subsidies (for counter-narcotics and “homeland security” efforts, among other things), the damaged squad car is federal property, and so the matter belongs in federal court, where California's shield law doesn't apply.
That claim has yet to be resolved in the courts, but given that claims of this sort have been consistently vindicated since, oh, about 1937, the suspense isn't exactly killing me.
Which leaves us here:
Any police agency that receives so much as a particle of federal aid is no longer a local police force. It is, in principle, a federal army of occupation.
Yes, most policemen (including those seen in LESO's promotional video) are decent and honorable people who honestly believe that they are serving and protecting their communities. But the people who fund and control them are neither decent, nor honorable, and at a time of their choosing they can execute Order 66 (if you'll pardon the allusion) and turn that army against us.
For decades, since the Kennedy administration unveiled its Freedom From War program for UN-administered “general and complete disarmament,” many observers have wondered when the blue helmets of the UN “Peace Force” would be dispatched to disarm Americans and put down patriotic resistance. It's not impossible that such a scenario could eventually be played out, however unlikely it is at present.
People who focus on the UN as the source of the immediate threat, however, are preoccupied with the wrong threat vector.
January 31, 2007
William Norman Grigg [send him mail] writes the Pro Libertate blog.
Copyright © 2007 William Norman Grigg
William Norman Grigg Archives
[link to www.lewrockwell.com]

I know. While some are still thinking they are good, the overall rules and regulations don't allow for this very often.

I find the news out of Canada interesting, where they found the Toronto officers dressed as masked anarchist's ready to start things to the police could attack an innocent and peaceful crowed?

We would never have even heard of it here, much less an admission that they were officers. Not in the U.S.

The militarization of the domestic police
[link to worldnetdaily.com]
Joseph Farah
World Net Daily

Posted: November 6, 1997**** this was written 10 yr ago ***


In California alone, more than $30 million in excess military hardware has been distributed -- mostly free of charge -- to more than 200 law enforcement agencies since November 1996.
Nationally, a total of 43,253 items originally valued at $204.3 million went to more than 11,000 government law enforcement agencies in all 50 states over a one-year period.
Bayonets, weapons of deadly hand-to-hand combat, have bolstered the arsenals of police in 23 states as part of a massive flow of surplus military gear.
What gives? Why is all this deadly hardware purchased with U.S. taxpayer dollars to fight foreign enemies now being turned on unsuspecting American civilians at the very moment they are being disarmed by local, state and federal governments?
The militarization of local police departments is getting so brazen even many local governments are having second thoughts about the program. In Los Angeles, for instance, one of the nation's biggest police departments is saying it was a mistake to accept the bayonets and is shipping them back to the Army.
More than 6,400 surplus bayonets went to law enforcement agencies between Oct. 1, 1996 and Sept. 30, 1997, according to the federal Defense Logistics Agency in Washington. But what on earth would domestic police departments do with bayonets?
For once I agree with the American Civil Liberties Union.
"We can imagine no circumstances whatsoever where it would be appropriate for a local police agency to put a bayonet on the end of a rifle," said John Crew, an ACLU attorney.
It turns out they were requisitioned by a sergeant in the LAPD. But what about elsewhere? What about North Carolina, Connecticut and Indiana where far more bayonets were distributed? And why is the federal government even making this stuff available for the purposes of domestic law enforcement? Do they so distrust the American people? Evidently so. Washington won't even report to the people where the gear is going.
Just imagine if the Illinois state police had bayonets on their rifles the day they kicked down Shirley Allen's door in Roby? Instead of being unfairly incarcerated in a mental ward right now, she might have been shish kebab.
This whole program turning over military gear to local cops got started in 1990 with the requirement that agencies use the weapons to fight drugs. But that rule was quietly dropped by the Clinton administration last year when the program was dramatically expanded.
What other goodies are local and state police departments getting from the military? Everything from fatigues to office equipment to helicopters, armored vehicles, body armor, assault rifles and night-vision gear. Hmmm. I'll sleep better at night knowing I'm so well-protected.
All of this wouldn't be quite so alarming if it didn't occur simultaneously with the militarization of the growing ranks of federal cops. There are now more than 80,000 armed federal personnel involved in law enforcement in agencies as diverse as the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency. It's the standing army the Founding Fathers so feared might develop along with a strong central government.
Another ominous trend is the growing cooperation between not only the dozens of federal law enforcement agencies which routinely perform joint military-syle raids on unsuspecting civilians, but also the way the feds work so closely with local and state cops. The federal government has also taken the lead role in training local and state police officers as well at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center that has plans to turn out some 25,000 new U.S. cops each of the next three years.
On top of that, if you really want to venture into the realm of the paranoid, there's the plan currently before Congress to authorize the hiring of more foreign police -- specifically those from the Royal Hong Kong Police department -- into the federal law enforcement agencies. Such hiring is already permissible, under earlier legislation, at the local and state level.
What ever happened to the concept of "government of the people, by the people and for the people"? Have we strayed so far? Has the schism between government and the governed become so large that only one side can be trusted with guns? Is this not the path only to tyranny?