In the Name of Safety

In a delightful little conversation, Achromatic brought up an anecdotal situation happening in a mall close to him:

Due to the level of fear present throughout Europe due to ISIS, police have been deployed in this English mall outfitted with assault rifles. This is apparently in the name of safety and to discourage/intimidate any possible threats in the area. Now, the question brought up was this: would you feel safe in such a scenario? Would you feel that the job was being accomplished? I'd be extremely frightened. I considered it outright intimidation of a fearful populace in the extremely vague idea of safety and wouldn't abide by it. I totally admit that I dunno what I'd actually do about it (or could do), but the underlying moral disagreement would be there.

How far can we go in the name of safety, trying to assuage the fears of a scared public? Where must we draw the line?

I think it's a scarily small step to go from assault rifles at the shops to the NSA and martial law. Even ignoring that this just tells the terror cells that their plans are working, just think about how uncomfortable the general populace must feel.

How do you feel, when you walk or drive past a cop? You feel nervous probably, even if you know damn well that you're not doing anything wrong at all, because you know there an armed person right there with the ability to apprehend you or even wound you if they perceive the wrong thing about you and many police officers the world over are all too happy to abuse that power. Now lets make those same police officers hyper alert and put assault weapons in their hands. It's going to cause a lot of civil unrest, especially in places like England where police officers were barely armed usually.

This is bizarre. I dunno which shopping centres are near Achromatic (Ben - Bluewater, Lakeside? If it's either of those two they're obviously different) but this is unheard of in England. I'm sure it's gonna be either in one of those two mentioned centres; either that, or something exceptional has arisen in this shopping centre Ben's on about. Black Friday is probably also a factor; as much as it disappoints me that we've even started engaging in Black Friday over here, there is gonna be a massively increased number of shoppers and there'll be concerns that go with that (robbery, etc). The issue's probably got much more depth to it than just "protection from isis".

For anyone who doesn't know, by the way, Lakeside and Bluewater are gigantic shopping centres and one of them, idr which, has lots of high-end stuff which attracts extremely rich and often important tourists. It's comparable to very high-end areas of London in which armed police are a common sight. If this is the case, I'm a little less surprised.

To answer the question, though, this is public intimidation and it's completely unacceptable and it's disgusting that the UK is going the same way as its cousins over the lake. Our population does not support, and has not supported in any recent history, the threat of violence / death as a means of "protection". No, I would not feel comfortable around this; regardless of if I have anything to fear or not, it's literally these peoples' job to intimidate.

GLaDOS said:

In a delightful little conversation, Achromatic brought up an anecdotal situation happening in a mall close to him:

Due to the level of fear present throughout Europe due to ISIS, police have been deployed in this English mall outfitted with assault rifles. This is apparently in the name of safety and to discourage/intimidate any possible threats in the area. Now, the question brought up was this: would you feel safe in such a scenario? Would you feel that the job was being accomplished? I'd be extremely frightened. I considered it outright intimidation of a fearful populace in the extremely vague idea of safety and wouldn't abide by it. I totally admit that I dunno what I'd actually do about it (or could do), but the underlying moral disagreement would be there.

How far can we go in the name of safety, trying to assuage the fears of a scared public? Where must we draw the line?

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In a country where we have very few firearms in public ownership and a very niche gun culture, seeing armed police with military grade fire arms is unsettling. I mean our police on a whole are fairly well trained but it's still a bit weird to see.

Now you know why there's such a huge animosity towards police officers by citizens in the United States. The state arms itself, the people get scared. Combine that with relative ease of access to firearms, you got an armed populace ready to show the state that you won't be pushed around. At least, that's the idea.

Now you also know how many Americans felt about a great deal of policy changes post-9/11. We're still seething over the PATRIOT Act.

At this point it wouldn't phase me if I was visited England since Americans have had to put up with militarized police for a while. Trump tower is surrounded by guards armed with machine guns. Good way to save tax dollars: stop guarding him. Whatever happens, he did kind of bring it on himself.

One difference for us, though: America has always had an ingrained gun culture due to the Second Amendment and the frontier culture generated during the exploration of the landmass during the 1800's, manifest destiny blah blah BS. To many Americans, enacting strong gun control is seen as a curtailing and elimination of tradition and autonomy "in the name of safety."

Over-armed police make me feel anxious like there's something bad about to happen soon in the immediate area. That, or someone is going to get trigger happy because they see a minority who scares them. I dunno. I just don't trust people to walk around with guns, even the police since the police have been trained to shoot first.

It's not necessary to go around showing so much force unless you're doing it to scare the populace. It's easy enough to keep big guns in your patrol car or whatever in case of something super serious like an actual terrorist attack, and in most cases you would only need pepper spray and/or a taser or some other non-lethal objects.

To the main point, I think I'm okay with the (very small) possibility that a terrorist attack will happen in my backyard if it means we don't have armed soldiers walking up and down our streets. Not that I think heavily armed police are actually going to intimidate would-be terrorists. I think it would rather come as a challenge and/or embolden them. Look at all the cases in America of lone wolf gunmen who end up being shot and killed by police. They were like "Hey, I'm gonna die anyway, so I may as well do my worst" and you had things like the deaths of 20 children in one school shooting alone.

Hm. The past few times I've been in Paris I've ran into some military looking personnel wielding a gun that looks like an assault rifle -- I find it very off putting personally, but like you said I don't know what I could do about it.

I think it was more bizarre than anything the first time I encountered it. Now whenever I visit I sort of expect it. Only time I've ever seen something like it though.

Maybe it's a little bit bold of me to say this, but I think it raises an interesting discussion point, so take it as that:

These sorts of anti-terrorism measures make me feel less safe than the threat of terrorism itself.

Discuss.

I find it a bit odd that the UK would do something like this. Most places in Europe have never seemed to me to be eager to have anyone be heavily armed.

Razor Leaf said:

Maybe it's a little bit bold of me to say this, but I think it raises an interesting discussion point, so take it as that:

These sorts of anti-terrorism measures make me feel less safe than the threat of terrorism itself.

Discuss.

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I think part of why you or anyone would feel this way is because the danger is sort of more present. You can walk into the mall or wherever and see the police officer with the assault rifle, you can be physically near them. Whereas with terrorism you can on a logical level understand the danger it poses, but on another level it's hard to really feel it in the same way as with the armed cop, because the terrorist agent isn't necessarily right there to invoke the feelings.

something like that

Esper said:

Over-armed police make me feel anxious like there's something bad about to happen soon in the immediate area. That, or someone is going to get trigger happy because they see a minority who scares them. I dunno. I just don't trust people to walk around with guns, even the police since the police have been trained to shoot first.

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Police are trained to kill, but they have a procedure they must follow before shooting- even if the person has a weapon. Police are only allowed shoot if they or someone else is in imminent danger.

Esper said:

It's not necessary to go around showing so much force unless you're doing it to scare the populace. It's easy enough to keep big guns in your patrol car or whatever in case of something super serious like an actual terrorist attack, and in most cases you would only need pepper spray and/or a taser or some other non-lethal objects.

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I agree. I wouldnt be surprised if there was some kind of reactionary movement to the sudden heavy militarization of police. But in this case, they are defending against potential terrorist attacks (I still think its over-doing things). Sometimes, large individuals aren't even affected by tasers (for example, in the Michael Brown case, he was SHOT many times before falling).

Esper said:

To the main point, I think I'm okay with the (very small) possibility that a terrorist attack will happen in my backyard if it means we don't have armed soldiers walking up and down our streets. Not that I think heavily armed police are actually going to intimidate would-be terrorists. I think it would rather come as a challenge and/or embolden them. Look at all the cases in America of lone wolf gunmen who end up being shot and killed by police. They were like "Hey, I'm gonna die anyway, so I may as well do my worst" and you had things like the deaths of 20 children in one school shooting alone.

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Organized terrorists aren't stupid though. Maybe it would embolden individual terrorists, but if people are leading them, the presence of large police forces may closet them for a while. But then again, police can't be everywhere at once. And attacks are fast- the police can't always react.

BadSheep said:

Organized terrorists aren't stupid though. Maybe it would embolden individual terrorists, but if people are leading them, the presence of large police forces may closet them for a while. But then again, police can't be everywhere at once. And attacks are fast- the police can't always react.

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I have to disagree here. The point of terrorism isn't to somehow "win" a war. The entire point of terrorism is to well... spread terror. The introduction of heavily armed police to public areas does two things

1. Causes people to be even more afraid because


and

2. Tells the terrorists that their tactics are working and that they should keep doing what they're doing. If they're smart, they'll just attack different places and if they're crazy they'll just blow those places to shit anyway. You might have noticed that a lot of terrorists are already on suicide missions in the first place - whether they know it or not.

gimmepie said:

I have to disagree here. The point of terrorism isn't to somehow "win" a war. The entire point of terrorism is to well... spread terror. The introduction of heavily armed police to public areas does two things

1. Causes people to be even more afraid because

a. There are people with big freaking guns right there.

b. It makes it seem there's a greater threat of terrorism or similar in that area.​

and

2. Tells the terrorists that their tactics are working and that they should keep doing what they're doing. If they're smart, they'll just attack different places and if they're crazy they'll just blow those places to **** anyway. You might have noticed that a lot of terrorists are already on suicide missions in the first place - whether they know it or not.

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True true. You are right... I should have realized that because I agree with you. The terrorists want us to pass things like the PATRIOT Act, increase security, and take away other freedoms. They want us to finance endless warfare. etc.

BadSheep said:

Organized terrorists aren't stupid though. Maybe it would embolden individual terrorists, but if people are leading them, the presence of large police forces may closet them for a while. But then again, police can't be everywhere at once. And attacks are fast- the police can't always react.

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It's the individual ones who have done the most harm in my country though. I'm thinking of the angry individuals who feel like they have no reason not to let themselves get killed after they've started their rampage because they're doing it out of some misplaced inner turmoil over feeling slighted by someone/society and just want revenge.