Via Oregon DOT/Flickr

This is really like sumfink out of a guilty pleasure 80’s sci-fi.

Tropa De Elita comes to the US. Alternet has an article length extract from Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.

“Good police work has nothing to do with dressing up in black and breaking into houses in the middle of the night. And the mentality changes when they get put on the SWAT team. I remember a guy I was good friends with, it just completely changed him. The us-versus-them mentality takes over. You see that mentality in regular patrol officers too. But it’s much, much worse on the SWAT team. They’re more concerned with the drugs than they are with innocent bystanders. Because when you get into that mentality, there are no innocent people. There’s us and there’s the enemy. Children and dogs are always the easiest casualties.”

Not your ideal full length sunshine read? Well there’s a quickie Vice interview with the author here.