Israel Security Forces Are Still Training American Cops

[maz]

Israel Security Forces Are Training American Cops Despite History of Rights Abuses

It's not uncommon for residents of America's most heavily policed neighborhoods to describe their local cops as "an occupying force." Judging by where many U.S. police forces get their training, the description seems apt.

Thousands of American law enforcement officers frequently travel for training to one of the few countries where policing and militarism are even more deeply intertwined than they are here: Israel.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Israel seized on its decades-long experience as an occupying force to brand itself a world leader in counterterrorism. U.S. law enforcement agencies took the Jewish state up on its expertise by participating in exchange programs sponsored by an array of pro-Israel groups, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the Anti-Defamation League. Over the past decade and a half, scores of top federal, state, and local police officers from dozens of departments from across the U.S. have gone to Israel to learn about its terrorism-focused policing.

Yet Israel's policing prowess is marred by its primary purpose: occupation. Israel has carried out a half-century of military rule in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, an occupation rife with abuses. The country's police and security forces also regularly violate the rights of Palestinians and immigrants inside of Israel's 1967 borders.

"A lot of the policing that folks are observing and being talked to about in these trips is policing that happens in a nondemocratic context," said Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and author of a forthcoming book on global policing. "It involves either military policing, border control policing, or policing of folks in the occupied territories who aren't full legal subjects in the Israeli legal system."
While attention on the militarization of American police forces has intensified in recent years, spurring some reforms that the Trump administration has already undone, U.S.-Israel police exchange programs have carried on without much public scrutiny.

This week, a delegation of top American law enforcement officers is in Israel for the ADL's National Counter-Terrorism Seminar, which includes training on topics such as "leadership in a time of terror" and "balancing the fight against crime and terrorism," according to literature by the group advertising the trip. More than 200 law enforcement executives from over 100 departments in the U.S. and abroad, immigration enforcement agencies, and even campus police have participated in the ADL program since it launched in 2004.

Among this year's participants in the seminar is D.C. Metropolitan Police Commander Morgan Kane, whose attendance at the training earned the department a public rebuke from D.C. Council Member David Grosso. "I am concerned that we are not doing enough to prevent the militarization of law enforcement in the District of Columbia," he wrote in a letter to Metropolitan Police Department Chief Peter Newsham. "Learning from military advisors is not what local law enforcement needs."
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[rmstock]

How did it come about that the Israeli's are the sole entrepreneur of
the most devious and nasty tricks ? Yet it seems a life saver :

  "[ ... ]
   Obama ordered the restrictions in 2015 after public outrage at the
   deployment of some of that equipment during protests against police
   abuse in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere. Announcing the new measures
   in a speech to the Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police union
   in the country, Attorney General Jeff Sessions called that equipment
   "lifesaving," dismissing criticisms of police militarization as
   "superficial concerns." [ ... ]"

[yankeedoodle]

How did it come about that the Israeli's are the sole entrepreneur of
the most devious and nasty tricks ? Yet it seems a life saver :

Very profound observation.  Funny how that worked out, isn't it?  Serendipity, no doubt.