Protest? Police are getting Ready for you

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Protest? Police are getting Ready for you

HARRISONBURG - In a secluded gravel lot off Mosby Road Wednesday, about 20 Harrisonburg police officers in riot gear were pelted with rocks, tennis balls and the occasional 2-by-4.

In this case, the rioters weren't hoodlums looking for trouble. They were some of the police department's highest-ranking officers helping to train part of HPD's newest team - a 40-member Civil Disturbance Unit.

Although many officers are trained in crowd containment and dispersal methods each year, officers say it's better to have a team in place just in case one is needed.

But, they say, it's unlikely the Harrisonburg unit will be used much.
"It's better to have it and never need it, than need it and not have it," said Harrisonburg police Lt. Tom Hoover.

The idea to train officers to deal with riot situations started in the late 1990s in preparation for Y2K, when some government officials around the country were worried mass chaos would break loose if computers stopped working.

After Y2K proved to be a non-event, the Harrisonburg department continued to train a small portion of its force each year.

Cpl. Joe Palaskey said it's time for Harrisonburg to take the next step to keep pace with the need to control large crowds.

The city's population continues to grow, as has the student enrollment at James Madison University. JMU projects it will have about 21,500 students by 2013, which compares to around 18,000 who enrolled for the 2008-09 school year.

In addition, the university plans on expanding Bridgeforth Stadium to seat more than 20,000 people, up from its current capacity of about 15,000.
"As the city grows, we felt that we needed a full-time team in the city," Palaskey said.

Gearing Up
For the past week, half the newly formed team spent every day studying the legal aspects of crowd control and practicing methods for looting suppression, crowd extractions, building searches and officer rescue.

Palaskey said one of the lessons taught over the week deals with what protesters are allowed to do and what they can't do.

For example, he said, if protesters start a sit-in in the middle of a road it would be a violation of a city ordinance dealing with impeding traffic.

Officers faced with such a situation would initially ask the protesters to move their demonstration to the sidewalks.

"Our goal isn't to stop protests, we want to make sure it's a lawful protest," Palaskey said.

But, if things get out of hand, HPD officers have plenty of resources to help break up a crowd.

Further along in the training, officers were trained how to use shields and what to do if someone grabs one.

In extreme circumstances, Sgt. Carl Cline said the unit could use tear gas.
"Our biggest deterrent are the chemical munitions," Cline said.

They also have an assortment of other non-lethal weapons, including a gun that shoots rubber bullets.

Unlike tear gas, Cline said, rubber bullets wouldn't be used on an entire crowd.

"We wouldn't target a crowd," he said. "It's usually [reserved] for an initiator."

Tactics Rarely Used
While a 40-member team is now in place, Palaskey said it's unlikely that it will be called upon often. In fact, the last time city police had to bust out the riot gear was a decade ago.

In 2000, JMU's annual return-to-school block party, an off-campus event on Village Lane, got out of hand.

At one point, about 2,500 people gathered in the streets, throwing beer bottles and lighting a Dumpster on fire.

Police in riot gear, who were bombarded with bottles, used tear gas to break up the crowd. About 20 arrests followed in the days to come.

Since then, the annual party has been calm, leading police to believe the unit won't be needed when the Dukes return later this month.

"Every year, it seems to be getting better and better," Palaskey said.

In addition to large parties, officers say they must be prepared for large sporting events and unexpected protests that might get spin out of control.

"You don't want to panic," Hoover said. "The unknown always scares people. People are less likely to panic if they are trained properly."

Palaskey pointed to last October's unexpected campaign stop at JMU by then presidential hopeful Barack Obama. He said officers were only given a few days to prepare for the capacity crowd of about 8,000 at JMU's Convocation Center. Officers didn't know how many people would show up, or if protesters would try to disrupt the rally.

But, Palaskey said, the CDU ensures that the department is prepared for most situations.

"Forty well-trained people can really handle a crowd," he said. "We want to be trained to handle anywhere from 10 to 10,000 people, or more."



Harrisonburg Police Lt. Tom Hoover acts as a protester during training for the department's Civil Disturbance Unit on Wednesday.


Police Officer Sarah Dove (left) practices a shin-scraping technique with Officer Chris Shaver.


Harrisonburg Police Officer C.M. Grubbs (right) deflects the advances of Officer Tony Hermes in an exercise during civil disturbance training on Wednesday.

[Beetle]

"It's better to have it and never need it, than need it and not have it,"

That would be why I own guns, ammo, and other items that may make defending myself and/or surviving a lil' easier.

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Army Looking Into Monitoring of Protest Groups

August 2, 2009
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE — The Army says it has opened an inquiry into a claim that one of its employees spent more than two years infiltrating antiwar groups active near one of the nation’s largest military bases. The groups say the employee infiltrated their activities under an assumed name and gained access to their plans as well as names and e-mail addresses of some members.

The man, John J. Towery, a civilian employee at Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma, Wash., works as a criminal intelligence analyst for the post’s Force Protection Division, say officials at Fort Lewis, the nation’s third largest Army post.

The Army would not disclose the nature of the investigation or address the claim that Mr. Towery had shared information about civilians. It said Mr. Towery was not available for an interview.

“Mr. John Towery performs sensitive work within the installation law enforcement community, and it would not be appropriate for him to discuss his duties with the media,” the Army said in written statement. “Fort Lewis is aware of the claim with regard to Mr. Towery. To ensure all regulatory guidelines were followed, the command has decided that an inquiry is prudent, and an officer is being appointed to conduct the inquiry.”

Brendan Maslauskas Dunn said he met Mr. Towery in spring 2007, when Mr. Maslauskas Dunn became involved with Port Militarization Resistance, a group that has frequently tried to disrupt military shipments in Olympia, Tacoma and other ports nearby. Mr. Maslauskas Dunn, who was also active in at least one other group, Students for a Democratic Society, said Mr. Towery had identified himself as John Jacob, using his middle name as his last. He said he worked as a civilian at Fort Lewis doing computer support, Mr. Maslauskas Dunn said.

Mr. Towery, he said, frequently attended protests but had not been among those who agreed in advance that they would be willing to be arrested. He said Mr. Towery had often worked as a “watcher” who tracked law enforcement at the protests.

At one point early on, Mr. Maslauskas Dunn said, Mr. Towery brought at least one of his children to an event. He said Mr. Towery often spent time at a meeting place for anarchists in Tacoma.

Mr. Maslauskas Dunn and another member of the group, Drew Hendricks, said that Mr. Towery had been among a handful of people who ran e-mail lists for some of the groups and that this had given him access to names and e-mail addresses. Sound familiar?

Mr. Maslauskas Dunn said Mr. Towery would sometimes call group members while he was at work at Fort Lewis and provide information about the movements of some units and equipment.

“A lot of information he did give us was easily accessible online,” Mr. Maslauskas Dunn said. “You just had to do a little research.”

Mr. Hendricks said he and other group members did not accept classified information if it was offered by people in the military. Mr. Hendricks, who said he lived in Olympia and repaired printers for a living, said Mr. Towery had drawn his suspicion more than once in the past, including after he posted inaccurate information about a military movement on an activist Web site.

Yet he and Mr. Maslauskas Dunn, who said he worked as a janitor at a lumber mill in Shelton, Wash., said Mr. Towery’s identity was inadvertently discovered after a public records request made with the City of Olympia.

The request yielded an e-mail message Mr. Towery had sent to another person with a military address relating to the protesters’ activities.

That led Mr. Hendricks and other group members to try to determine who Mr. Towery was. After they learned it was the man they had known as Mr. Jacob, they discussed it at City Council meeting in Olympia last week and posted the information on a Web site.

Mr. Maslauskas Dunn said that in a meeting last week, Mr. Towery told him and another group member that he was not reporting information to Fort Lewis and that he genuinely wanted to join “the peace movement” but was under pressure to share some information about protesters with local law enforcement authorities. “What he said is that the world isn’t just in black and white, that there are areas of gray and that it’s in those areas of gray that he lives his life,” Mr. Maslauskas Dunn said.

He said Mr. Towery told them that the Army had reassigned him, at least temporarily, and that he was being investigated “for espionage.” Mr. Maslauskas Dunn and Mr. Hendricks said they were skeptical of suggestions that Mr. Towery might have infiltrated the group purely on his own, as a so-called renegade without Army approval.

Stephen Dycus, a professor at Vermont Law School who focuses on national security issues, said the Army was prohibited from conducting law enforcement among civilians except in very rare circumstances, none of which immediately appeared to be relevant to the Fort Lewis case. Mr. Dycus said several statutes and rules also prohibited the Army from conducting covert surveillance of civilian groups for intelligence purposes.

“Infiltration is a really big deal,” he said. He said it “raises fundamental questions about the role of the military in American society.”

Catherine Caruso, a spokeswoman for Fort Lewis, said in a written statement that “the Fort Lewis Force Protection Division, under the Directorate of Emergency Services, consists of both military and civilian employees whose focus is on supporting law enforcement and security operations to ensure the safety and security of Fort Lewis, soldiers, family members, the work force and those personnel accessing the installation.”

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Companion Threads:

• Police turn to Drones for Domestic Surveillance
• FEMA Training to Stop People Like YOU

The Pentagon Is Offering Free Military Hardware To Every Police Department In The US

Robert Johnson | Dec. 5, 2011, 11:09 AM | 41,389 | 84

The U.S. military has some of the most advanced killing equipment in the world that allows it to invade almost wherever it likes at will. We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns out a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens.

Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the "1033 Program" that gave more than $500 million of military gear to U.S. police forces in 2011 alone.

1033 was passed by Congress in 1997 to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but despite a 40-year low in violent crime, police are snapping up hardware like never before. While this year's staggering take topped the charts, next year's orders are up 400 percent over the same period.

This upswing coincides with an increasingly military-like style of law enforcement most recently seen in the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns.

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice told The Daily, “The trend toward militarization was well under way before 9/11, but it’s the federal policy of making surplus military equipment available almost for free that has poured fuel on this fire.”

From The Daily:
Thanks to it, cops in Cobb County, Ga. — one of the wealthiest and most educated counties in the U.S. — now have an amphibious tank. The sheriff of Richland County, S.C., proudly acquired a machine-gun-equipped armored personnel carrier that he nicknamed “The Peacemaker.”

This comes on top of grants from the Department of Homeland Security that enable police departments to buy vehicles such as “BearCats” — 16,000-pound bulletproof trucks equipped with battering rams, gun ports, tear-gas dispensers and radiation detectors. To date, more than 500 of these tank-like vehicles have been sold by Lenco, its Massachusetts-based manufacturer, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel.

“It’s kind of had a corrupting influence on the culture of policing in America,” Lynch says. “The dynamic is that you have some officer go to the chief and say, people in the next county have [military hardware], if we don’t take it some other city will. Then they acquire the equipment, they create a paramilitary unit, and everything seems fine.

“But then one or two years pass. They say, look we’ve got this equipment, this training and we haven’t been using it. That’s where it starts to creep into routine policing.”

[Ryan Ruck]

Yep, DRMO has been providing retired military hardware to police departments for a long time.

A lot of departments get Humvees, M113s, M16s, and sometimes even uniforms. Pretty much if DRMO sells it at government surplus auction, state and local government agencies of all types can get it. I know at one point Cincinnati PD had some M1008s towing their mounted patrol horse trailers. They upgraded them a while back to regular fleet trucks.

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Companion Threads:

• DHS new Terror Warning: "We are now focused on Americans taking up arms"
• America will face Riots, Marches, and Revolution
• Making martial law easier
• Nation Building America
• Bill creates Camps in U.S. for 'Emergencies'
• Obama Making Plans to Use Executive Power
• How To Destroy A Country

Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Downtown Los Angeles Military Exercises



LOS ANGELES (CNS) - Joint military training exercises will be held evenings in downtown Los Angeles through Thursday, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

The LAPD will be providing support for the exercises, which will also be held in other portions of the greater Los Angeles area, police said.

Training sites ``have been carefully selected to ensure the event does not negatively impact the citizens of Los Angeles and their daily routine,'' a department official said.

The training, which a department official said would involve helicopters, has been coordinated with local authorities and owners of the training sites, police said.

Police said safety precautions have been taken to prevent risk to the general public and military personnel involved.

The exercises are closed to the public, police said.

The exercises are designed to ensure the military's ability to operate in urban environments, prepare forces for upcoming overseas deployments, and meet mandatory training certification requirements, police said.

Posted by David Perez

KFI News

[American Patriot]

The exercises are closed to the public, police said.

Unless you're part of the exercise then you won't be beat in public, much.... lol

[Ryan Ruck]

[Malsua]

I wonder what shenanigans the anarchists and lefties have planned for the RNC convention.

[vector7]

Saw these posted a few days ago and thought nothing of it...however they could be apart of some training exercise.

Union Pacific Military Train Thunders Through Santa Barbara!!!

Embedding disabled by request

Just before midnight on January 17, 2012, the Union Pacific SOXHR-17 (Oxnard to Herlong, CA) Military Train comes roaring through the Santa Barbara Amtrak Station heading North. This train had 121 A2 Bradley's on board as well as 12 fuel trucks making the journey up California on the UP Santa Barbara Subdivision. The locomotives on this train are the same ones that I caught in Camarillo on Monday (see previous video). Locomotive information to follow:

UP 5147 - EMD SD70M
UP 4824 - EMD SD70M
UP 4315 - EMD SD70M
UP 4685 - EMD SD70M

Tanks on train in Hayward California

Train stops in Hayward by Tennyson high school for about a hour and thirty minutes, the train was caring tanks. i wonder where it was heading?




Military Train rolls through Morgan Hill

Military equipment train loaded with tanks and other vehicles of war rolls through Morgan Hill, Calif. on Jan. 19, 2012. The train originated in Oxnard and is headed to the Sierra Army Depot in Herlong. This train ran as the UP 7623 SOXHR-17 via the Coast Line.



MILITARY EQUIPMENT Filmed 1\19\12 near Santa Cruz, Southbound

This video was uploaded to facebook via mobile by a Mr Andrew Tuckman yesterday, January 19th 2012, with the following caption.

I began filming this after a dozen or so train cars went by on a stretch of track south of Santa Cruz California. Where are the military vehicles going? Why are they being shipped? What could this possibly be for? Barack Obama, what are you up to? We want answers.....




In Castroville military tanks on train

Uploaded by carlosrlopez1987 on Jan 19, 2012

[American Patriot]

South to da border?

[Malsua]

So the military is moving bradley fighting vehicles. This is a problem why?

[vector7]

South to da border?

That would be a move in the right direction.

[vector7]

So the military is moving bradley fighting vehicles. This is a problem why?

Actually its not, just an interesting coincide.

[Ryan Ruck]

I read somewhere, can't remember where, that those Brads are painted in an old color scheme and are likely older, clapped out models headed to Anniston for refurb. I see a lot of stripped Brad hulls on flatbeds around here all the time.

[American Patriot]

We move military vehicles on trains ALL the time. I don't think this is "out of the ordinary".

They are, however, if I saw those images right last night "Forest Green" and not the current color scheme.

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US Military Fly Black Helicopters Over LA in Counterterrorism Drill


Uploaded by peltecs on Jan 27, 2012
so much for posse comitatus