And yet, as we've written about before, police departments all over America are going mad with power. SWAT teams are everywhere, doing stuff like storming art galleries for serving alcohol without the right permit and raiding Tibetan monks who overstayed their visas. In general, American cops are projecting less "friendly face of public order" and more "bad guys who just stumbled out of a young-adult dystopian movie."
Via Wall Street JournalAdd in an angsty love triangle between the drone and those two SWAT guys, and you've got 2015's big summer blockbuster.
#4. Local Police Keep Getting Anti-Terrorism Money
After 9/11, a lot of us thought that America was on a fast descent into a terrorist apocalypse. Soon we'd all be wrestling armed extremists on top of airplanes and blowing up trains before they plowed into nuclear power plants full of Ebola. It was our responsibility to deal with this inevitable future, and part of that responsibility was equipping America's police. So the Department of Homeland Security started giving terrorism grants to police departments to help them deal with the wave of Osama clones that was soon to wash across the nation.
Brand X Pictures/StockbyteThis came up in the stock image search for "terrorist," so I guess they would look like this.
And that's just the start of the "Let's arm our cops like they're in Future Stalingrad" bonanza. For the past decade or so, companies that produce intelligence and surveillance technology have been making bank selling it to the U.S. military. Now that America's war spending is winding down, it's much harder to use military contracts to build your own gold-coin swimming pools. When you're a defense contractor, potential new customers are limited: The federal government is not exactly big on American companies selling spy equipment to China. So, these companies are now actively targeting one of the only markets left to them: local police departments dripping with grant money.
In other words, a bunch of shit that was specifically developed to fight terrorists, like a radar system that allows users to see through walls into buildings, is now being marketed to cops near you. So, like, try not to take many showers. And that's just the start, because ...
