This is what happens when presidents boast about how they are bolstering border security by pointing to number of agent hires. You get a bunch of low life wannabe warriors. Quality over quantity. Get the mid off the street.
There's absurd amounts of cartel violence right now in Mexico. My brother in law is married to a lady who grew up in Mexico and she's lost several cousins to cartel violence. The town where her family lives is more or less vacant after hours. And I don't know about border-enforcement but state park police are actively engaging with these same cartel members and they are armed and violent (https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/3577673-cartels-ar... from that I'd assume that these New Jalisco soldiers are not pleasant to deal with if you're one of these low-level BP guys (cartel's are involved in smuggling people through the border). I wouldn't want their jobs and I wouldn't call them "low life wannabe warrior's" either.
this might be true, but ICE, being a knee jerk department created after 9/11, never really was set up with the proper oversight for a public agency. It's known for being opaque, poorly run, and not accountable to anyone. It, and CBP, are due for a massive overhaul/restructure.
I don't doubt that there is considerable violence along the border.
But I think there should be much more professional actors if they are state-sponsored. These guys make 40k on the low-end and 100k at peak.[1] That's nothing.
Of course with such low pay you end up with the bottom of the barrel of people. And in particular the kind of person who is there for reasons other than the compensation... think for example one of the victims you mentioned or someone adjacent to them. Or just replacement theorists, supremacists, and garden-variety sociopaths.
I wish there were some way they could filter out the whole super patriot warrior persona from law enforcement, it's useless to the community and it doesn't feel safe it feels hostile, they have no business being in a position of power over anyone.
I shouldn't see cops with punisher skull and crossed AR15s sleeve tattoos, that's not a law enforcement vibe, that's murderous vigilante cult vibe.
Take away the guns and the ability to use any real force (ie on duty cops are held to the same standard of assault as everyone else) The police department as a whole needs that ability but reserve it for a small exclusive units that can only get called in to deal with matters that require rapid deesclation by force.
When 99/100 of best cops are glorified meter maids, social workers, and civil servants you'll see the machismo disappear overnight.
You didn't realize that? You really need to think harder on this.
Are you aware that having a gun can stop a grizzly bear's teeth and claws from killing you too?
> Unless you think its appropriate for cops to be acting as judge jury and executioner
So if someone starts shooting at at random people in a mall, and a cop has a gun on him, he is supposed to run up and use some judo to disable the mass shooter, since the cop shouldn't act as judge jury and executioner?
So your argument is that cops should have weapons because some extraordinary circumstances sometimes happen and we should hope that instead of acting like the cops at Parkland did they take it upon themselves to circumvent the justice system and instead dispense "frontier justice"?
I am going ignore the part about grizzly bears because I dont believe that is in good faith and is basically just a non-sequitur
I fail to see how thats any better than disarming the bullies and letting specialized teams IE SWAT teams take care of extraordinary situations. That is if they even manage to show up in time to do anything which is in doubt.
I think you haven't been paying attention if you think people shooting guns at the public, or at cops, is an "extraordinary circumstance" in America. It's not just mall shootings, or parkland. It's also people just shooting at cops after getting pulled over for speeding, which is far less likely to get national news attention.
You're free to ignore it, but I added the point about grizzly bears because you seemed confused how a gun can help defend you against someone with a gun. It can help defend you against many threats, in fact.
Edit:responded from the account on my phone, sorry for any confusion.
The premise of a gun being able to defend you from anything is dependent on you using that gun to kill said thing. I feel like maybe I didnt get across what I was trying to say clearly enough. Cops being protected by guns = cops killing anything they "perceive as a threat"
I dont believe police officers should have the right or responsibility to dispense "frontier justice" meaning to execute people because they do something that is illegal. I am sure there is some legal definition of when an officer is allowed to shoot and kill another human being but I, and I hope most other people see that as circumventing the rule of law, making themselves into the judge jury and executioner.
The entire premise of our legal system is thrown out the door when we accept police officers having the capability to use their own judgement to dispense death. See "Robocop" this isnt some new idea. Cops having guns on them is equivalent in many ways to martial law. I hope I dont need to explain why martial law is not a good thing for a free society.
I think generally, cops do not execute people they find doing something illegal. There are far too many people in US prisons for that to be the case.
They do shoot people who they perceive as a threat to them(some of whom did not do anything illegal).
But I would love to know how you would like police to respond to situations that actually are a direct threat to them, if their guns are taken away. Hope they can run away quick enough?
Well I think generally police have lots of methods for responding to situations that they feel are a direct threat to them- that they use all the time. For instance tazing, pepper spray, and any other "less lethal" methods of violence.
Locking people in cages for a living is an inherently dangerous thing to do. I don't see how that should give them the right to execute people on a whim.
In fact I cant really imagine a situation where an ethical and justified police officer would ever need to kill someone. Like I said before in extraordinary circumstances I can see highly trained and equipped people as a necessity but having the run of the mill street bullies walking around armed to the teeth is, like I said before, literally equivalent to martial law.
As we have seen over and over again, the police have no duty to stop a crime in progress. We have seen where police sometimes sit there and wait for backup (ie, SWAT) before running in anyways.
No it wouldn't for the exact same reason that regular people don't need guns on them at all times. What makes the police threatening isn't individual cops projecting the threat of violence and dispensing it randomly like Batman. It's that the police as an institution have the people, time, and resources to follow you to the ends of the earth (i.e. "the long arm of the law") and dispense collective justice. If your goal is not going to prison killing a cop is a really terrible way to go about that.
Good luck filtering them out. It’s almost built into the culture. You’re an outcast where I come from if you fall out of line. You learn to just go with the flow and avoid the bad elements to survive.
It's a vicious cycle. As long as the punisher types are cops, the "right" people are disincentivized to join, whereas other punisher types feel welcome. :-(
The ability for hacker news commenters to grossly over-simplify and misrepresent things like this is unparalleled. Just like it takes all folks to make a village, it also takes those folks to do some missions that police forces have. The problem is when the culture of a police force is all of one type. There, however, is value in having people appear strong to those who would take advantage if weakness is detected. Today's punisher skull is yesteryear's ceremonial armor and masks.
Nothing we need done requires .... intimidating citizens.
Until you need SWAT to kick in a door with actual murderers on the other end. Really until you need violence to contain violence.
Then you get into the real questions: in their day-to-day interactions such as issuing citations are they intimidating citizens with behavior or their appearance? I've known several Military folks who later became police (and had significantly better escalation of force training from the military) who looked fierce but were big softies most days. No better friend, but no worse enemy and all.
Yeah man I literally know two dozen cops and almost every single one is a racist coward who gets off on bullying people they have power over. That's what the punisher skulls are for.
The murderers behind a door thing sound scary tho, how often do you think that happens? Vs like every other encounter the 700k american cops do each day? Also uh, uvalde? maine? Seems like we might be optimizing for the wrong thing here and also it doesn't even work.
Ah, giraffe_lady again. No, that's objectively not what the Punisher skulls are for. People don't slap a Punisher skull on their truck and say "alright, how many minorities can I oppress today." At least not the overwhelming majority.
The Punisher skull is a statement that they believe in vigilantism, not the rule of law, to the point where the guy who created the character condemned police officers who do it:
Ultimately the government always needs to have the biggest guns to maintain a monopoly on violence. Otherwise the government ceases to exist as competing organizations eventually start taking over.
Instead of arming the police force to the teeth, how about reducing access to weapons? It just seems completely insane that civilians have access to powerful weaponry, making it necessary for the police force to engage in an arms race with the public.
If I had to guess I would say that willingness to stand up to institutional corruption is negatively correlated with being in 5 figures of unforgivable debt.
It's not. It should be. I have no issues with applying educational rebates for members of the police force, but it needs to result in less litigation. At this point police are costing taxpayers huge sums of money due to lack of understanding and short term training. I don't know if we'll every move away from the current thinking, but I think most citizens want protectors, not warriors.
How many of the war criminals in the Bush administration or the people who tried to help Trump break U.S. law not only had 4 year degrees but also things like law degrees or MBAs? You can’t use credentials to filter out things like this any more reliably than head shape.
I wouldn’t use that particular language, but it does raise questions when they’re installing privacy apps on official devices. If it’s a security thing, that shouldn’t be handled individually.
It might be possible that on an international TECHNOLOGY forum, a significant percentage of users know what 'VPN' (a tech thing) stands for and don't know what 'ICE' (a government office (off topic) of a single nation (limited scope)) stands for. Context matters. ICE isn't within either the regional or topical domains of common conversation on this forum.
Depending on one's technical background or interests, reading about ICE can refer to many things. in my case Internal Combustion Engine and In-Circuit Emulator.
I thought this was another article about cars - engines overheating after bad security update and nation actors (agents) install apps and VPNs in cars.
A control improperly configured and unmaintained is not a control, it is a checkbox. Start at page 6.
"Even though ICE’s MDM provides visibility to all
installed applications, ICE did not have a process to periodically review, assess, block, and
remove risky applications installed on devices."
Also didn't prevent folks from installing VPN apps and TikTok (redacted, but easy to discern from what isn't).
(i own $day job's acceptable use policy and MDM baseline/operation)
As of two years ago when i dumped fedspace, the agency i was tied to had the phones legit mdm locked down and usage was actively monitored. It sucked so hard that phone was effectively unusable, but when the site youre at makes you leave all personal electronics outside the fence, its better than nothing.
