OFF THE WIRE
By Radley Balko
enco, Inc., makes the Bearcat, an armored personnel carrier that's
popping up in cities, towns, and counties across the country. Last year,
Jim Massery, a spokesman for the company, told me they now have
Bearcats in 90 of the 100 largest cities in America. They also have them
in lots of smaller, even tiny towns like Keene, New Hampshire.
These cities and towns are buying the vehicles with anti-terror grants
from the Department of Homeland Security, at a cost of a few hundred
thousand dollars each.
Critics (like me) say arming every small-town police department in
the country with gear more suited for a battlefield is fostering a
militarized, aggressive mindset in America's police forces. Moreover,
because most small towns will never see a school shooting or terrorist
attack, once the gear is in place it inevitably gets used for more
mundane police tasks -- mostly drug raids. But because this stuff is
"free" -- the federal government foots the bill -- there's usually no
local discussion or debate about whether it's appropriate for domestic
policing. (There was such a debate in Keene. Residents protested, but
the town went ahead with the Bearcat, anyway.)
At the time I wrote my article on Keene, Lenco was using an
interesting video to market the Bearcat. Shot from a
first-person-shooter point of view, the video included images of cops
dressed in camouflage, shooting high-powered weapons, eventually using a
battering ram affixed to the Bearcat to punch a hole in a building,
through which the vehicle then injected teargas. All of this was set to
AC/DC's "Thunderstruck."
After the video received some criticism, Lenco sent a take-down
notice to Google, and it was removed from YouTube. I'm republishing it
here, because I think there are political and policy reasons to let the
public see how these companies are marketing themselves to police
agencies. They wouldn't use these images if they weren't effective at
winning business. And that this sort of highly-militarized imagery is effective at attracting the interest of police agencies -- why that is, and what it means -- are issues worth discussing.
I bring this up again because Lenco recently released a new video, this
time for public consumption. This time, the company is promoting its
brand by appropriating images from the manhunt and crackdown in Boston
after the April marathon bombing. I'll let you decide if this is creepy
propaganda or merely a government contractor celebrating the heroism of
police in the wake of a tragedy.
What I find most interesting here is the difference in tone and tenor
between the way Lenco markets its products to police -- camouflage, guns
firing, ass-kicking, Thunderstruck -- and the face it presents to the
public: still images of heroic cops protecting and serving, set to
classical piano. The first video is aggressive and confrontational. The
second video aspires for inspiring. The contrast is telling.
