A Colt M-16 rifle that has been unaccounted for since January has cost Melbourne a tactical police vehicle, and potentially jeopardized the city’s participation in a federal surplus property program.
What scares me isn’t that an M-16 is on the loose in Southern Florida. It is probably safely in the gun safe of one of the officer’s homes anyway. What scares me is that there is a federal surplus property program where small town police departments can woo the government into giving them playthings such as M-16s and “tactical police vehicles.” The militarization of our local police departments needs to stop!
When I started as a cop in 1973, two detectives and one patrol officer was all that was deployed to take down a bad guy in a house. If the bad guy barricaded in, a couple more patrol officers and a patrol Sergeant with the gas gun were called in. No battlewagons, no full-auto weapons, the heaviest thing there would have been a Remington 870 shottie or Remington 760 30-06 slide rifle. Everyone else had revolvers.
The bad guys were just as bad, some worse than the baddies of today. The cops didn’t even use bullet-resistant vests then. It’s all gone downhill from there. When SWAT came about in the 1980’s, the entire region had one team, Portland Police Dept’s. They got maybe 1 or 2 call-outs per month. Now they get called out 2-3 times, per DAY. They go out on every felony warrant arrest, whenever there is a “bad guy with a gun”, etc, etc.
The police Departments have lost their nads AND their sense of community.