You Better Sit Again, Citizen
Radley Balko, author of the book Rise of the Warrior Cop was on Democracy Now! last Friday talking about the increased militarization of police departments across the US. One part of his interview really stood out to me, where he discusses a commercial for the armored personnel carriers we’ve been seeing on the news, the BearCat manufactured by Lenco. (The photo above shows a Lenco BearCat in action last week, in suburban Boise, Idaho, via KTVB.)
Says Balko:
…a few years ago, I wrote about a town in New Hampshire that sort of rebelled against this. Their town was going to buy a BearCat with one of these [Department of Homeland Security] grants. And what I thought was fascinating was I interviewed somebody from the Lenco company and asked him about this, and he said this is all overblown, that if a BearCat shows up on the scene, it’s much more likely to be filled with crisis negotiators and psychiatrists than it is with, you know, militarized cops.
And I found a video that Lenco sends to police departments across the country to market the BearCats. This is what they send them so that they’ll want to buy a BearCat with this DHS money. And the video shows camouflage-clad police officers piled into the BearCat. It shows up. They get out. They start shooting things. At one point it pokes a hole into a building and injects tear gas. And it was all set to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” You know, these are not images and sounds of crisis negotiators or de-escalation experts. This was all about militarism. This was all about conflicts and aggression. And that’s how the company markets this piece of equipment to police departments, which I think says a lot.
So I went online and found Lenco’s “commercial” for the BearCat, myself, check it out, this is Officer Friendly’s wet dream of what he wants to do to you:
