Police Training Alongside Military Forces: Prudent or Too Far?

Throughout this course, the question of the state's roll in regulating and patrolling the city has come up consistently. No where does this issue come to a head quite like the forced evictions of the Occupy protests that have taken place around the country. One of the campsites marred most severely by violent police action in Oakland, CA. Recently, Beirut-based al-Akhbar published an article detailing how the Oakland Police Department trained alongside the Bahrain military and Israeli forces as part of an operation known as Urban Shield 2011. Urban Shield 2011 was an event that took place on the UC Berkeley campus that brought the aforementioned groups, along with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, together with the Oakland Police Department. According to the article, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”
I think there are a lot of noteworthy points in the article, namely that it really does a good job of examining the militarization of the United States police force and the problematic nature of interchanging "crime" with "terrorism," as occurs in today's media. The issue of whether or not the beefing-up of US police forces actually does anything productive in dealing with crime and terrorism (My statistics say absolutely not, but I'm not looking to start an argument) is certainly debatable, but it should not go unobserved that in order to find this story, I had to look through a publication based in Lebanon.Nevertheless, with this type of information, it is not hard to understand why police trained in this way might be more likely to chose excessive force in these types of situations.  


To read an abridged version of the article, click here.
To read the article in its entirety, click here.