Some More News - Some More News: How Cops Became Soldiers

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Hi. On today's episode of Some More News, we look at how your local police department gradually became militarized, and how that's bad. Get the world's news at https://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link.Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by Amanda ScherkerAdditional Material by Shawn Depasquale and Riley KimProduced by Jonathan HarrisEdited by John Conway and Gregg MellerPost-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellPATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comYOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvlj0IzjSnNoduQF0l3VGng/join#somemorenews #Cops #swat If you’re 21 or older, grab 35% all month long with code SMN at http://www.indacloud.co!This year, skip breaking a sweat AND breaking the bank. Get this new customer offer and your 3-month Unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month at https://mintmobile.com/morenews – Upfront payment of $45 required (equivalent to $15/mo.). Limited time new customer offer for first 3 months only. Speeds may slow above 50GB on Unlimited plan. Taxes & fees extra. See MINT MOBILE for details.Try Gusto today at https://gusto.com/MORENEWS and get three months free when you run your first payroll.Pluto TV. Stream Now. Pay Never.Don't let a rough next day keep you on the sidelines—drink Pre-Alcohol to stay ahead of the game and make the most of every sunny Saturday. Go to https://zbiotics.com/MORENEWS to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use code MORENEWS at checkout.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, kids! You are all children, right? I've been assuming children this whole time. That's why we have the puppet and we talk about... Fascism and so on. Anyway, you like stories? Also, kids, before you answer, please like and subscribe and check out our Patreon. Use your parents' credit cards.

It's easy and free! Anyway, story time. Like all good stories, this begins at midnight on April 10th, 2024. A local North Carolina police SWAT squad has just thrown at least two flash-bank grenades into a mobile home. As the living room couch and rug erupts into flames, the SWAT team storms inside and points military-grade guns at a 16-year-old girl and nine-year-old boy,

while another officer violently handcuffs their visibly injured father. All, as their mother, a survivor of two heart attacks, struggles to breathe from all the smoke while being interrogated amidst escalating cardiovascular palpitations. Also, one of them is, is a maddening, He's a magic dog or something.

Oh, wait, also, also, the family had committed absolutely zero crimes. The cops had mistakenly connected their car to a suspected burglar's car, despite it hailing from a different decade than the vehicle in question. The two-hour raid caused over $11,000 worth of damage, not least because the squad inexplicably took a sledgehammer to the home's exterior. How else would you get into a home? Later, the local government agreed to cover repair costs only if the family dropped all claims against local officials.

And then they lived happily ever after? Probably not. So here's some news and also the moral of this story. What the fuck? Even if they were at the right house, even if, why would a bunch of rural North Carolina cops need to use any type of grenade to confront a suspected burglar, or an entire SWAT team for that matter? But mainly, and worst of all, why aren't I or you, in the least bit surprised by that story? We've all just accepted that

cops, even small-town cops, are these armored, militarized behemoths ready to repel into your one-bedroom apartment if you so much as forget to pay a parking ticket. This is, of course, in concurrence with ICE and Border Patrol and National Guard troops invading our city streets and brutalizing citizens. And you probably started to realize that all of these groups, more or less, look and act the same, by which I mean, like the military, which is wild. It's like we've slipped into the Paul Verhoeven verse and didn't even flinch, and not the cool one with all the sexy ladies. No, the other one. Thank you!

Because if you're young, like the many children watching this, I assume, you might not realize that it wasn't always like this. In my lifetime alone, cops have changed. And I'm pretty young. Got some years left. So what happened? Let's explore. I bet it has something to do with 9-11, right?

But worse. Now, to be Obama levels of clear, Cops have always sucked. We're not here to talk about why cops suck, or how racist they are, or how the show Cops sucked, or how cop rock is underrated as a work of satire about how cops suck. We are talking about how the line between the military

and the police has blurred, if not vanished. Because if you're amongst the more than four out of five Americans who live in an urban area, your local police force probably looks more like an army brigade than hat-tipping corner cops. And that's not only when they're conducting tens of thousands of SWAT raids each year. It's every aspect of how they operate, a military ethos that pervades modern American policing. And that's thanks to a number of federal programs that have gifted state and local police forces billions of dollars worth of surplus military equipment like it's a white elephant party at Amunation.

from body armor to rubber bullets to MRAPs, which are military vehicles specifically designed to survive the roadside bombs and landmines for which American cities are so famous. In fact, even small police forces have inherited enough unnecessary gear that many publicly donated some of their war dildos to troops in Ukraine, a country with a smaller military budget than the New York Police Department alone. And of course, if you're getting military-level equipment, you also need to know how to use it, which is why, as of last year, America had 80 fascist-themed Disneylands or cop cities in some phase of development, with budgets topping out at $415 million per site.

No expenses are spared on these college campuses for budding stormtroopers, which offer exciting amenities like mock urban blocks, areas for testing exploits. areas for testing explosives and test tracks where you and your bro donkey punch can joyride until his vomit turns pink. Also, school shooter simulations, complete with fake schools to bust up. We are going to put people through like scenarios what they think is a movie. The difference is there's no script. Cover me. Okay, ready.

And whatever happens, happens. Wow, looks radical. By which I mean extreme. by which I mean excessive. Maybe it's just me, but telling cops they are living out a movie while they tear through a fake school, seeking out someone to shoot, doesn't seem like a great idea. But at least American cops don't have to rely solely

on their own pricey playgrounds. They also regularly train with other foreign and domestic military forces, picking up skills like urban warfare and intelligence gathering. In short, if it feels like cops are acting a lot like soldiers, That's because they are. They have some of the same equipment and training. And I wanted to bring up school shootings

because the history and origin of police militarization is directly related to fear. Also racism, of course it is. So gather around and get comfortable. Have a beer, eat like four tabs of acid. It is time for, I forget. Shouldn't have done it last. Okay, well, why even have a segment intro then?

Whatever. Our story really starts in the mid-1960s, when a wave of civil unrest sparked by acts of systemic racism had some white people feeling stressed. Not because of the hideous legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws, but because all that civil rights stuff had gone too far. Meet the silent majority, aka a term popularized by Nixon to refer to a large group of hypothetical Americans who didn't express their views through protest. but who instead quietly approved of, well, whatever the person using the term wants it to seem like people approve of. Like how a silent majority of people in my home think I should get a predator tattoo. During this same time, it should be noted that America saw its first mass shooting, which concerned cops everywhere. But one, budding LAPD inspector got an idea, specially trained military-style police squads who could respond to high-stress

hostage situations or urban riots with speed and tact, also known as SWAT teams. Now at the time SWAT teams were actually controversial, as other leaders at the LAPD didn't understand why police officers protecting the peace should carry wartime weapons. Adorable, real good apple stuff. But the dogged officer struck a deal with local Marines who trained the first SWAT team in secret at Hollywood Universal Studio's cinematic backlot, where cops, cops played heroes in what would become the same replica streets as Bruce Almighty. That means they probably flashbang the Jaws Shark, right?

I know I would have after, I don't know, accidentally shooting one of the dogs from Homeward Bound. Oh, that's not universal. Beethoven. After accidentally shooting the dog Beethoven from the movie Beethoven, I'd flashbang the Jaws shark. Anyway, and thus, the SWAT team was berthed, the oily brain baby of a single innovative cop, who, by the way, was named Darrell fucking Gates. And I think that there's an awful lot of people out there that just simply use any opportunity

to go to the streets. and I think that what we saw out there last night were not the good people of South Central Los Angeles at all. We were seeing a lot of young people, a lot of gang members, a lot of drunks, a lot of people who will use any, any excuse whatsoever. That's right, Darrell Gates,

also known as the future L.A. police chief in charge during the Rodney King beating and subsequent upheaval that came from it, none of which he seemed to predict or understand at the time. He's the guy who invented SWAT teams, like the Ben Franklin of police brutality, and he was specifically inspired by his experience during past incidents of civil unrest, such as the 1965 Watts uprising, which was triggered by accusations of police brutality. This is all to say that a brand new form of police violence was invented as a response to civil unrest,

which was a response to police violence. It's the old swallow a spider to tear gas a fly tactic, you see. You know how it goes? She planted the gun to beat the cow. She beat the cow to frame the goat, she framed the goat to shoot the dog. She shot the dog to entrap the cat. She entrapped the cat to extort the bird. She extorted the bird to arrest the spider and so on and so on.

You remember school. Because of course, it wasn't actually about keeping the peace. I know I said this episode wasn't about how cops are racist, but, well, They're racist. So their ideas often come from racism. I'm sorry. And fittingly, the LAPD SWAT team made its theatrical debut in December of 1969, near days after Chicago police murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton in his sleep. The Panthers L.A. division was anticipating a similar attack, so when Hollywood's finest SWAT team came rolling up, the two sides exchanged thousands of gunshots over a five hours long shootout. The Panthers eventually surrendered and unbelievably nobody was killed. Even more unbelievably, this became a PR success for the SWAT movement,

because if there's one thing white Americans disliked more than the rapid exchange of gunfire on crowded city streets, it was the Black Panthers. So SWAT teams were here to stay. At the same time, that old scamp Richard Nixon had used the silent majority and their racial fears to win the White House. house. But of course, all that fear mongering means that he was expected to do something once in power. He didn't really care about reducing violent street crime like robberies or homicides because states and local cops would get all the credit for that. No, this failed orange juice entrepreneur turned president needed a federal cause worth fighting for. And thankfully for him, I mean, actually for him,

and thankfully for him, his jowled maw found something real juicy. America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive. More on drugs, baby! Just say no. We as a gateway drug. Dare. Remember Dare? Hey, who invented Dare anyway?

I'm not gonna check the papers, I'm gonna check my phone. I'm gonna do a little fake Google search. Oh my god! Daryl Gates! I'm serious, Daryl Gates invented the SWAT team and the DARE program. Someone get me a time machine, I've discovered a nexus event. So illegal drugs, which were frequently sold across state lines and thus fell under federal purview, were the obvious answer to Nixon's woes.

Plus, they made an easy shorthand for the sins of both sexually experimental hippies and impoverished communities of color. Who cares if illegal drug users were statistically less likely to commit violent crimes? What an absurd little detail for a nitpicking little jerk like you to focus on. You fool, you fucking fool. Only one thing mattered. Narcotics were destroying the very fabric of American life. And by declaring war on them, threatening to invade the cities of Coolsville and Weedberg, Nixon also unleashed a big old spigot of federal funding to help local and state police forces get their grubby hands on military-grade weapons.

But only if they played ball. Specifically, he dangled his jowly Quaker balls in their faces, by which I think I think actually mean he dangled federal funding to persuade states to pass his preferred legislation, which expanded police powers to do things like no-knock raids and wiretap civilians, because if nothing else, Nixon was hot for eavesdropping. If else, Pat.

In exchange, states could have been able to be able to be. loads of military equipment and training so long as they mostly used it for drug enforcement. After significantly increasing the size of the federal drug enforcement agency, Nixon's administration turned their attention from high-level drug traffickers, who were tedious and difficult to track down to low-level street offenders that were easy to catch. This made for great PR because if there's one thing Americans loved more than unnecessary military-grade weapons, It was locking tons of non-violent people in cages. Boy, I just realized how familiar all of this sounds.

Quick, get me a time machine again. I want to go back and add some foreshadowing. Oh, my goodness, shucks. So to recap, Nixon, in conjunction with individual states, waged a war on drugs as a way to justify increasingly militarizing the police. You might notice that none of this really stems from an actual reason,

so much as a general feat. first brought on by racial unrest. But at least Nixon fell from grace and left office, and this all sort of faded away. Drugs are menacing our society. They're threatening our values and undercutting our institutions. They're killing our children. Blast! Reagan! I always forget about him. For show. I obviously don't forget about him. I mean, who do you think I am? Reagan? Under Ronald Reagan, the war on drugs went into turbo charge. In part, thanks to the expansion of the expansion of of civil asset forfeiture, which is a policy so archaic it was originally made to punish pirates.

It entered modern law enforcement in 1970 and gave officers the right to seize any property they could conceivably say was connected to criminal enterprise. That meant claiming anything from a sleek modernist house to a fast car, to a stack of cash, to a shiny sex yacht, even if you never so much as charged this supposed criminal with jaywalking.

Under Reagan, and in part thanks to Senator at the time Joe Brandon, the policy was expanded to sweeten the deal for state and local police agencies, allowing them to claim up to 80% of this bountiful booty. Now, cops had every reason to, number one, focus on raiding suspected criminals in their homes where they kept all their nice jewelry, and number poop, prioritize minor drug cases where there were assets to seize, rather than more important stuff, like, I don't know, off the old dome. Rape and murder? Those were scary for sure, but didn't come with free prizes.

Between 1985 and 1991, the Justice Department seized $1.5 billion worth of assets, a number that would nearly double over the next five years. Instead of keeping their community safe, cops now had every financial incentive to raid the nicest homes in their neighborhoods. What could possibly go wrong? Something? Probably. Eventually, asset forfeiture was raking in so much dough that many states started passing laws to funnel the funds away from police budgets and into frivolous things like public school systems, gross and cringe, six, seven or whatever. But luckily, police had an easy loophole. They could just call in the feds and thus skirt any pesky state laws. And this is officially how our police force and our

military touched tips. The war on drugs was this hazy national crisis that spanned state lines and proved to be extremely lucrative at the same time. And since it was all framed like a war, the military was granted licensed to help fight drugs via things like transporting personnel, Loaning equipment and even flying U2 spy planes over small California pot fields, which probably made for a lot of shitty body highs in the Golden State. This only escalated in 1986 when Reagan declared drugs were a national security threat. By this point, federal funding to stop war crime, sorry, I think stop pot dealing, was pouring out faster than cops could spend it. Between 1980 and 1995, SWAT deployments rose one-firm, thousand and four hundred percent, mostly for nonviolent drug offenses. All the while,

militarization was disproportionately unleashed on, I know you can guess, you're guessing right now, communities of color. Like in 1985, when cops dropped a satchel bomb on a Philadelphia Black Liberation Group, killing 11 people, including five children, and destroying 61 homes. Holy, gosh, darn, Fuck. And remember, this is all to fight like, weed, man. Weed! The thing your parents are probably smoking in the next room while watching Aquatine. Hunger Force! That's pretty much legal today. The war on drugs was objectively a sham. At best, the drugs won, but it was almost definitely a ploy to go after marginalized communities. Just ask Nixon's former

John Erlickman, who in 1994 admitted to Harper Magazine, full quote. The Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders,

raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. Of course they did. Boy, that sounds like a confession to a crime. Weird, we don't act like it's a crime, but that's a crime.

with a lot of victims, including children like you. The era from the 60s to the 90s was essentially a secret war against black people, waged by our government, coincidentally right after the last war we waged against black people, the side effect of which being that the entire nature of policing had changed. Our cops were now soldiers, something we should have stopped right there when it happened. But sadly, Americans were so propagandized that the vague ideal of public safety over personal freedom was commonly accepted. And this was just the beginning.

Because, well, you know what happened in the 2000s. Oh shit! Let's go to the ad break. And when we come back, we will wage a brand new literal and figurative war. Has your news outlet of choice been purchased by a soulless billionaire vampire intent on sucking truth and reality from our shared existence? Not yet. That's great. Give them money. For the rest of us, there's Ground News, a website and app we specifically wanted to sponsor us. They gather news from hundreds of sources and compare coverage. I've been working with Ground News for a long time and that is for a reason.

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Jack Black's apartment. What if it was Jumanji? Oh my gosh, guys, what if? That doesn't make any sense. What if it was Meet Joe Black's apartment? I do want to see that. 9-11. Welcome back, kids!

You weren't alive for 9-11 because you're all children, but your parents were! They were in high school, getting hand jays behind the gym because the coach was too distracted crying about America's loss of innocence. That was our ground zero. A lot of towers fell behind the gym, let me tell you.

So inappropriate. Anyway, we're in the 9-11 portion of our video about police militarization. We just talked about how the war on drugs, gave the government a grand excuse to militarize and expand the role of local cops. But that was a mere appetizer to the war on terror. Because one of the first things people wondered after 9-11 was, of course, how did this happen? What failed? Everything was discussed and exposed from broken

radio communications between police and firefighters to an underpaid airport security force of contractors. One thing was for sure. We needed to make our homeland more secure. And so emerged the amorphous concept of Homeland Security, which if you think about, sounds a little flirty fascist, which is by design. The term Homeland was given its modern dress rehearsal by the worst Adolf at the 1934 Nuremberg rally.

The Nazis hoped the idea of the homeland would evoke a sentimental shared feeling of national pride. It certainly had that effect on America, whose frightened citizenry basically just consented to a growing security state apparatus. And with it, everything from mass surveillance of American citizens without judicial oversight, to the detention of hundreds of Muslim people, including American citizens, to the enhanced interrogation of enemy combatants. And I can't overemphasize the scare quotes there. For anyone in our government who wanted to do some authoritarian shit, especially cops, it was a gift.

Herman and Julia Schwendinger's book, Homeland Fascism, tracks how presidential overreach was mirrored by federal, state, and local law enforcement, as billions of dollars to combat domestic terrorism flowed into police departments. When combat in Afghanistan and then Iraq escalated, urban warfare was posited as the future of military activity, both home and abroad. See, this is where cops and soldiers really began to meld mines. War wasn't being fought in some grassy field of trenches anymore. It was in cities. In the Middle East, the American military struggled to distinguish between insurgent fighters

and peaceful citizens in volatile urban areas and frequently wound up treating everyone as a potential threat. Ironically, this meant that American military abroad was increasingly acting more like police, just as American police were becoming more like soldiers. More and more were they training alongside or under military personnel in topics ranging from urban tactical operations to counterterrorism operations to intelligence gathering to bioterrorism. Soldier, cop, foreign city, American city, tomato, tomato, potato, potato, I just made myself hungry for war! Because on top of this, since the 1960s, American cops have adopted a warrior mindset, specifically when it came to policing cities.

We've talked about this in our previous episode about their training, and how they are often told they are God-ordained Batman's watching over a city, and the War on Terror very obviously furthered this mindset, which of course alienates cops from the people they are supposed to protect. Suddenly, everyone in a city is seen as a potential threat, which in turn makes any act of protest,

mobilization, activism, or even just plain survival to be seen as soft-serve urban warfare that demands a paramilitary-like response. So we have cops and soldiers training together, cats and dogs living together, combined with this vague war on terror, the idea that an attack could happen anywhere and to top it off gigantic new grants from the newborn Department of Homeland Security to give police more access to war junk than ever. Over $35 billion in total between 2002 and 2011, plus discounts on military equipment, plus a Pentagon program that allowed the DOD to literally just give out war gear to local cops. Like the hand-me-downs your little sibling got, or in my case,

the hand-me-downs me got. Specifically in this case, $7.6 billion worth of hand-me-downs. The results look like this. In Nina, Wisconsin, officers use a multi-terrain vehicle. The Boise, Idaho Police Department has an M-Rap vehicle designed to withstand roadside bombs. So does the Warren County Sheriff's Department in upstate New York. Bud York is Sheriff. I'm hoping I never have to use this vehicle, but if I do have to use it, I'm not going to have to worry about my people or possibly the public being injured. Ah, yes, better to have a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle and not need one, than to need a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle and not have one. So weapons were flowing like this sweet, sweet spice melange,

sometimes with hilarious results. The tiny village of Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, population sub-7,000, received 10 helicopters, an armored vehicle, and two Humvees. Grand Forks, North Dakota acquired more biochemical suits and gas masks than it had police officers to wear them. And if that's not the American dream, I don't know what is. and this is just the stuff we know about, because each police force is subject to different levels of oversight.

These equipment acquisitions were often made without transparency. In 2017, one government watchdog agency conducted a sting operation in which it posed as a fake law enforcement agency applying to obtain 100 pieces of military equipment from the Pentagon. I'm tickled and terrified TMCR to report that their application was approved within one week. But don't you scoundrels get any funny ideas. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Don't do it, polite laugh. Our country has lost its mind. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Like, seriously, what the fuck are we doing? Ha ha ha. Can I leave? Ha ha. Is there a way to escape like a hatch?

Where's the hatch? I've memorized the code. I can do good work in the hatch. Four? Remember the rest. The National Association of Police Organizations has called the use of wartime equipment life-saving and essential for street cops.

Because they're scared little babies. While he was Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, said that this equipment sent a strong message that we will not allow criminal activity, violence, and lawlessness to become the new normal. That message continued saying, also, we're really paranoid and terrified and overfunded. Stay in your homes!

I might have added that last part, actually, because just in case you were wondering, None of this made us safer. That's pretty important to note. According to two peer-reviewed studies from 2021, distributing military equipment to local law enforcement has no calculable influence on either crime levels or officer injury rates. On the other hand, research shows that military equipment does make police more violent. Specifically, the Washington Post found that the more militarized cops became, the more likely they were to not just kill you, but kill your fucking pets. This also, to nobody surprise, overwhelmingly harms you've already guessed black communities.

Beyond that, the, uh, most obvious study in the world found that watching small town police forces parade around with automatic rifles makes people kind of hate cops. And how? I mean, you don't even really need a study. Just look at what happened in Yuvaldi, where the heavily equipped police force just sat around outside of a school classroom while kids inside were being killed.

That alone tells you that police are both overfunded and not protecting anyone. It's this weird paradox where cops want and love all this equipment designed for dangerous situations, but don't actually want to put themselves in danger, resulting in the gear mainly being used for low-level offenses. So, for example, the ACLU looked into over 800 SWAT deployments between 2011 and 2012 and found that about 80% of those were being done to execute search warrants,

mostly for non-violent drug cases. Only 7% involve a hostage, barricade, or active shooter, while SWAT teams have been known to raid poker games, bars serving underage drinkers, organic farms, and in dozens of cases of swat-like raids, hair salons to arrest dastardly delinquents, daring to barber without a license. So if you're currently running an underage poker game

at an unlicensed barber shop located on the grounds of an organic vineyard, you are just asking to be the next Waco. Try a Ruby Ridge Savignon. It really is so stupid, so tragic, and so American, By 2013, journalist Radley Balco had identified a full 50 cases in which innocent people died during SWAT raids. The New York Times found an even larger number, 81 civilians killed between 2010 and 2016. Hey, remember when people used to, and still do, call for SWAT teams as a prank?

You know, the thing that's known to kill a lot of babies and dogs? Really cool prank, awesome stuff. Meanwhile, as the federal government ramped up surveillance practices to previously the unimaginable scales, local police were also in on the action, launching their own intelligence and counterterrorism units to keep tabs on local dissidents and also their former romantic partners. You never know when one of them might be a terrorist. Dozens of data fusion centers popped up across the country to foster intelligence sharing among state, local, and regional law enforcement agencies.

Often, local surveillance was part of the expanded joint terrorist task forces. with which the FBI covertly recruited cops from all over America to surveil their communities without being hampered by state privacy laws. This resulted in vital security efforts like the investigation of food not bombs, the only charity more dangerous than the infamous bombs not food. More like White Castle, am I not right? All right. Meanwhile, the post-911 NYPD's newly launched Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau

conducted intense surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods, assigning mosque crawlers to listen in on religious sermons and rakers to explore ethnic neighborhoods, just profiling, racially. Hmm, whatever. So just to recap there, because I sure, sure you talk a lot. Eh.

Not only did the War on Terror allow police forces to share the same equipment as the military, but also to begin to operate in the same way. Like this is all spy shit, right? Or rather, racist spy shit. Why are the police doing racist spy shit? Basically, the same way Amazon uses the postal service for their last mile deliveries,

our government was just letting cops look for perceived terrorists, which certainly helped alienate them from their communities, right? Not just emotionally, but politically, because surveillance wasn't limited to Muslim communities. By 2003, NYPD could be found harassing and targeting anti-Iraq war protesters, which you might notice has zero to do with terrorism and seems like a crime. The NYPD was literally sending undercover agents to surveil progressive advocates planning to protest the 2004 Republican National Convention, not just in New York,

but all over the country and even people outside of the country. International spy shit. Ahead of and during the convention, a collaboration of local, state, federal, and Pentagon forces, helped along by private telecom corporations, were able to seamlessly track the cell phone conversations and emails of demonstrators while collecting on-the-ground reports and military satellite imagery. All of this information was then relayed to the 10,000 NYPD officers on the ground. Many bravely clad in riot gear and wielding machine guns as they corralled and terrored, and beat up protesters.

There's a bunch of video of this, including a documentary short that features this interesting footage from one of the police helicopters. And instead of watching what was going on on the street, whomever was operating that kept going to this couple who were making out on a rooftop. And it wasn't just for like a second and then, you know, back to the action.

I mean, it was, you know, real surveillance. That obviously serves no. serves no legitimate governmental objective. There's no law enforcement purpose. I could even vaguely imagine, you know, that you could rationally relate to that kind of conduct. Really seems like they don't need all that equipment and are just like playing war?

Just sign up for the war, guys. There's one on right now. Anyway, nearly 2,000 protesters were shoved into an asbestos-infect makeshift detention center, exposed to a bunch of hazardous chemicals that in one case required medical attention. Also, they were denied access to lawyers given limited bathroom breaks and were forced to sleep on the floor. Many were there for 20 to 30 hours, all so they could ultimately

be served with a fucking ticket. This obviously is all super gross, and not just because of the asbestos and helicopter pervert stuff. It shows that during the war on terror, police realized a few things. For starters, fighting terrorists was a good way to get funding and do cool spy stuff. And more importantly, the word terrorist could really mean anyone remotely unhappy with the government. This happened all over the country. Maryland state troopers surveilled groups ranging from human rights activists to advocates for better bike lanes, while Denver, Colorado forces kept records on over 3,000 supposed extremists, including an amnest. International organizer and members of a Quaker group that had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Even Nixon's people aren't safe. The mandate of fighting terror not only made any potential crimes committed much more consequential in the eyes of the law, it also encouraged police to view disparate communities as both physical and ideological threats. You might notice that with this history, civil rights protests, the war on drugs, and then the war on terror, It all centers around giving police an excuse to target a specific group they've conveniently labeled as criminals. And each time they were able to make that excuse vaguer and vaguer while using increasingly

more sophisticated tactics and equipment. This slow creep where cops are now operating less as members of the community and more like an invading force. In fact, and not at all surprisingly, since 9-11, thousands of Americans see, state and local police officers, as well as federal FBI and ICE agents, have gone to Israel to train under the country's police, military, and security forces. Very cool, because why not say fuck it and just treat American cities like an open-air prison? Thanks to this training, American cops now have their hands on skunk.

A nausea-inducing liquid Israeli soldiers spray at high pressure to punish Palestinian demonstrators, which the St. Louis police started buying from Israeli weapons company after the Ferguson protests. For Israel's part, they happily adopted the NYPD's infamously racist stop and frisk policies. The two countries now use much of the same equipment and methods to contain government dissidents. Because friends share. That's what we call synergy. Synergy with an eye. And so all of this brings us to 2020.

Trump, COVID, and the murder of George Floyd. Fun times! And a police force that was fully indistinguishable from the military. Over that summer, the Department of Homeland Security used military aircrafts to surveil demonstrations in 15 cities, as cops on the ground unleashed rubber bullets and flashbang grenades on generally peaceful protesters. All the while, federal troops of unclear affiliations were deployed across the country, often detaining demonstrators without identifying themselves. Videos plastered social media showing horrors like police throwing tear gas canisters at protesters,

something that is literally considered a war crime. Luckily, we're not at war. We just use the word war and talk about it as if we're at war and do war stuff warily. But we're not! So it doesn't count. Except, and this is a pretty goddamn huge problem, in all the time we spent militarizing the police, we never stopped to add any new guardrails.

See, the American Armed Forces are governed, in theory, and despite what our current triple Secretary of War says, by certain international war laws, as well as the federal government's standing rules of engagement and individual branch guidelines, like the US Army's rule to treat all civilians humanely. Pause for effect. Repeat once,

Greet all civilians humanely. Pause for effect again. Our cops, in contrast, are vaguely counseled to use only the amount of force necessary. And most states have varied and vague rules around use of force, none of which meet international standards. And I think this recent era is when everyday people really started to notice that. I mean, a lot of people already knew it. the Ferguson and George Floyd protests really hammered home that there was something fundamentally

wrong with police. But even then, it's hard to even get a clear sense of how bad the problem is since, in a lot of states, cops aren't really required to submit data about its use of force because I, I don't know why. I guess they're evil. I can't think of another reason. So again, a lot of people, specifically people of color, already knew that police were broken. By design, one could easily argue, broken in a powerful, fucked up way. But the slow

creep of the war on drugs and terror, combined with the propaganda attached to them, kept a lot of predominantly white Americans distracted from how dystopian the average local police force became. After all, if you're not out there getting tear gassed at protests, you might not notice. Maybe you watch Fox News and assume that all this violence is because of Antifa or whatever. Maybe you watch CNN and you think all the violence is because of also Antifa or whatever. A lot of dupes out there is my point.

All the way until ICE shows up to kidnap your neighbor and you go outside in your bathrobe to see that we are apparently being occupied by our own government. There's a name for this, of course. Shit. There's a much better name for it too, of course, that you can say in polite company. The boomerang effect.

We've discussed this in the past, but it's a theory arguing that the same tools which an imperial power uses to police its colonies abroad will Like someone vomiting on a roller coaster end up blast it back into its own face In other words, all that training and equipment and money we spent fighting the war on terror in the Middle East would inevitably be adopted here by cops to police citizens What are they gonna do? Throw the armored veer vehicles away when they don't need them? I mean, come on, they're gonna melt down those amazing tanks to make some sort of like woke participation trophy display? The same drones Israel uses to surveil Palestinians are now employed by American cops, while the contractors who walled off Gaza and Baghdad were tapped to rebuild the Mexico-US border. Private prison

operators who cut their teeth incarcerating over 80,000 people without trial. all over the world, now get even richer maintaining inhumane conditions in immigrant detention facilities. The same mercenary contractors who, big quotes, kept the peace while Iraq was bigger quotes, rebuilt, would patrol New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Because if the stormtrooper ain't broke, don't fix it. The empire strikes backward. This is also called internal colonization. An early example was 19th century European colonialists who pioneered nifty ideas like fingerprinting and panopticon prisons in order to keep a close eye on their disgruntled subjects, which they then brought back to their homelands. Because colonized populations were always assumed

to be on the verge of revolting, I wonder why. It was easy to justify hyper-policing them, particularly when you brought in some all-American racism. This mentality migrated back to America, where new police training academies solemnly taught recruits about race degeneration and the inherent criminality of communities of color. Also, funny sounds with your mouth. See, because it's not just that we've been adapting the equipment of colonization,

but the philosophy as well, the paranoia, the racism, the idea that any demonstration needs to be stamped down lest they revolt. Post-Katrina New Orleans, for example, was frequently called Baghdad on the bayou, and the majority black city was treated with the same militarism as war-torn Iraq, torn by the war that we started, by the way. People in both locales were treated

as de facto criminals, with post-hurrican survivors painted as violent looters rather than people fighting to, you know, stay alive despite the government's, let's call it a less-than-stellar disaster relief efforts. Again, it's a slow crepe made fast. by the war on terror. Before we knew it, American cities had become as militarized as any colonial space, via police checkpoints, military-style fences and barbed wire fences, and so on. Simultaneously, districts of concentrated wealth, ranging from tourist spots to gated communities, are enclaveed off, much like pseudo-military green zones that you might have found in post-war Iraq. It's all so normalized that we don't even really think about it anymore.

privatized security forces, gentrification framed as urban renewal, the ultimate goal to push out poor or ethnic communities, people who become refugees in their own country, not unlike survivors of America's wars abroad. In fact, that is the other big component here, the crux of the partnership between the military and the police. We go into other countries, completely destabilize them, and create refugees who come to America for a better life, who in turn become scapegoat. and enemies to justify increased policing, often around the fear of crime and drugs.

It's a symbiotic relationship, a self-perpetuating machine designed to gradually and innately foster fascism. There's a long history of this, from Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century being linked to the opium trade, to Mexican immigrants in the 1930s being coded as dangerous due to marijuana use. All the way to Big Dawn, evoking the fentanyl crisis to justify popular. policies like tariffs and his immigration crack down. Boy, when you lay it all out like this, it kind of seems like America sucks. We do have some great national parks, though. I mean, they weren't really ours, and there's currently a movement to privatize and destroy them.

Whatever, we need to do an ad break before I cry faint, because somehow there's still more to explore in the journey of how cops turned into soldiers. There is in fact a third party that needs to be addressed. Isn't the Illuminati? Stick around to find out. But no. You know, when you're doing your taxes and the cockatiel you pay to hold up your W-2 keeps chewing on the paper and mixturating on your desk, that's kind of what it's like for small business owners

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Pluto TV has thousands of free movies and TV shows. Is that right? I replied quizzically. You mean movies like Pineapple Express, Gladiator, Motion Capture, La Ventura, the Mighty, Mighty Flintstones? Burry my hand at the place where hands go? The shakes that barley the wind? The entire Star Trek film franchise. The 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, team of,

well, they were a team, isn't that enough? Takedo Jones and Tell Bert you're pregnant? Yes. Yes, the cops that you remember I was talking to said, and they continued. TV shows like Survivor, SpongeBob Square Pants, Paw Petrol, the Fair Parenthold, a Game of Thrones spin-off show that's just the history of House Florent, a Twin Peak spin-off show that's just about Nadine Drape Runner's business, Takedo Jones, the show, and Ghosts. Great, I said, so they let me off with a warning.

This time. Pluto TV is always free, I thought to myself, on the way home. Stream now, I continued to think. Pay never, which wasn't a part of the quote. I'm just telling you, I thought stream now and I told you pay never. As a social butterfly, who is overwhelmed by the news, I often like to wind down the week by having a few drinks with friends. You know, sing what's going on at karaoke? Blow off steam, temporarily pause my doom scrolling, et cetera.

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So if you are unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions ask. Remember to head to zbiotics.com slash more news and use code more news at checkout for 15% off. Ow! Because I'll wake in the morning and I'll step outside and I'll say thank you Zbiotics. Daryl goddamn Gates. I still can't get over that.

But hey, he's dead. We got him! So we're jazzing on about the police, the military, and how they've slowly, over decades, melded together to form this new flesh of fascism. We've pointed to the war on terror and war on drugs as major turning points for this mushing. But there's a third entity we have yet to fully explore.

Capitalism, of course, of course! It's like Voldemort in every Harry Potter movie or book. We haven't talked about all the goddamn corporate money. Because all these weapons and surveillance equipment are being made by someone, right? Thanks to War on Terror era grants, weapons companies can offer direct sales of equipment to cops without any middleman. Many police forces now staff full-time grant writers who spend their days fantasizing about what lethal equipment to import to their neighborhood. For smaller towns, gun companies will often offer direct help to cops,

with drafting bids to earn government grants to buy their weapons. Just out of the goodness of their hearts. Most gallingly, these programs all typically operate without oversight or accountability from the federal government. Much less people who don't want their cops running around with flashbang grenades. But wait! There's more! Billion dollar industries surround every aspect of policing. There's the police consulting and training field,

which includes expensive training programs, training programs that teach cops casual everyday skills like how to use a military sniper rifle. At the same time, tech companies are equipping police forces with everything from surveillance cameras to data brokers to facial recognition such as Clearview AI, which has categorized 30 billion faces. Clearview came in particularly handy after the January 6th riots, something they have boasted about in their promotional videos. Around the country, law enforcement agencies turned

to Clearview AI. Among them was the Miami Police Department. They forwarded 13 potential matches to the FBI. Clearview AI saw a surge in usage immediately after the riot. That video also mentions how useful they are for child sex abuse photos. How can you argue with that? Go on, Clearview.

Store billions of our faces so that police can identify us in large crowds. Civil liberties, smivel, smibberties. Thing is, this isn't actually about police forces paying corporations with our tax money. Sure, that sucks and blows, but it's actually much worse than that because the big problem is corporations paying police forces through foundations. These are quote-fingies, charities that essentially function as shell companies quietly funneling millions of corporate

dollars into local police department coffers, a sort of funn, dark slush fund for departments looking to expand their infrastructure. are typically tax-deductible, charitable donations from the very corporations who compete for police contracts, which I'm sure couldn't create any blatant conflict of interest. And while publicly funded police line items are typically subject to public review, police foundation funding can be utilized without the same oversight or transparency. These organizations threw over $800 million to police forces across America over a six-year period thanks to private donors like fossil fuel companies, retail chains, and tech firms.

While this constitutes a small amount of total police funding, it's primarily used to pay for new, experimental, and often controversial technology like predictive policing, the exact kind of technology that is making the police more like the military. Or as NYPD spokesperson Peter Donald once admitted, these foundations fund things the city can't. For example, through the Atlanta Police Foundation, private corporations have provided around 80% of the funding for Project Shield,

a surveillance network of over 20,000 public and private cameras. Atlanta is now the most surveilled city in the country. Cool! And when the LAPD chief of police wanted access to surveillance software from Peter Thiel's company, Palantir, he didn't turn to the city with its year-long approval process for big-ticket items. Instead, he just asked retailer Target to route the necessary funds through an LA Police Foundation, part of the friendly big box stores long tradition of funding surveillance technology, which is then used to police petty retail theft. Target supporting the police surveillance state.

Check out their Black History Month merch, but to be, I don't know, I guess, fair or whatever, Target is but one of many companies doing this. Almost 70% of police departments have copped to maintaining direct partnerships with major corporations via these police foundations, with partners ranging from usual suspects like Black Rock or Facebook or AT&T to more surprising special interest groups like the whole ass country of the United Arab Emirates, which wrote a million dollar check to the NYPD in 2015. Notably, Amazon has donated handsomely to police foundations across the country and spent years agreeably letting 1,800 police agencies check out the footage

captured by its ring security cameras. Hmm, call me paranoid, you're paranoid, but it sure seems that when private corporations and foreign countries are allowed to pay the police millions of dollars, it's almost like those police forces are no longer incentivized to serve and protect their citizens, but rather the interests of those corporations and foreign countries instead. I don't know why, but I feel like I have to put that in big, bold writing. When private corporations and foreign countries are allowed to pay the police millions of dollars, it's almost like those police forces are no longer incentivized to serve and protect their citizens,

but rather the interests of those corporations and foreign countries instead. I don't know, did that get the point across clearly enough? Do we need to show the nifty graphic full screen again? I just really want to make sure people understand this. The police, as a whole, absolutely do not serve everyday people, at least not as their primary function. They are there to protect the assets and peace of mind of the wealthy. This is why law enforcement also has an extremely BFF relationship with real estate companies. For example, as an urban neighborhood gentrifies, 9-1-1-311 calls typically rise,

which leads to higher levels of misdemeanor arrests for petty charges like loitering or noise violations. This doesn't actually help anyone, but makes the rich honkies feel better, right? This benefits property owners who see land values rise as their neighborhoods become more favorable, while police budgets rise too as property taxes and thus local revenue grows. And they all know this. At 1-2014 New York Police Foundation Gala, corporate donors were gifted bulletproof vests as swag and presented with a slideshow comparing rates of falling crime to rising property values. At the time, Mayor Bill de Blasio commented that as a homeowner in Brooklyn, he was particularly

delighted. Urban housing expert Samuel Stein argues that de Blasio, like his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, saw luxury development as the solution to the city's woes. To achieve that transformation, they believed crackdowns on small-scale quality-of-life offenders by well-armed police forces were crucial. Of course, this isn't just happening in New York. Houston billionaire John D. Arnold clandestinely funded aerial surveillance over Baltimore. Tech first developed to monitor activity in Iraq and also tested by the LAPD in Compton.

While fossil fuel giants like Chevron and General Electric have helped the police in clamping down on dissent by proposing crime bills designed to outlaw protests at infrastructure sites that bring them bad PR. I mean, just look at Donald Trump, gentrification personified, who dreams of bulldozing in Gaza to put up Trump hotels. This is why gentrification is such a buzzy word. In many cases, it's describing imperialism done on a smaller scale in our own neighborhoods. It's the same mechanisms of violently pushing out the undesirable poorer classes in order

to rebuild for the elite. Whether it be a neighborhood or an entire country, it's usually for a Starbucks. And so the police serve the exact same purpose as the military. This is why that cop city in Atlanta was so grossly. It's not simply about needing a place to train cops. That is a $115 million paramilitary police training center primarily funded by Georgia-based corporate donors ranging from Chick-fil-A to Coca-Cola to Home Depot. It was built on land, violently stolen from the indigenous Muskogee people during the Trail of Tears, which was then converted into a slave

plantation and then revamped into a prison labor camp because perfect. It represents everything wrong with policing in this country. A police industrial complex brought to you by Bank of America. Paul God damn, Verhoeven. Listen, kids, it comes down to this. Nobody wants to live in fear. Crime is generally bad. We all agree on that. Boo, murder. But what you have to understand is that the police have never really existed to prevent crime, not on a large systemic level. They're just there when the crime already happened, and this country never really seriously tried to create a system that prevents or at least mitigates crime. This goes back to when President Lyndon Big Balls Johnson had declared a war on poverty and was trying to kick off a series of social welfare reforms to solve it. But got sidetracked

due to public opinion and refocused on the topic of crime. And so, despite evidence at the time that systemic poverty was a leading cause of crime in the first place, Johnson helped a staff a punitive system of law and order that prioritized police presence. And then we just never look back. Imagine a garden, a lush, beautiful marijuana garden. But for some reason, not all the plants are growing strong. You're getting a lot of ditch weed looking turds,

you know, snickle fritz. And what you want to do is troubleshoot the soil, open access to resources like sunlight and water, nurture the plants so they can grow strong. But imagine, Instead of that, you hired a landscaper who just kept coming over and yanking out the bad plans and spraying your precious weed with chemicals and shit. And you never solved the problem. You just kept hiring this landscaper to come back every week. Now, this analogy may seem crass because we're comparing people to weeds and whatnot.

And I understand and agree. But incidentally, this is somewhat similar to a tactic employed in Gaza by our collaborator and training buddy Israel, and they literally call it mowing the grass. That's essentially what we're doing with the police. But more sinisterly, it's as if that hypothetical landscaper kept asking for billions of dollars in order to buy elaborate equipment while secretly funding and supporting political efforts to keep your plants unhealthy in order to perpetuate the cycle. And as a result, ultimately brutalize your entire garden until all your precious marijuana's gone! I'm sorry for calling criminals dishweed.

Again, it's hard to build a perfect metaphor. But that is basically the problem of funding. misunderstanding of how to prevent crime thanks to decades of propaganda. While it began with real fears, crime has since gone way down since the days of Lyndon Johnson, and it is still down, which as we noted before doesn't have much to do with our increasing police budgets. As it stands, of the millions of arrests made in America each year, roughly 5% involve violent crimes at all.

And at the same time, our fear of this perceived crime just keeps going up, all while we've never once bothered to explore the root causes of that fear or crime. And this is, of course, in tandem with decades of television and movies and video games depicting cops as action heroes and loose cannons traversing scum-filled cities like they were war zones. Do you remember the point-and-click game, police quest? A more serious cousin to Space Quest or Kingsquest or Leisure Suit Larry. The first one released in the late 80s took place

a fictional town and was developed with the help of a real cop. It had an almost annoying attention spent on police procedure, calling for backup, proper use of force, and so on. But as they kept making those games into the 90s, you can see in real time how the mindset of cops and the job being a cop devolved. The 1993 reboot, Police Quest Open Season, actually takes place in Los Angeles, complete with racial stereotypes lurking in dangerous neighborhoods and a final fight with a drag queen serial killer while you light them on fire and then watch them die.

Your action neutralizes your assailant. Jesus fucking Christ, put them out! Why aren't you putting them out? What sick cop did they get to make that atrocity? Oh right, it was Darrell Gates, who took over the series in the 90s. Oh my sweet horse. This guy, he's like Palpatine. Behind it all he is, he's not back though,

he's dead like I mentioned earlier, so that's great. Gates went on to spin off police quest into an entire SWAT series that focused entirely on raiding buildings with big, strong weapons, as opposed to solving crimes or interacting with the community. If you play your cards right, you can even shoot a scared old woman defending her home.

That, let's be honest, hilarious clip, kind of sums it all up. From 1987's police quest to 2000, 2005 SWAT 4, we were gradually fearmongered into allowing our police forces to get bigger and bigger and bigger and mainly with the help of Daryl Gates, I guess, until they began to work in tandem with our military adopting the same imperialist mindset and forming a symbiotic relationship invading other countries creating refugees who we would then demonize and terrorize here at home all to continue this self-perpetuating cycle of money being fed into law enforcement to exist in

of themselves and the wealthy people in charge. It's wrong. It's not what police are supposed to be, as was beautifully and gruffly articulated by Commander Bill Adama. There's a reason where you separate military on the police. One fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both,

then the enemies of the state tend to become the people. And here we are, with the police treating the people. with the police treating the people like the enemy of the people. Now we have this big, grotesque machine with talons deep in our foundation. It's hard to imagine how to dislodge that. But it starts with fear. It starts with everyday people realizing that the way we think about crime and the causes and solutions to crime are fundamentally incorrect.

And that taking even just a little bit of law enforcement, staggering budget, over $100 billion per year from state and local funding alone, and redirecting it towards other programs or social services could be very useful. Drug treatment, affordable housing, work programs, maybe instead of paying to put cops in schools, we just fund the schools, you know? And this isn't even getting into the ever-increasing budget of our actual military, the military. But sadly, as our president pointed out on the day we filmed this, we can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We're fighting wars. We can't take care of it.

of daycare. God, what a piece of shit. But yeah, if we cut police budgets by a third, that would still just bring it down to pre-911 levels. America's police spending per capita has increased by nearly 50% since the 1990s. Fucking defund them is what I guess I'm trying to say, even a little bit. Give the money to, I don't know, me, me, give me money. Kids, give me money. This is a stick up. Ah, put your hands up. I'll kill your parents if you don't give me money. Okay, see ya. I'm not gonna kill you. Calm down, kids. Geez, I'm not gonna kill you. Who am I? The US government? Ha, ha ha ha ha ha. We joke because it sucks. Hey everybody, thanks for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe. Make sure to buy Warbo stuff. Buy Warbo stuff. It's on our merch store. We're doing

things out of order today. That's the merch part. And the other part, I already said like and subscribe. Leave a comment. Make it nice. Please. And we got a podcast called Even More News. is on this channel twice a week. Sometimes we live stream. Check that out. Look for the dates. We also have this show available as a podcast.

If you want to listen to it instead of Warmbos over there, I can't hold them up anymore. The Warbo stuff. Look, bottom line, thanks for watching. Top of the line, we've got a Patreon.com

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