External resources relating to Equipment, training and tactics
All front-line police in England and Wales should be offered Tasers in light of the increased terrorism threat, the head of the Police Federation says.
Steve White said the devices would help protect against "dangerous people" who could be preparing to attack officers.
"We've got to show our officers that we're taking the threat seriously," he told Radio 4's Today...
From tracking online activity to cameras that see through walls, Israel's homeland security industry offers European states a range of options as they tackle the terrorists in their midst.
The Turkish government’s proposed expansion of police powers to search and detain and for the use of firearms would undermine human rights protections. A number of the proposals in a draft security bill would circumvent the role of prosecutors and judiciary in ways that directly undercut safeguards against the arbitrary abuse of power.
Following a review of several federal programs that provide money and equipment to local police, President Obama on Monday announced he would tighten standards on the programs, stopping short of curtailing them. Law enforcement in Missouri and in its St. Louis County, where police officers deployed military gear and equipment to quell unrest in the town of Ferguson, have benefited from all of the major programs below.
Across the hemisphere, we have recently seen violent clashes between protesters and militarized police forces. Tipping point events—such as the clashes in Brazil in the summer of 2013 and in Ferguson, Missouri last month—have provoked public outrage and calls for “de-militarization” of police forces. While the outrage is sometimes too fleeting to compel change, the events make the public and the media aware of conditions that affected populations have known for decades. While the roots of police militarization in Brazil differ from those in Ferguson and other U.S. cities, the consequences are the same...
A new report highlights Israel’s use of supposedly “non-lethal weapons” against unarmed Palestinian protesters.
The report – “Proven Effective: Crowd control weapons in the Occupied Territories” – was published by the group Who Profits and launched at a conference in Jerusalem on 10 September.
Focusing on tear gas, skunk water and “The Scream” (a high volume acoustic device strapped atop Israeli military vehicles), the report documents their regular use to violently crush unarmed Palestinian demonstrators throughout the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The clouds of tear gas, flurries of projectiles and images of police officers outfitted in military-grade hardware in Ferguson, Missouri, have reignited concerns about the militarization of domestic law enforcement in the United States. But there has been another, little-discussed change in the training of American police since the 9/11 attacks: At least 300 high-ranking sheriffs and police from agencies large and small – from New York and Maine to Orange County and Oakland, California – have traveled to Israel for privately funded seminars in what is described as counterterrorism techniques.
Ahmad S.* was on his way to a wedding when he was shot in the head. It was the afternoon of April 5, 2013 and Ahmad, then 16, was making his way through the streets in the Jalazoun refugee camp where he lives.
“There were clashes and soldiers were firing tear gas and rubber-coated metal bullets,” he said. “The soldier was about 10 meters away when he fired at me. I was hit in the head and the arm. I fainted and fell to the ground.”
When tear-gas was first fired into the streets of Ferguson, Missouri at people angry at the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, Palestinian activists sent out messages on Twitter giving people tips for how to deal with tear gas’ effects.
And there was another direct connection between events in Missouri and the West Bank, as Palestinian activist Mariam Barghouti noted: the company that supplies the Israeli army with tear gas is the same company supplying the police in Ferguson.
State and local police departments obtain some of their military-style equipment through a free Defense Department program created in the early 1990s. While the portion of their gear that comes from the program is relatively small (most of it is paid for by the departments or through federal grants), detailed data from the Pentagon illustrates how ubiquitous such equipment has become. Highlighted counties have received guns, grenade launchers, vehicles, night vision or body armor through the program since 2006 (MAP).
Since the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police in Missouri last weekend, the people of Ferguson have been subjected to a military-style crackdown by a squadron of local police departments dressed like combat soldiers. This has prompted residents to liken the conditions on the ground in Ferguson to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine.
And who can blame them?
The dystopian scenes of paramilitary units in camouflage rampaging through the streets of Ferguson, pointing assault rifles at unarmed residents and launching tear gas into people’s front yards from behind armored personnel carriers (APCs), could easily be mistaken for a Tuesday afternoon in the occupied West Bank.
And it’s no coincidence.
FERGUSON, Mo. — For four nights in a row, they streamed onto West Florissant Avenue wearing camouflage, black helmets and vests with '
stamped on the back. They carried objects that doubled as warnings: assault rifles and ammunition, slender black nightsticks and gas masks.
They were not just one police force but many, hailing from communities throughout north
Their adversaries were a ragtag group of mostly unarmed neighborhood residents, hundreds of African-Americans whose pent-up fury at the police had sent them pouring onto streets and sidewalks in Ferguson, demanding justice for
(Jerusalem) – Israeli soldiers unlawfully killed two men who had participated in a July 25, 2014 protest in the West Bank against Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip, according to all available evidence. Official medical reports and medical sources indicated that they died of gunshot wounds caused by live ammunition.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) has called for this campaign for ISDS and other companies complicit with Israeli apartheid to be banned from the Olympics, for pressure until the Olympics will be free of apartheid.
BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Rubhiya Abd al-Rahman Darwish was taking a nap on the couch of her family home on Sunday when she was awoken with a start by the sound of shattering glass.
"I saw a burst of water breaking through the window, when suddenly an intense odor hit and I passed out from the smell, so they had to take me to the hospital," the 75-year-old woman told Ma'an during an interview in her small apartment in Bethlehem's Aida refugee camp.
(Jerusalem) – Video footage, photographs, witness statements, and medical records indicate that two 17-year-old boys whom Israeli forces shot and killed on May 15, 2014 posed no imminent threat to the forces at the time. The boys, who had been participating in a demonstration in the West Bank, were apparently shot with live ammunition, Human Rights Watch said.
NEENAH, Wis. — Inside the municipal garage of this small lakefront city, parked next to the hefty orange snowplow, sits an even larger truck, this one painted in desert khaki. Weighing 30 tons and built to withstand land mines, the armored combat vehicle is one of hundreds showing up across the country, in police departments big and small.
The 9-foot-tall armored truck was intended for an overseas battlefield. But as
Across the country, heavily armed Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams are forcing their way into people’s homes in the middle of the night, often deploying explosive devices such as flashbang grenades to temporarily blind and deafen residents, simply to serve a search warrant on the suspicion that someone may be in possession of a small amount of drugs. Neighborhoods are not war zones, and our police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. However, the ACLU encountered this type of story over and over when studying the militarization of state and local law enforcement agencies.
This investigation gave us data to corroborate a trend we have been noticing nationwide: American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight. Using these federal funds, state and local law enforcement agencies have amassed military arsenals purportedly to wage the failed War on Drugs, the battlegrounds of which have disproportionately been in communities of color. But these arsenals are by no means free of cost for communities. Instead, the use of hyperaggressive tools and tactics results in tragedy for civilians and police officers, escalates the risk of needless violence, destroys property, and undermines individual liberties.
A protracted territorial struggle has been waged in recent years in many parts of the West Bank between settlers seeking to expand the areas under their control and annexing as much land as possible and Palestinian landowners interested in farming their land. The civilian security coordinators (CSCs) and the civilian guarding squads that operate in the Israeli settlements on the West Bank are among the most influential parties in this struggle. The CSCs are agents of the army, in that they are subject to the Military Justice Law and hold policing powers, but they are appointed by the settlements and see themselves as representing the settlements’ interests. This conflict of interests, combined with the absence of a clear definition of their powers and weak supervision of their actions, creates daily friction and clashes between the CSCs and settlement civilian guard usquads, on the one hand, and Palestinians farmers, on the other. In many cases the end result is that Palestinian landowners are unable to farm their land.
With the agility of a seasoned Border Patrol veteran, the woman rushed after the students. She caught up with them just before they entered the exhibition hall of the eighth annual Border Security Expo, reaching out and grabbing the nearest of them by the shoulder. Slightly out of breath, she said, “You can’t go in there, give me back your badges.”
The astonished students had barely caught a glimpse of the dazzling pavilion of science-fiction-style products in that exhibition hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. There, just beyond their view, more than 100 companies, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Verizon, were trying to sell the latest in futuristic border policing technology to anyone with the money to buy it...
Family and neighbors buried Noha Katamish the day after she died from the effects of tear gas fired into her home by Israeli forces in Aida Refugee Camp Monday. The 45-year-old mother of one daughter suffered from asthma, which likely compounded the choking effects of the gas grenade that was fired through her living room window as soldiers invaded the camp.
Ma’an News quoted an Israeli military spokesperson as saying that, “The death was not linked to the use of riot dispersal means by the army, including tear gas.” It is unclear how the military could make such a definitive statement before any investigation was possible.
The following report highlights three local and international companies that manufacture “non-lethal” crowd control weapons. These weapons are currently used by Israeli authorities and security forces, mainly to suppress non-violent demonstrations in the occupied Palestinian territories, in violation of the right to freedom of expression and association. Despite the fact that they are often labeled as “nonlethal” weapons, they have already been proven as potentially lethal in different incidents around the world, when the use of these weapons led to the death of demonstrators.
The report focuses on three types of weapons as case studies: tear gas canisters, which are produces and marketed by Combined Systems, Inc. (CSI) and M.R. Hunter; “the Scream”, manufactured by Electro-Optics Research & Development (EORD) and LRAD; and “the Skunk”, which is manufactured by Odortec, with the supporting companies: Man and BeitAlfa Technologies. The report will highlight the harmful consequences of these weapons, including their potentially lethal effects. The occupied Palestinian territories are being used as a lab for testing new civil oppression weapons on humans, in order to label them as “proven effective” for marketing abroad.
Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a licence”.
Police appear to have used tear gas manufactured by US and South African-based companies on the 3rd anniversary of Bahrain’s mass protests. Images received by Bahrain Watch show tear gas canisters identical to those manufactured by Federal Laboratories (US/UK) and Rheinmetall Denel Munitions (German/South African), apparently used on February 14, 2014. This follows a May 2012 special briefing by US Senior Administration Officials confirming that the US “has maintained a pause on most arms sales and licenses to the Government of Bahrain”. A similar statement was made in January 2012 by the State Department confirming a halt on ‘most security assistance’, including item sales that can be used against protesters, to Bahrain.