Should Police Use Bombs to Kill Criminals?
07/16/2016
Ivan Eland
Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent Institute
In the wake of the two seemingly outrageous slayings of African
American men by police in Minnesota and Louisiana and the equally
heinous retaliatory killings of five police officers in Dallas by a
black former Army Reservist, questions have been raised in all three
cases about excessive police behavior.
Police surrogates on the cable TV networks have been sent into a
state of apoplexy that some security analysts, while the Dallas police
department is still grieving, have raised eyebrows about the use of an
exploding bomb, delivered by a robot, to kill the Dallas shooter.
Whether intentional or not, this argument is an attempt to use the
legitimate grief of the police families to shield the department from a
debate about the aggressive military tactics used to kill the shooter.
Using a robot
normally used for explosive neutralization to offensively deliver a bomb
is not just a further incremental militarization of the police, such as
military-style uniforms and SWAT teams with military gear and
equipment, including armored vehicles. The police use of exploding
ordinance is a quantum escalation that has the potential to kill
innocent bystanders and also to start fires that are difficult to
control. Let’s remember when police in 1985 attempted to roust out the
Move group by dropping a bomb from a helicopter on an urban neighborhood
in Philadelphia, which started a fire that destroyed more than 60 homes
in that city. The city blocks destroyed looked like something from a
foreign war zone, but the manmade disaster happened in an American city.
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