NYPD creating new anti terror/anti protest unit
New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton speaks at the New York City Police Foundation’s “State of the NYPD” breakfast in New York, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015.
NEW YORK — New York Police Department Commissioner William J. Bratton announced Thursday a new unit specifically created to respond to protests and terrorist attacks.
According to the New York Times, the Strategic Response Group, comprised of around 350 officers, will be equipped with machine guns and heavy armor and will receive training in advanced counterterrorism tactics and “disorder control.”
NEW YORK — New York Police Department Commissioner William J. Bratton announced Thursday a new unit specifically created to respond to protests and terrorist attacks.
According to the New York Times, the Strategic Response Group, comprised of around 350 officers, will be equipped with machine guns and heavy armor and will receive training in advanced counterterrorism tactics and “disorder control.”
New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton speaks at the New York City Police Foundation’s “State of the NYPD” breakfast in New York, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015. (AP Image)Bratton cited the recent terror attacks in Paris as one example of the type of large-scale incidents the new unit will be trained to respond to.
The NY Daily News reports the officers will be comprised of a combination of current counterterror police and cops from other units, with an aim of preventing most officers from leaving their regular precincts in order to respond to these types of events.
“It will allow us to staff important programs like site protection and critical-response vehicles — or CRV — without using precinct personnel,” Bratton said during the Thursday presentation.
The commissioner touted the cohesiveness of a unit trained and working together versus the method currently used to create a response team.
Bratton expects the program to arrive in the next six months, according to Newsday.
Nice to see that peaceful, unarmed protest seems to be as threatening to the police as homicidal ISIL lunatics. When police are trained to be anti terror hammers, we can expect to be treated like nails if we want to use our 1st Amendment rights to protest brutality or anything else. If you liked the pictures of cops in camoflage and body armor pointing sniper rifles and MP-5 submachine guns at African American citizens holding their hands in the air, you ought to love this…
PS: More at The Atlantic…
theatlantic.com
The benefit to such a squad is its ability to respond to an attack like the ones in Mumbai or Nairobi, where heavily armed gunmen seize a building with many hostages. The cost is the danger that the militarized unit will be turned on U.S. citizens.
Alas, that worst-case scenario seems to be Bratton’s plan. The unit, dubbed a Strategic Response Group, is “designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris,” Bratton declared, giving no sign of recognizing that one of those things is unlike the others.
The NYPD has a history of violently suppressing protests.
An investigation undertaken by law clinics at NYU, Fordham, Harvard, and Stanford concluded, after eight months of study, that the NYPD abused Occupy Wall Street protesters and violated their rights on numerous occasions during the 2011 protests that radiated out from Zuccotti Park. Their report is titled Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street.
