The shooting of an Occupy Oakland protester by the police yesterday and an article from HuffPo last month really got me thinking about the police and freedom. There is a fundamental trade-off between safety and freedom and I'm starting to worry we've gone too far into the safety camp. According to this article 90% of cities over 50,000 people have SWAT teams. Do cities this small ever really need to use force this drastic? There are billions in counter-terrorism funds floating around and no accountability in the DoD - they flat out don't know where the money goes. Apparently what happens is that little rural towns end up with tanks and machine guns. Do we really trust all these towns to keep these weapons secure? Isn't it more of a risk to spread deadly weapons all around the country?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/police-militarization-9-11-september-11_n_955508.html
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