So the eagle has landed, and boy fuckin' howdy are the Bad Guys on the run:
"Between the first two nights of the federal takeover, 66 arrests were made, with another 45 being made Wednesday — numbers that Parker argued paled in comparison to the potential millions of dollars the deployment will cost taxpayers.
“In fact, 1,450 officers participated in Tuesday night’s operation to arrest 43 people; this comes to 34 officers per alleged offender,” Parker wrote.
“On Wednesday night, 1,650 officers participated, which breaks down to about 37 officers per alleged criminal. And on Thursday, 20 officers arrested a plainly overwrought man who allegedly threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent at 14th and U streets NW. Your tax dollars at work.”
Which takes us back to the first post about this, which asked several questions but not, perhaps, the most important one, which is
"What, exactly, are all these GIs going to actually do?"
These aren't civil cops. They're Joe and Molly, weekend warriors, cooks, bakers, mechanics, grunts, MPs, PAC clerks. You don't enforce law with fucking PAC clerks, you fill in forms.
That has been lingering in the back of my mind since I posted earlier.
Don't handwave. Be specific. What is one of these DCARNG "presence patrols" going to do?
Can you imagine a couple of the guys from your local Guard unit chasing robbers like T.J. Fucking Hooker? Rousting bums from the park? How? At bayonet point? With just their amazing Guard jedi mind trick powers?
Will they walk around hand-in-hand with the newly-federalized D.C. cops the way the Royal Army did the RUC in Belfast?
And if so, why? The IRA was an armed insurgency. Backing the Ulster cops with soldiers made perfect sense (not that I'm arguing that the British occupation of Ireland made or makes sense in any fashion, just that if you're going to try and do policing during a guerilla war you kinda have to do it that way...) but the D.C. cops aren't fighting guerrillas.
So...what? What are all these GIs shambling around the Tidal Basin doing? They're on our fucking taxpayer dime, so I'd sure like to know if my money is being wasted on the military equivalent of a multi-million dollar gold-encrusted fucking ballroom.
Just sayin'.
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