Fun Quiz

A quiz on military style police tactics. [Link]

Today's Quiz:

You should find this one more difficult than the previous quiz.

Police did not carry out an aggressive, military-style raid to accomplish which of the following purposes?

    (a) To find the source of a parody Twitter feed

    (b) To check a bar for underage drinkers

    (c) To recover a large number of overdue library books

    (d) To enforce copyright law against a DJ

    (e) To check whether barbers had valid barbering licenses

    (f) To apprehend Tibetan monks who overstayed their visas

    (g) They did that in all these cases

I think it is worth considering this one for a moment, so I'm going to put the answer and further discussion after the jump below.

If you find it slightly terrifying that they did this (and by "this," I mean used a SWAT team or a gang of officers using similar tactics) for any of those purposes, congratulations, you are sane. The answer is (c): to my knowledge, a SWAT team has never been used to recover overdue library books, but I think that example is no less ridiculous than the others. And inevery one of those other cases, police aggressively stormed the premises with guns drawn, wearing body armor and even masks, though they had no reason to think there would be any danger.

The Tibetan monks were here on a peace mission, for Christ's sake.

Well, not for Christ's sake, but you know what I mean.

Welcome back to the 50's

When do they take out the attack dogs and water hoses? [Link]

The protests were peaceful for many hours, and turned chaotic when police shot rubber bullets, tear gas (or another form of noxious gas), used an LRAD sonic weapon to blast the crowd with painful sound, and assaulted protesters.

Livestreams: one, two, three.

From the Los Angeles Times:

"Hands up! Don't shoot!" demonstrators chanted as they walked down West Florissant Avenue in a permitted march. Some young men at the back of the group raised their middle fingers as they passed a Ferguson Police Department officer, shouting profanities at him. About 30 demonstrators, who were almost all black, sat down in the middle of an intersection near a line of about a dozen riot police, who were all white.

Huffington Post reporter Ryan J. Reilly and Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery were arrested. They were among reporters live-tweeting events in Ferguson this afternoon, and ducked into a McDonalds to recharge their smartphones and other devices. Subsequent tweets indicated they were taken into police custody. Lowery confirms: "Was arrested. Also Ryan Reilly of Huff Po. Assaulted and arrested. Officers decided we weren't leaving McDonalds quickly enough, shouldn't have been taping them." Both journalists have been released, possibly thanks to a phone call from Matt Pearce of the LA Times to the Ferguson police chief, asking why the men were being held.

"Ferguson chief tells me Lowery and Reilly's arresters were 'probably somebody who didn't know better," tweeted Pearce. Here is video of the arrest.

I would hope this will be the catalyst to change the militarization of policing in America, but I fear it will require more incidents like this.

Why does China's Moon Rover exhibit show a nuclear mushroom cloud over Europe?

This is worrying. [Link]

China has made a major diplomatic faux pas by illustrating its Moon Rover exhibit with a stock image of a nuclear mushroom cloud over Europe.

While it's probably just an embarrassing error, it's still an unsettling image given the Chinese government's recent statements concerning plans to build a missile base on the Moon.

On December 3, The Beijing Times reported that Chinese experts are discussing whether the People’s Liberation Army could establish a missile base on the Moon. Per the Taiwan-based, English-language site Want China Times:

An expert from the China National Space Administration's Lunar Exploration Programme Center told the [Beijing Times]that China plans to send its first astronaut to the moon by 2030. By 2050, the moon could become a base from which to send the country's manned spacecraft to explore deep space, the source said. [Want China Times]

Innocent enough, right? But the source added that the Moon could be transformed into a deadly weapon. Like the Death Star in Star Wars, the Moon could be used as a military battle station, bristling with ballistic missiles that could be launched against any military target on Earth.

Lest you think this is all science fiction, there has been a worrying trend toward a militarization of space. Officially, the Outer Space Treaty bars states from placing nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction in orbit around Earth, installing them on the Moon or any other celestial body, or otherwise stationing them in outer space. It exclusively limits the use of the Moon and other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes. China, the United States, and Russia are all party to this treaty.

Police shooting dogs

They do it too much. [Link]

Police officers receive extensive training about the use of force when it is applied against humans. But how many departments provide training on dealing with pets? Very few, says the Humane Society. This despite the fact that, according to a Justice Department paper (“The Problem of Dog-Related Incidents and Encounters”), 39 percent of U.S. homes have dogs. More than half of dog owners “consider their dogs family members,” it continues, “and another 45.1 percent view them as companions or pets....”
Do we really need systematic training to combat a few isolated incidents, however unfortunate? The question rests on a false premise. Civil-liberties writer Radley Balko notes that over a nine-year period Milwaukee officers killed 434 dogs – about one every eight days. And that’s just one city. Across the country, according to Justice, “the majority of [police] shooting incidents involve animals, most frequently dogs.”
But surely those shootings occur because the animals themselves pose a serious threat, right? Nope. The Justice Department says not only that “dogs are seldom dangerous” but that even when they are, “the overwhelming majority of dog bites are minor, causing either no injury at all or injuries so minor that no medical care is required.” As Balko writes, “If dangerous dogs are so common, one would expect to find frequent reports of vicious attacks on meter readers, postal workers, firemen, and delivery workers. But according to a spokesman from the United States Postal Service, serious dog attacks on mail carriers are vanishingly rare.”
Yet serious – deadly – attacks against dogs are all too common. They shouldn’t be. And the solutions are obvious: Departmental policies, backed by state law, should require police officers to use lethal force against companion animals only as a last resort. Officers should receive training in safe and non-lethal methods of animal control – and in dog behavior: “An approaching dog is almost always friendly,” according to the Justice Department; “a dog who feels threatened will usually try to keep his distance.”

Radley Balko documents this problem in greater detail in his important new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. As he points out, dog shootings are part of a broader pattern of police using increasingly aggressive military-style tactics against people as well as pets, even when the circumstances don’t even come close to justifying it. He also notes that many police departments never punish officers who wrongfully shoot dogs even in the most egregious cases, such as this one.

Balko and Hinkle recommend improved training for police, similar to that which postal workers get. As Balko points out, US Postal Service employees often encounter dogs, but virtually always avoid injuries without resorting to violence against the animals. Such training should be coupled with serious sanctions for officers who shoot dogs without good cause. Ideally, they should be subject to criminal and civil penalties comparable to those imposed on civilians who shoot pets without justification. After all, it is reasonable to expect trained police officers to exercise better judgment and self-control than ordinary citizens when it comes to the use of force. People who can’t even live up to the same standards expected of civilians probably should not be police officers in the first place.