Cargo Cult Toughness, posted by HidingFromGoro
It’s funny because it [police wearing wearing ski masks] started in Europe so that the “special operators” wouldn’t be recognized because they didn’t want the IRA/Baader-Meinhof/whoever to figure out who they were and kill their families; and in the US they wear them to serve possession busts or failure-to-appear warrants and the cops basically trip all over themselves to tell you they’re SWAT.
You’ll see in cop magazines some dude sweating in 40 pounds of gear with like 20 M-16 magazines and a bunch of grenades clipped to his vest, with only his eyes showing through his mask, and then the article will include something like “Patrolman Arnold Denbest has been on the Salt Lake City SWAT team for 2 years, and has served multiple high-risk warrants including the big bust on Smith street in March of last year. He currently lives in Ogden, UT with his wife Laura and two young children.”
The masks are just one of the talismans that police use to emulate the (largely fictionalized) special-ops superwarrior. If they dress like them, if they mimic the language, the manner, the equipment, etc then they will “become” them in a sense. It becomes a ritual- sure you could kick down the door and roll in with a pistol or shotgun; but it’s not “real” unless you blow it up with an explosive charge and roll in with an automatic rifle and a gas mask. This (along with profitable surplus contracts to buy military gear) is also why there is an insistence on using whatever the military is using at the time- it’s why they “need” a 5.56mm M4 “for those situations when you need more range than a shotgun or what if he’s wearing body armor.” A hunting rifle provides better accuracy, longer range, more power, and better armor penetration but these are not employed. The military uses 5.56mm carbines so that’s what we need to use.
The common excuse for this is that “well we recruit from the military so they need to use what they’re familiar with,” and this is in line with the increasing militarization of police, but really keeping that familiarity is contrary to what needs to be happening, which is that ex-military guys need to be trained & socialized as far away from the mindset of a combat troop as possible. Every effort should be made to move an ex-soldier (especially a combat veteran) away from being a soldier (destroy & conquer, decisive action in which there is a clear enemy & a predefined state of “victory”) and toward being a law enforcement officer (protect & serve, situationally-appropriate action in which all parties are members of the same community , no us-vs-them, primary mission: nonviolent conflict resolution & community cohesiveness). Maintaining the same weapons so some jarhead doesn’t have to learn where the safety is on a new weapon is contrary to that.
The masks are contrary to that. They promote anonymity, where the cop stops being a member of the community and instead the “tip of the spear” in a faceless, omnipotent engine of justice. The justifications for masks are endless- just pick up a BQM or USC catalog. This one’s fire-retardant, this one has extra padding so your helmet is more comfortable, this one wicks the sweat away from your brow with whichever proprietary snake-oil textile is popular this month. They all need to go. It’s a stupid and costly aping of an imagined model warrior.
It’s like when tribesmen in Pacific islands build fake landing strips and coconut-shell headphones to make the planes come back and bring more trinkets.
It’s cargo-cult toughness.
