Taking the “good guy with a gun” line to heart, the Nassau County Police Department in Long Island, New York is building an arsenal of assault rifles to arm themselves against potential mass shootings or terrorist attacks.
The county has purchased 150 new M400 SWAT rifles specifically to “keep pace” with mass shooters, CBS New York reports. Patrol cars have also been outfitted with new armor and tactical helmets. Two hundred officers will start training on Friday.
“When you’re talking active shooters and the locations where they’re most likely to occur — malls, schools — you have extensive distances that are gonna have to be covered,” Nassau County Police Commissioner Thomas Krumpter said.
Anvato Universal PlayerEdit descriptionup.anv.bzNassau County police were also quick to step up security in the wake of the attacks in Paris, promising to closely monitor all “large gatherings” for terrorist activity.
.@NassauCountyPD are stepping up patrols at gatherings. If you know any large gathering this weekend please let us know. #Paris #terror
— Ed Mangano (@edmangano) November 14, 2015
It’s actually relatively unlikely that Nassau County Police will have to respond to an attack like the one that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California. Mass shootings still make up a small percentage of total gun violence deaths and an even smaller share of the overall crime officers have to deal with on a day to day basis.
It’s more likely that the new gear will exacerbate “the rise of the warrior cop,” a term coined by Washington Post columnist Radley Balko to describe the post-9/11 militarization of police departments.
Virtually every police department, no matter how small, possesses a cache of tactical gear and weapons gifted by the military, theoretically to deal with terrorist attacks and mass shootings. But that equipment hasn’t had much effect in curbing such threats. Rather, research suggests that the mere presence of weapons can escalate a tense situation and provoke more aggressive behavior on both sides. That effect was on full display when local police rolled out tanks and high-grade weapons during police brutality protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, and other cities.
Nassau County police faced similar protests, particularly after officers were caught on video beating a man during a traffic stop. The assault trial for one of those officers, accused of using his fists, knee and flashlight to beat the unarmed driver, occurred last month.
In May, President Obama signed an executive order to keep the military from giving local police forces certain kinds of equipment. But that doesn’t stop police departments from spending taxpayer money or grants to stockpile weapons.
The gun industry has learned that mass shootings are good for business; sales always go up due to “panic buying.” Two of the biggest gun manufacturers reported massive spikes in sales over the first quarter after the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. This year, Black Friday gun sales broke records, coinciding with a shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado the same day. Police departments are not immune to that momentum. The militarization of police, as Balko explains, ramped up in the wake of the September 11 attacks as an antiterrorism effort.
The impulse to super-charge police forces in the wake of shootings and terrorist attacks hasn’t yielded much improvement in safety, but it has had other consequences. In response to the Columbine High School shooting, for example, many schools started employing armed police officers to theoretically protect students and disarm shooters. There’s no evidence those officers have had any effect on school safety. Instead, schools with armed guards have dramatically higher rates of student arrests, usually for minor disciplinary offenses.