Historical likelihood for civil war between the people & the

[Woodsman]

I am beginning to wonder about the possibilities of a war between the people of US & the local, state & federal governments as these police keep getting off for killing people. There have been 4 major incidents recently that have gotten full media spotlight. What are your thoughts?

[coldharvest]

Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also. -Kahlil Gibran

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it. - Malcolm X

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.- Thomas Jefferson
I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude.- Thomas Jefferson

My Son, Freedom is best, I tell thee true, of all things to be won. Then never live within the Bond of Slavery. -William Wallace

[OneLungMcClung]

The short version: No.

When you say “war” you likely mean open combat, small arms fire and IEDs, assassinations, a rebel group or loose alliance of people fighting against someone/some entity and for something. We are hardly anywhere near that.

What would this war’s ultimate goal be? For cops to stop killing citizens? How would shooting cops and bombing police stations achieve that? We are home to the most militarized and paramilitary police force in the developed world. This is not an issue of armed forces facing off, nor one of asymmetric warfare, it is not a case of diametrically opposed principals; the core problem here is instead one of disconnect: the police have the job of keeping the peace in increasingly impoverished neighborhoods and are doing it with outdated tactics, and equipment heavy mentality.

Keeping the peace - how does one do that? By recruiting officers of a different race, up arming them, and sending them in to kick ass? Hardly. LAPD was like that all throughout the 1970’s to the 1990’s. Predominantly white, mostly ex-military, heavily armed, these cops took a no-holds barred attitude of kicking people’s asses to keep them in line. Humiliation, beatings, arrests, these were the tools used. And it produced what you would expect: anger in the community. That produced the LA riots…. and a renaissance in LAPD policing. Yes, they can still be dirty bastards, but the reality is that when LAPD started putting more Black, Latino and Asian officers on the streets, and those cops were older (late 20’s early 30’s instead of 22 year olds), and trained on how to talk, you started to see a change in the outcome of policing. Atlanta had the same problem: generally 50% to 65% black, the city was patrolled by an almost all white police force. This would yield problems, as you would expect. Black cops and mixed units made a difference. Atlanta isn’t the sunshine city by any means (and neither is LA), but things got better from a societal standpoint.

That’s what you’ll see here, a continuation of the circle. We need to head back to the community policing model championed by LAPD. Right now we are regressing back to a paramilitary style of policing. It is a by-product of equipment mentality: post 9/11 meant dollars, dollars and dollars that had to be spent. It meant access to military grade equipment: M-16s for everybody, grenade launchers, and armored vehicles. It meant training: training that was developed by Special Forces and the CIA (counter insurgency training, as well as Direct Action urban warfare and building entry tactics that outclassed even LAPD/LA Sheriff’s SWAT tactics and those of FBI’s HRT). Small town cops are getting big war training. Anyone who has worked a Federal job knows that you have to keep spending that money on equipment and training or you don’t get it next fiscal cycle. So that is a self-fulfilling prophecy: a militarized police force with a shit-ton of equipment and training in the shadows of two counter-insurgency wars, that has to keep spending that money on that stuff or it gets cut off from the tit.

Meanwhile, back home, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. What’s a police officer to do? You react the way you are trained.
Ferguson was an example of left-wing media making a problem where there wasn’t one to begin with: a man charged a police officer and tried to take his firearm, and got shot in the process. Cut and dried. But the media made damn sure you knew it was a BLACK “kid” (6’4” 300 lbs), made damn sure you knew it was a WHITE police officer, and made damn sure that it was portrayed, every so softly, as a racist event. They didn’t state much about who taught this “child” to fight with the police, who taught him to rob stores. They didnt talk much about the alternatives that Ferguson needs to proceed with: changes in recruiting, changes in tactics and equipment. A Taser might have made a difference here.

I've had two tasered patients in the last month, both under arrest by Philly PD. Both times, the cops said "If we didn't have these tasers, we would have shot him". It may not have stopped this incident, but you gotta give cops the right tools.

Cleveland? The city obviously needs to redo their background checks and 911 dispatch protocols. My experience with 911 dispatch here in Killadelphia has been morbidly comical – they quite often mumble, get the calls wrong, and occasionally call the wrong hospital. I’m glad I’m not a cop, but especially here. But back to Cleveland: This cop was apparently not fit for hire at another agency, and found to be “sorely lacking” at Cleveland PD. Plus their dispatchers fucked it up and forgot to tell the little part about this maybe being a kid with a maybe toy gun. So officers rolled on a hot call of man with a gun at a playground.... but once again the media fanned the fire: you know it’s a white cop and a little black kid. A tragedy of errors that gets turned into a racist execution by a cracker cop.

New York? Now we’re getting somewhere…. Sort of. Cops use a choke hold (which is not authorized in multiple departments for the very reason of what happened here)… and it looks like NYPD needs to address its use of force policy. But why did it get to choke hold time? Racist ass cracker cop.. or angry black man and police officer who won’t be talked back to? You decide.

You might see a few police officers murdered by self-righteous fools. These assholes will be quickly killed or arrested and given life without parole or the death penalty, as they deserve. The “revolution” will be in police tactics, as more and more people get hurt by the cops and more and more civic leaders cry out for change. We live in the era of the mini camera, so you screw up, and it’s on YouTube immediately. Also, the equipment mentality will slow down as those Federal dollar start to dry up (it already is – the same cuts to the Military are cutting deeply into DHS spending).

War? Hardly. It would take a concerted effort by the US government to drive Americans to armed revolution. And the government isn't that organized.

[Woodsman]

Thanks for your input men - I think this whole police brutality thing (along with the torture documents) is a media highlight of some intermittent (but serious) problems of current day USA.

I made the error of focusing on it a bit - back to proper focus of tending lands.

There's always improvements to be made I guess.

It's good to hear from you McClung!

Best,
Woods

[Kurt]

The US will never have a Civil War.

But, we might be in line for a massacre or two.

Historically the masscres in the US always had a native American vs. Settlers or Mormon vs. Not-Mormon or just killing Unionists and Coal minors because you could not stand uppity Dagos and Heathen Chinee asserting themsevles to get fairly paid for their labor.

A few deviated from that "Cowboys" rarely massacred indians. They liked to murder farmers. The last union based massacre would have been around 1972 in Harlan County in Kentucky (a small one but still) and of course Kent State, and Greensboro.

I would look for more massacres along the line of "Mormons" vs outsiders (but not by Mormons hence the quotes) and "Kent State".

The right wing in the US, not the strict constitutionalists that I admire and will usually side with, but the Sarah Palin type wing will probably massacre "leftists" one day. They are always saying "our side has the guns" and they tend to be chickenshits in every other aspect of life, and give a chickenshit a gun and a mirror that shows what a chickenshit they are and they are gonna shoot that mirror.

It will happen one day among a group of "counter protestors" who decide it is best, like what happened in Greensboro where the commies made the mistake of "taking on the Klan" when the actual Klan had not done much of anything for 10 years other than pretend they were relevent.

If it happens it will happen like that. The Palin wing of the conservatives will protest something and then a few leftists will counter protest them. It will be in a "gun state" like Arizona where people have been tolerated in the past carrying rifles in public and the protestors will have signs and masks and not much else and kablooey...someone will yell "I am afraid for my life" and there will be blood.

[AaronPes]

I loved that sketch DC. I also liked the historical dragons den where beer was invented.

[Kurt]

The US will never have a Civil War.

But, we might be in line for a massacre or two.

Historically the masscres in the US always had a native American vs. Settlers or Mormon vs. Not-Mormon or just killing Unionists and Coal minors because you could not stand uppity Dagos and Heathen Chinee asserting themsevles to get fairly paid for their labor.

A few deviated from that "Cowboys" rarely massacred indians. They liked to murder farmers. The last union based massacre would have been around 1972 in Harlan County in Kentucky (a small one but still) and of course Kent State, and Greensboro.

I would look for more massacres along the line of "Mormons" vs outsiders (but not by Mormons hence the quotes) and "Kent State".

The right wing in the US, not the strict constitutionalists that I admire and will usually side with, but the Sarah Palin type wing will probably massacre "leftists" one day. They are always saying "our side has the guns" and they tend to be chickenshits in every other aspect of life, and give a chickenshit a gun and a mirror that shows what a chickenshit they are and they are gonna shoot that mirror.

It will happen one day among a group of "counter protestors" who decide it is best, like what happened in Greensboro where the commies made the mistake of "taking on the Klan" when the actual Klan had not done much of anything for 10 years other than pretend they were relevent.

If it happens it will happen like that. The Palin wing of the conservatives will protest something and then a few leftists will counter protest them. It will be in a "gun state" like Arizona where people have been tolerated in the past carrying rifles in public and the protestors will have signs and masks and not much else and kablooey...someone will yell "I am afraid for my life" and there will be blood.

I kind of got this. Not a massacre though, but I am sure they would have liked it to be one.

[AztecDave]

Since 9/11, I think there has been a gross over militarization of city police forces in general. And the development of a like mindset within a lot of forces. They all wanna be Rambos in multicam.
Unfortunately, the maturity, and i think, training, of a lot of officers is severely lacking. So you get the shoot first mentality. This past summer I was in the US visiting my family. Met up with my cousin who is a SWAT officer for a VERY large US metropolitan city. He was driving his extra large SWAT SUV, all black. He said he need it to carry all his shit. I asked him why he didn't drive a minivan, because you can carry hell of a lot more shit in a Toyota Sienna than in a Chevy Suburban. I know, I have 1 of each. Well, a minivan isn't quite as macho and intimidating, or cool, as a blacked out urban assault vehicle. He showed me his arsenal that he drove around with all the time. He had an H&K M4, a Kimber .45 cal 1911, Remington short barrel shotgun, about a dozen flash bangs, same number of smoke grenades, 2 different bullet proof vests, 1 with ceramic plates for up to 7.62 rounds, and a 40mm grenade launcher with an integral 7 round capacity drum (sorry, don't know the nomenclature of the model but it looked a lot like the one used int he movie "Dogs of War"). And other misc shit. Now I know he's a member of SWAT but he also told me that most of the squad cars carried a similar load. That is just ridiculous. He carried more shit than I did when I was in Afghanistan. But when cops are armed like this, there is an increased mentality to use them, or at least shoot too soon. Cops should ere on the side of being Sheriff Andy Taylor, not Rambo. The last incident, I understand the cops shot a deaf guy carrying a pipe. Was the guy attacking the cops with it? Or did he just not drop it when they told him to?

But to the point of a civil war, I don't think so.