The key to running a police state in which, under the best case scenario, the police are still exponentially outnumbered by non-compliant citizens playing the civil disobedience role, is to make improvements on your ability to round up and transport large numbers of protesters — criminalizing them in order to take away some of their rights and, in more extreme cases, their votes.
It ain’t black helicopters that are coming for us. More like the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle.
No longer will Passaic County law enforcement have to take separate cars to respond to a scene where mass arrests are expected. Now the sheriff’s department has a 16-foot dual axle trailer to transport up to 20 officers to parades, demonstrations, shopping frenzies or college parties that might get too rowdy.
The $130,000 trailer came from the state’s Department of Corrections through a federal Homeland Security grant, putting Passaic County on New Jersey’s Mass Arrest Response Team. That means the trailer will be deployed anywhere in the state where police need its size, flood lights and amplified speaker system to squash a large-scale public disturbance.
[my emphases] Now, I’m sure Passaic County is a veritable hotbed of street protests, just as I’m sure that, from an environmental perspective, massive police carpooling will doubtless help us combat the scourge of man-made climate change. So this makes a ton of sense, logistically. And if it proves successful at rounding up protester in Jersey, that means the DHS might just have to fund one 0f these bad boys for every major county in the country. Your tax dollars literally coming back to — and for — you!
I just wonder: does this giant trailer or enforced civic compliance come equipped with plenty of military-style features, including the deadliest of all weapons, the military-style assault rifle chambered in police-favored .223 Remington?
If only for the irony?
(h/t Dennis D)
More irony from the article, unintentional though it may be:
$65,000? They don’t just need stinkin’ badges, they need stinkin’ expensive badges.
“The scoops are coming!”
Well thanks to homemade insurgent explosives as debuting by the palestinians (the IRA were better at pyro frankly) rolling in the tanks is no longer a surefire way to “pacify” an urban environment.
Unfortunately without fireproof and bomb proof tanks the next step in urban pacification is long distance fire missions and light cheap vehicles with pintle mounts and improvised steel plate armor. A much cheaper but more violently aggressive solution. Of course the real horror is that an insurgent force can do pretty much the same sort of thing though their fire missions will be improvised mortars and rockets instead of aircraft. That means if the pick-up truck and helicopter pacification effort fails then the city must be burned or knocked down with far greater loss of life.
Some other counties in NJ got some of these $100k+ trailers apparently, some pix here:
http://www.northjersey.com/news/160709455_River_Vale_CERT_receives_disaster_response_trailer.html
Make sure you are sitting down before you click that link.
It might be cheaper just to buy some steel-box bob-tails.
Mentor of Arisia has foreseen this…
More “Smart Diplomacy” and “International Test Passing” to follow:
http://theothermccain.com/2012/12/28/africa-in-crisis-u-s-abandons-embassy-france-wont-intervene/