External resources relating to Threat perception

The Honduran government launched a second operation to put troops on the streets of its most violent cities, paid for using funds from a newly imposed security tax...

AUGUSTA, Maine — The way law enforcement agencies in Israel work together to deal with threats is a model the United States can learn from, the chief of the Maine State Police said after returning from a weeklong training trip to the Middle East nation.

William “Drew” Dodds, the salesperson for StrongWatch, a Tucson-based company, is at the top of his game when he describes developments on the southern border of the United States in football terms. In his telling, that boundary is the line of scrimmage, and the technology his company is trying to sell -- a mobile surveillance system named Freedom-On-The-Move, a camera set atop a retractable mast outfitted in the bed of a truck and maneuvered with an Xbox controller -- acts like a “roving linebacker"...

New York - In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured.

La Marin is not only one of the busiest bus stations in Ecuador's capital, Quito, but also one of the city's crime hotspots with frequent muggings and thefts...

In the early hours of Saturday, March 12, Yemeni security forces under the direction of Yemen’s Central Security Service (CSS) (which is commanded by Yahya Salih and is home to the U.S. funded and trained “counter-terror unit”) stormed the anti-government protesters’ camp near Sana’a University. The ensuing battle between the protesters and state security forces resulted in over 100 injured and two dead protesters. The violence continued across Yemen on Sunday with more injured protesters and one death reported in the southern port city of Aden...

The report, Preach What You Practice: The Separation of Military and Police Roles in the Americas, from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) provides a background briefing on key distinctions between military and police functions. It calls on the Obama Administration to change direction, and stop encouraging the military forces of other countries to take on roles that would be illegal for the U.S. Armed Forces to carry out at home. The authors, a team of WOLA’s regional security experts, set out specific steps to be taken by both United States and countries in the region.

South African special forces troops have begun a six-month deployment along the troubled border with Zimbabwe, where rape, robbery and other crimes are commonplace, and the flow of desperate migrants continues unabated.

"This is a battle to stop people coming across the border illegally - it is not a war. The soldiers know they [migrants] are just trying to survive. It's very different from what they are trained to do, and it is very difficult," Colonel Gert Faul, the South African National Defence Force commander in Limpopo Province, told IRIN.

Two companies of Parabats - elite South African paratroopers deployed in recent years to Sudan, DRC and Burundi as peacekeepers - have arrived at a highly porous border in the first phase of a deployment that will see soldiers from various units return to all South Africa's land borders in the next few years...

Abstract: The intensification of militarized violence, racist terror and destructive dehumanization across the globe makes it imperative to examine the corresponding formations of securocratic regimes in the centres of power.  With a focus on a united Europe, my essay interrogates the ubiquitous penetration of militarization into everyday life-worlds.  My research suggests that in these interior borderlands, emergent cultures of militarization are normalized by recourse to racialization, criminalization and securitization, which in turn gives rise to new intimacies of violence, dehumanization and othering within expanding networks of fortification in a self-proclaimed white society.

The legal cases against Tahoe Resources are being carried out in a larger context of opposition to the Escobal mine. The violence, repression, and criminalization community leaders continue to face is not limited to what transpired on April 27, 2013...

Turkish authorities committed human rights violations on a massive scale in the government’s attempts to crush the Gezi Park protests this summer said Amnesty International.

In a report published today the organization details the worst excesses of police violence, during the protests, the failure to bring these abuses to justice and the subsequent prosecution and harassment of those that took part...

The militarization of police units has been a longstanding policy in Latin America well before it received attention from the U.S. media. U.S. bilateral assistance to countries in Latin America has encouraged the adoption of military equipment and military training for local police forces.   While the U.S. prohibits the armed forces from assisting police forces at home, the practice of technology transfer and military training in-country has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean for years. The logic is that crime and violence have overwhelmed local police forces—weak and corrupt to begin with—and therefore the armed forces are necessary for the state to provide security.   But that comes with huge risks...