The North Hollywood shootout and the militarization of police

The New Neo Posted on by

As part of the current argument about what’s right and wrong with US police forces, a trend that often comes up is the greater “militarization” of police, which is seen by many people as part of the problem.

As commenter “F” writes:

Does anyone over 60 ever remember seeing a policeman wearing a ballistic vest? And nowadays, does anyone remember seeing an LEO without a ballistic vest? Or think back to armament 60 years ago and now: LEOs when I was young had a revolver, and possibly a shotgun in the vehicle. Now the LEO carries an autoloading pistol with a magazine holding 13-21 cartridges, and two extra magazines on his/her belt, along with a military long gun in the car, not to forget helmets and other accoutrements from the battlefield.

I am the first to admit, this is in response to a change in the bad guys’ change in armament: they are also carrying autoloaders with high capacity magazines and ballistic vests. We are also seeing more armored vehicles being used by law enforcement, and cops are able to tap into information data bases from their vehicle and communicate from their person to headquarters.

So the equation has changed on both sides. And legislatures appear more and more ready to handicap the police and allow law-breakers to go Scott-free when they’re apprehended.

I’m far from an expert on policing or weaponry. But I remember this incident in California in 1997 as a turning point. It left the two perps dead and twelve police officers plus eight bystanders injured, and it certainly got my attention:

At 9:17 am, Phillips and Mitasareanu entered and robbed Bank of America’s North Hollywood branch. The two robbers were confronted by LAPD officers when they exited the bank and a shootout between the officers and robbers ensued…

Phillips and Mitasareanu are believed to have robbed at least two other banks using similar methods by taking control of the entire bank and firing weapons illegally modified to enable fully-automatic fire, chambered for intermediate cartridges for control and entry past “bullet-proof” security doors, and were suspects in two armored car robberies.

Standard issue sidearms carried by most local patrol officers at the time were 9mm pistols or .38 Special revolvers; some patrol cars were also equipped with a 12-gauge shotgun. Phillips and Mitasareanu carried Norinco Type 56 S-1s (an AK-47 variant), a Bushmaster XM-15 Dissipator with high-capacity drum magazine, and a Heckler & Koch HK91 rifle, all of which had been illegally modified to enable fully-automatic fire, as well as a Beretta 92FS pistol. The robbers wore mostly homemade, heavy plated body armor which successfully protected them from handgun rounds and shotgun pellets fired by the responding officers. A police SWAT team eventually arrived bearing sufficient firepower, and they commandeered an armored car to evacuate the wounded. Several officers also appropriated AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles from a nearby firearms dealer. The incident sparked debate on the need for patrol officers to upgrade their firepower in preparation for similar situations in the future.

You bet it did.

Please read the whole thing. I recall it being covered in real time, and being horrified at the amount of firepower and protection the perps had.

Also this:

The shootout contributed to motivating the arming of rank-and-file police officers in Los Angeles and nationwide with semi-automatic, selective fire, and automatic rifles.

The ineffectiveness of the standard police patrol pistols and shotguns in penetrating the robbers’ body armor led to a trend in the United States toward arming selected police patrol officers, not just SWAT teams, with heavier firepower such as semi-automatic AR-15 style rifles. SWAT teams, whose close quarters battle weaponry usually consisted of submachine guns that fired pistol cartridges such as the Heckler & Koch MP5, began supplementing them with AR-15 rifles and carbines.

Seven months after the incident, the Department of Defense gave 600 surplus M16s to the LAPD, which were issued to each patrol sergeant; LAPD patrol vehicles now carry AR-15s as standard issue, with bullet-resistant Kevlar plating in their doors as well.[42] Also as a result of this incident LAPD authorized its officers to carry .45 ACP caliber semiautomatic pistols as duty sidearms, specifically the Smith & Wesson Models 4506 and 4566. Prior to 1997, only LAPD SWAT officers were authorized to carry .45 ACP caliber pistols, specifically the Model 1911A1 .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol.

Times were different back then in other ways, as well. For example, “The year following the shootout, 18 officers of the LAPD received the departmental Medal of Valor for their actions, and met President Bill Clinton.” You may recall that Clinton was a Democrat.

Becoming a police officer should not entail signing up for suicide by perp. Obviously, though, most encounters between police and civilians are not going to involve this sort of shootout – at least, not yet. However, police have become understandably wary and police forces have felt the need to prepare to meet the possible worst-case threats.

The “defund the police” advocates have responded in a profoundly illogical and destructive manner, but they have their own agenda which is political and deeply leftist and radical. I don’t have a solution; but I know that defunding the police is not it.

[NOTE: For those too young to remember incidents such as North Hollywood – and that represents a sizeable portion of the voting public – it may seem as though the police just woke up one day and decided to escalate things. And the left has an investment in letting them (or helping them) think that way.]

Police union endorses Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Good:

The National Association of Police Organizations endorsed President Trump’s reelection Wednesday, citing his “steadfast and very public support” for law enforcement.

In a brief letter to Mr. Trump, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, NAPO President Michael McHale said the president’s support was critical in the wake of the attacks on law enforcement following the death of George Floyd…

The decision to side with Mr. Trump this year delivered a blow to presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden, who prides himself on being a “union man” and longtime ally of police.

The group didn’t endorse anyone in 2016, and endorsed Obama/Biden in 2008 and 2012.

Twitter is a security threat

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, Twitter is a threat in many ways, in particular the spread of cancel culture and the increase in the ability to organize riots, as well as offering great rewards for animus in general.

But this is what I’m referring to in the title of this post:

On Wednesday, a spike of high profile accounts including those of Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Uber, and Apple tweeted cryptocurrency scams in an apparent hack.

“We used a rep that literally done all the work for us,” one of the sources told Motherboard. The second source added they paid the Twitter insider…

Whereas in other cases hackers have bribed workers to leverage tools over individual users, in this case the access has led to takeovers of some of the biggest accounts on the social media platform and tweeted bitcoin related scams in an effort to generate income…

Within an hour of the breach, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking for more information about the hack, including how the hack occurred, how many users were compromised, and whether the hack affected President Trump’s account. Hawley said “please reach out immediately to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and take any necessary measures to secure the site before this breach expands.”

In 2017, a Twitter worker briefly deleted President Donald Trump’s account before it was quickly reinstated…

All tech companies face the issue of malicious insiders.

How are employees of such companies vetted? I doubt there’s a way to stop this sort of thing; it’s baked into the cake, as it were. Most world leaders have accounts on Twitter, and the potential for mischief (too mild a word) of all kinds is enormous.

Irreversible Damage: the transgender movement and young girls

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written about this before, but I want to mention it again, because if any of you have children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren in the school system, you need to be alert and aware of the fact that the current climate around transgender identity is harming children and especially young girls [emphasis mine]:

Gender dysphoria, the acute discomfort in one’s biological sex, was, until about five years ago, extremely rare…

…[But] over the past decade…there has been a huge increase among teenage girls and female university students, most notably in the US, the UK and Scandinavia. Transgenderism is certainly no longer the preserve of adult males, as it once had been…

…[Author] Shrier looks at why many girls, often from the point they start menstruating onwards, start to feel alienated from their own bodies, despite never having experienced any previous discomfort in their biological sex.

The first key factor for Shrier is the role of trans narratives propagated within schools. ‘Gender affirmation’ is rife within public schools across the US, she writes. She goes on to show how classrooms are being colonised by therapists eager to push children towards a pathway of lifelong medicalisation…

The second key factor is the rise of online trans-influencer culture. In some ways, this has been the engine driving the transgender narrative over the past decade. It hooks into contemporary youngsters’ need to establish a social identity and have it affirmed. Indeed, such is the power of online trans influencers that it is surely no coincidence that, as Shrier puts it, ‘over 65 per cent of teens had increased their social-media use and time spent online immediately prior to their announcement of transgender identity’…

Shrier also criticises the common and coercive trans-culture tropes that appear online, including: ‘If your parents loved you, they would support your trans identity’, and, ‘If you’re not supported in your trans identity, you’ll probably kill yourself’. She even uncovers online trans influencers showing kids how to convince doctors they’re trans in order to receive prescriptions for hormone-blockers or hormones. The damage all this does to young girls’ bodies is terrifying.

What’s more, the medical world offers no resistance.

Please read the whole thing. I haven’t read the book, but here it is. It sounds not only good, but important.

I have noticed all the trends mentioned in the excerpt. In particular, YouTube is rife with it. I’ve read the comments there, too, and it is clear to me that this is at least in part (and a large part at that) a contagion effect.

You can also find the stories of detransitioners on YouTube, girls (and some boys) who regret transitioning to the opposite sex and are trying to transition back. Even if they haven’t had what’s known as “bottom” surgery, some of the effects of the hormones they have taken are devastating and irreversible, especially for girls. Just as an example, teenaged girls who take male hormones experience a deepening of the voice that is ordinarily irreversible. To see these detransitioned girls and young women, speaking with male voices emanating from their female bodies, and to know that this effect is permanent, is a sorrowful experience .

She’s not woke enough – literally

The New Neo Posted on by

The Red Guard rides again:

Nearly 2,000 people called for the termination of a New York City professor after she reportedly fell asleep during an anti-racist meeting held on Zoom.

Patricia Simon, a theater arts associate professor at Marymount Manhattan College, is facing requests for her removal after a June 29 Zoom meeting to discuss the adoption of an “anti-racist framework.”

You will not be allowed to sleep through the revolution – although it seems that Simon claims she didn’t actually sleep, she was just resting her “Zoom-weary eyes,” and that she listened with her “ears and heart the entire meeting.”

Not good enough, Ms. Simon. Not nearly good enough. You must listen with your entire body.

What appears to be the case here is that Simon’s apparent Zoomsnooze gave disgruntled students a chance to tee off at a teacher who had offended many of her prickly charges before. My favorite accusation is this one: “enabling the racist and sizeist actions and words of the vocal coaches under her jurisdiction.” These days “racist” can mean anything, literally anything. But reading between the lines, I’d guess that Simon may have committed the unpardonable crime of pointing out to some significantly overweight students that their career opportunities out in the world – as opposed to within the hallowed halls of Marymount – might be limited somewhat by that extra poundage. Reality, unfortunately, is still somewhat “sizeist.”

When I was in college, no one cared what we students thought of our professors, unless they did something remarkably egregious (raped someone? murdered someone?). We were not even asked – not once – to fill out evaluation forms. I had a number of really bad or really mean ones. That wasn’t the greatest of situations, but the pendulum has now swung so far in the other direction that it’s coming round to bite us all in the you-know-what.

More evidence about the benefits of hydroxychloroquine

The New Neo Posted on by

With all the other news, it’s easy to forget how the drug hydroxychloroquine was trashed after Trump had the audacity to mention it as being promising. But let’s not forget, because lives were lost as a result of the anti-Trump response.

It’s very sad:

President Trump expressed optimism based on studies in France and China, and the media freaked out. The president’s political opposition would go on to cling to any proof the drug would not work and suppress any information that it would. This politicization culminated in the horrific study published by Lancet that the publication quietly retracted.

However, the damage was already done. The World Health Organization suspended trials immediately after the study published in Lancet. Switzerland, which had been using the treatment, prohibited the use of the drug in COVID-19 shortly after that on May 27th. The retraction was so stealth that the ban was not lifted in Switzerland until June 11th.

This window allowed French researchers to analyze what happened in the entire population of COVID-19 patients during the ban. They used the case fatality rate (CFR) as the measure observed. The graph is stunning.

Here’s the graph:

Please read the whole piece.

Another sad thing is that most people will never know, because the same media outlets that helped cause the problem aren’t likely to call our attention to what they themselves have done.

[NOTE: I wonder whether the researchers who did this study will be canceled because of where it led them.]

And in classic Orwellian fashion, these racists call themselves “anti-racists”

The New Neo Posted on by

Leftists love to give themselves titles that are the opposite of their essence. Orwell knew this, and it was a prominent part of his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four.

We see it today in the names of several organizations. For example, “Antifa” (whose members actually lean toward the leftist wing of anarchism), which supposedly stands for “anti-Fascist,” is the closest thing this country has to brownshirts right now. And “Black Lives Matter” – founded by avowed Marxists and admirers of Venezuela – could more accurately be called “The Only Black Lives That Matter Are Those Snuffed Out By White Cops, and We Don’t Care If the Policies We Advocate Lead to the Deaths of Countless More Innocent Black People Than Are Ever Killed By Police.”

That name would be a bit unwieldy on a poster, though.

The “anti-racism” advocates sound as though they’re promoting a good thing, too. “Anti-racism”? Sign me up for the course! Except that, unfortunately for all of us (except the anti-racism trainers themselves, who are smiling all the way to the bank), they are advocates of a racism that’s remarkably pernicious and cleverly – well, the word “diabolical” comes to mind (here’s an article from The Federalist that will get you up to speed on the details, if you aren’t already).

How does flagrant racism, and the promotion of a program that will lead to more racism rather than less, come to be defined as anti-racism? Well, never underestimate the creativity of the left, but in this case it pretty much boils down to the fact that the left defines everything in terms of the power hierarchy (as they order that hierarchy, of course). So racism can only be exercised by the group or groups the left sees as being on top.

In other words, to the left, racism against white people is some sort of oxymoron – it literally does not exist and cannot exist. So we get things such as this, which harms just about everyone:

I repeat: this harms everyone. Except, of course, the purveyors of anti-racism. It may even harm black children the most.

Now it’s Andrew Sullivan’s turn…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to say buh-bye:

“I am trying hard to create in this magazine a civil, respectful, intellectually honest space for political debate,” Haskell [the New York editor] said. “I believe there is a way to write from a conservative* perspective about some of the most politically charged subjects of American life while still upholding our values. I also think that our magazine in particular has an opportunity to be a place where the liberal project is hashed out, which is to say not only championed but also interrogated.”

Or as Seth Mandel of the Washington Examiner tweets, “Translation: I want to challenge our reader base but I don’t know how to do that without challenging our reader base,” adding, “that feeling when you thought you were publishing far-right-wing ideas because you hired Jon Chait.”

And while we’re on the subject of cancel culture, there’s this:

Until last week, Gary Garrels was senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). He resigned his position after museum employees circulated a petition that accused him of racism and demanded his immediate ouster.

“Gary’s removal from SFMOMA is non-negotiable,” read the petition. “Considering his lengthy tenure at this institution, we ask just how long have his toxic white supremacist beliefs regarding race and equity directed his position curating the content of the museum?”

I confess I’ve never heard of Garrels or of SFMOMA. Sounds like quite the Nazi, doesn’t he? Let’s see:

The petitioners cite few examples of anything even approaching bad behavior from Garrels. Their sole complaint is that he allegedly concluded a presentation on how to diversify the museum’s holdings by saying, “don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.”

Garrels has apparently articulated this sentiment on more than one occasion. According to artnet.com, he said that it would be impossible to completely shun white artists, because this would constitute “reverse discrimination.” That’s the sum total of his alleged crimes. He made a perfectly benign, wholly inoffensive, obviously true statement that at least some of the museum’s featured artists would continue to be white. The petition lists no other specific grievances.

Are these people that powerful? Or was Garrels just tired of the fight? I could easily understand it if he were.

Here’s an article that sheds a bit more light on the Garrels flap. It appears to me that the expression “reverse discrimination,” which he used, was part of the list of his terrible crimes. My suspicion is that to the anti-racist woke, “reverse discrimination” cannot possibly exist, because of their Marxist power-dominated definition of discrimination.

Also there’s this:

…[Garrels’] lasting legacy at SFMOMA may be tied to two very different initiatives: the museum’s extended loan deal of the Fisher Collection and its decision, last year, to auction off a painting by Mark Rothko for $50.1 million in order to create a dedicated fund to acquire work by female artists, artists of color, and LGBTQ+ artists. Works that have been acquired using the fund include pieces by Rebecca Belmore, Forrest Bess, Frank Bowling, Leonora Carrington, Lygia Clark, and Norman Lewis.

So the auction and the use of the funds to buy up works by members of the designated interest groups were not enough to save Garrels. Apparently the whiteness of the Fisher Collection was a problem that offset that effort:

In 2009, Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher agreed to lend their collection of 1,100 works to the museum for 100 years. As part of the deal, the museum agreed to organize Fisher-only displays once a decade and to keep three-quarters of the works on show at all times in designated galleries as Fisher works. But the collection contains very few works by women or artists of color, creating a structural dominance of white men in the museum’s galleries.

Those nefarious Gap collectors of white male art!! No wonder Garrels had to go.

Quite some time ago, I noticed that museum art of the modern variety had become totally political. Even for collections of older works, much of the commentary is such leftist PC claptrap that it often ruins the exhibit and in order to enjoy the art you have to skip the explanatory materials on the wall.

Then again, Soviet art wasn’t very good either.

The Littleton shooting

The New Neo Posted on by

In Detroit, a 20-year-old black man was killed by police. His name was Hakim Littleton.

Black Lives Matter, the organization dedicated to publicizing and protesting all deaths of black people at the hands of police (particularly white police), sprung into action with predictable results:

…[A]round 300 converged at the site of the shooting on Detroit’s west side, yelling at police and chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Defund DPD!’

Several members of the crowd threw bottles, bricks and other projectiles at officers, who deployed tear gas and made eight arrests.

Many of the protesters were carrying signs and chanting ‘we want badge numbers,’ and ‘killer cops get out of town.’

Sound familiar? But something was different. The police chief James Craig (who happens to be black, by the way) immediately released a video of the incident, and it revealed that Littleton had actually fired at a police officer from about three feet away, aiming at the officer’s head. He missed, and the officer gave chase, as several other officers fired on Littleton and felled him, causing his death.

Craig said he released the video hours after the incident to quell ‘a false narrative’ that the shooting was unjustified. The ‘erroneous information that was put out has incited violence,’ he said.

I don’t have a full text of Craig’s remarks, but I wonder whether he named who put out that “erroneous information” (better known in the past as a lie).

The incident began with the investigation of a fatal shooting days earlier at a party. Police came to arrest another man, Darnell Sylvester (apparently a friend of Littleton’s), who was wanted on an outstanding drug arrest and who was also a suspect in that earlier shooting. Sylvester followed police instructions and was being taken into custody when Littleton (who was not being arrested) decided to act quite differently.

This entire incident highlights many things. One is that if a person cooperates, no problem. The second is that some people with guns aren’t good shots. The third is that police work is very very dangerous and difficult. The fourth is that BLM and other such groups are in the business of firing up cop-hatred without any interest in learning facts first. The fifth is that videocams can sometimes help tell the truth. The sixth is the political use of a story: will this one fade, or will Littleton enter the pantheon of BLM’s martyrs?

“The unhinged revolution is trying to make the U.S. into one big CHOP”

The New Neo Posted on by

That title is a quote from this article by Victor Davis Hanson. Please read the whole thing.

Hanson isn’t ordinarily given to extreme statements. I’ve followed his columns and articles for years. He’s become more bitter and more angry, as have most of us (I include myself). This particular article is written at great intensity, and he’s clearly alarmed.

Hanson seems to think this thing may be burning itself out. The title of his piece indicates that we possibly have reached “Peak Jacobinism” (again, interesting that this appears on Bastille Day, from a historian such as Hanson).

I’m not at all sure we have – and neither, I may add, is Hanson. I hope so. But I don’t think so.