Predator drones and armored personnel carriers have become commonplace in US cities. Congress has the power to fix this<\/p>\n
America\u2019s main streets are a warzone. This should trouble every American, irrespective of their political leaning. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are near impossible to realize when our streets are policed so militarily. Our nation\u2019s founders would be outraged, so as we commemorate the 250th anniversary this year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it\u2019s worth evaluating how far off the mark we are in maintaining that much-vaunted freedom and liberty.<\/p>\n
This past year, especially, witnessed a troubling militarization of the streets, with Donald Trump\u2019s deployment of ICE and the national guard in multiple US cities, including Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. There is substantial documentation<\/a> of immigration enforcement using military-grade equipment transferred<\/a> from the Pentagon. And from Chicago to California, homeland security officers\u2019 use of flash-bang grenades<\/a>, predator drones<\/a>, and armored personnel carriers<\/a> is now commonplace. But to be clear, Americans were already seeing their streets militarized due to the Pentagon\u2019s 1033 Program<\/a>, which was created by Congress in the 1990s and provides war equipment free of charge<\/a> to America\u2019s police forces. This militarization of law enforcement is now a local, state and federal agency problem.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Predator drones and armored personnel carriers have become commonplace in US cities. Congress has the power to fix this America\u2019s main streets are a warzone. This should trouble every American, irrespective of their political leaning. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are near impossible to realize when our streets are policed so militarily. Our … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}