Handguns
Subscribe
Digital Now Included!
Current Subscribers Click Here.
Current Subscribers Click Here.
All Florida Sportsman subscribers now have digital access to their magazine content. This means you have the option to read your magazine on most popular phones and tablets.
To get started, click the link below to visit mymagnow.com and learn how to access your digital magazine.
Replies
If they were on to such great ideas and great plans they wouldn't have to shove it down other people's throats
The Spy Who Came Home
Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop.
The prevalence of high-powered weapons in America is creating an arms race between citizens and the authorities. Each year, dozens of cops are shot dead, and officers kill around a thousand members of the public—often after mistaking innocuous objects for weapons or frightened behavior for threats. Meanwhile, peaceful protesters are increasingly confronted with snipers, armored vehicles, and smoke and tear gas. In the past twenty years, more than five billion dollars’ worth of military gear has been transferred from the military to state and local police departments, including night-vision equipment, boats, aircraft, grenade launchers, and bayonets. “If we wanted an MRAP”—a military vehicle, designed to protect soldiers from ambushes and mines—“we would just have to submit an application to the federal government,” Skinner told me.
According to David M. Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading criminologists, American policing is practiced more as a craft than as a profession. “The kind of thinking that should go into framing and refining what a profession of public safety should be has still not been done,” he told me. Officers are deployed as enforcers of the state, without being taught psychology, anthropology, sociology, community dynamics, local history, or criminology. Lethal force is prioritized above other options. When Skinner joined the police force, everyone in his class was given a pistol, but none were given Tasers, because the department had run out.
At Georgia’s state police-training facilities, the focus is “all tactics and law,” Skinner told me. Officers are taught that “once you give a lawful order it has to be followed—and that means immediately.” But the recipient of a “lawful order” may not understand why it’s being issued, or that his or her failure to comply may lead to the use of force. There’s no training on how to de-escalate tense scenarios in which no crime has been committed, even though the majority of police calls fall into that category. It is up to the officer’s discretion to shape these interactions, and the most straightforward option is to order belligerent people to the ground and, if they resist, tackle them and put them in cuffs.
“This is how situations go so, so badly—yet justifiably, legally,” Skinner said. Police officers often encounter people during the worst moments of their lives, and Skinner believes that his role is partly to resolve trouble and partly to prevent people from crossing the line from what he calls “near-crime” into “actual crime.” The goal, he said, is “to slow things down, using the power of human interaction more than the power of the state.”
“The de-escalation calls are so much more draining for me than grabbing people,” he told me. “My head is humming during the call. It’s exactly—and I mean exactly—like the prep work I used to do for the agency, where you’re seeing the interaction unfold in the way that you steer it.” As a case officer, Skinner drew flowcharts, mapping out every direction he thought a conversation might go. Now, he said, “instead of having a week to prepare for the meeting, I have as much time as it takes to drive up to the call.”
Not sure which ones sleep better at night. The one I feel the worst for is my FBI agent niece. She is a fantastic LEO, but probably hard to be in the FBI these days. She has been Fla LEO of the year and is a high ranking FBI agent, but life is tough there these days.
One who might have it hardest is the one who is an Indy Fire Dept guy. Kind of hard to rush to an emergency and give Narcan to the same person six or eight time a month!
The guy was simply giving his experience in being a beat cop now and he even mentions most cops try to operate as he does, I get that he thinks police department needs more money for training and police cars and basic equipment instead of more military type equipment from the federal government,. The issue is the military stuff is retired from military use and is given to local P.D. It is money the feds already spent. To get more money for the other things will result in higher taxes since the feds don't support that but your local taxes do.
As you should be aware of, our local police and sheriffs departments here are always trying to get more money for more officers, training, etc., but our local commissioners keep cutting the budget, 'it has gotten so bad that in the past the Sheriff took his case to Tallahassee to get more money by forcing the local government to loosen their purse strings.
You don't seem to think a reporter puts their own slant on articles, but they do. It is why the reporter used quotes for what Sullivan said and didn't use quotes when he was interjecting his thoughts into the article. it was not a news article, it was a human interest story. It was not meant to be fact based, but give a point of view.
The New Yorker, like many other newspapers have news reports, human interest, opinion, advertising, and more, Their news stories are factual. That does not apply to any of the other stories int he paper.
Is this a news story based in truth?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-appearances/kim-kardashian-meeting-donald-trump-in-the-oval-office-is-a-nightmare-we-cant-wake-up-from
Former Mini Mart Magnate
I am just here for my amusement.
I am beginning to question your reading ability if that is all you got out of that article.
Former Mini Mart Magnate
I am just here for my amusement.
In March, 2016, while visiting his aunt in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he gave a lecture on terrorism at the local World Affairs Council. “We have become the most fragile superpower ever,” he told the audience. While Al Qaeda aims to carry out what its operatives call “spectacular attacks,” he explained, ISIS obsesses over creating a “spectacular reaction.” As an example, he recounted an incident in Garland, Texas, in which two wannabe jihadis were killed after attempting a raid on a provocative anti-Muslim convention. The men had no coherent affiliation with ISIS; they merely followed its instructions—which have been widely disseminated by the American media—to post online that they were acting on behalf of the group. “If you strip the word ‘terrorism,’ two idiots drove from Arizona and got shot in a parking lot,” Skinner said. The real threat to American life was the response. “We shut down cities,” he said. “We change our laws. We change our societies.” He went on, “We’re basically doing their work for them.”
“Getting killed by ISIS in Savannah is like expecting to get hit by a piano falling from an asteroid,” Skinner said. “It’s batshit insane. Day to day, it’s the people who are kicking in doors and stealing cars who are actually making life unbearable.”
Former Mini Mart Magnate
I am just here for my amusement.