OT: Hey check out SD Unified’s new School Bus!!!

[Coronita]

http://www.autoblog.com/2014/09/16/san-diego-school-district-acquires-mrap/#aol-comments

Lol…Let the tin-foil hats begin!!!!

Meet the newest vehicle in the arsenal of the San Diego Unified School District, a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, more commonly known as an MRAP, or the US military’s answer to the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) so favored by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, you might be asking, are the officers of the San Diego Unified School District Police (sidebar: is it normal nowadays for school districts to have police departments?) regularly subject to ambushes and/or IEDs? It seems unlikely.

Instead, the district says the vehicle will be used for search and rescue, according to KPBS, the local public broadcaster.

“Our idea is: How can we get in and pull out a classroom at a time of kids if there’s an active shooter? If there’s a fire [or] if there’s an earthquake, can we rip down a wall? Stuff like that,” Captain Joe Florentino told KBPS

[spdrun]

Perfect project for auto shop classes, and as a parts donor for real school buses. Truck chassis probably has some parts commonality with some school bus, somewhere 🙂

Hey, it was free. Some mo govahment cheeze, if you puh-leeze.

[bearishgurl]

[quote=spdrun]Perfect project for auto shop classes, and as a parts donor for real school buses. Truck chassis probably has some parts commonality with some school bus, somewhere 🙂

Hey, it was free. Some mo govahment cheeze, if you puh-leeze.[/quote]

That was my first impression … that it was “acquired” via DRMO or GSA auction (or simply transferred to SDUSD via a gov’mt accounting loophole).

[bearishgurl]

[quote=bearishgurl][quote=spdrun]Perfect project for auto shop classes, and as a parts donor for real school buses. Truck chassis probably has some parts commonality with some school bus, somewhere 🙂

Hey, it was free. Some mo govahment cheeze, if you puh-leeze.[/quote]

That was my first impression … that it was “acquired” via DRMO or GSA auction (or simply transferred to SDUSD via a gov’mt accounting loophole).[/quote]

Uh, yeah … just as I thought:

…The MRAP, which is valued at $730,000, was acquired for a mere pittance – $5,000 in shipping fees – through the controversial Excess Property Program, or 1033 program. That’s the same Department of Defense setup that has drawn fire following the Ferguson, MO protests…

I can’t imagine that it will be sent to kids’ homes in the middle of the school day in attempt to ambush “truant” kids, lol ….

[UCGal]

wow. My kids would love it if that were the school bus. They go to a magnet in SDUSD, and the bus is old, no AC, and pretty typical for a school bus.

As far as the district having a police department… I went to school in SDUSD back in the 60’s and 70’s…even back then there was an officer on campus of my high school. (His name was Gino… everyone liked him.) He was there to do the random locker inspections (looking for pot), and bust the kids in the parking lot smoking out… (My school, my graduating class, was the basis for Fast Times… so pot was the issue back in the late 70’s.).

I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a district officer at every high school in this very large district.

But that tank pictured – that’s ridiculous. Are we in a police state?

[CDMA ENG]

John Oliver on HBO did a brilliant piece on this…

He addresses this around the 6 minute mark… but its a good piece overall…

Have a serious laugh!

By the way… JO is brilliant all together…

Have fun..

CE

[enron_by_the_sea]

Probably needs 20 gallons to go a mile?

[phaster]

After watching what the nation “press” thought about the new school district vehicle acquisition

http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/xq6f9b/military-vehicles-for-public-schools

could not help but recall what happened years ago when the “tank” was taken for a joy ride,

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2011/may/17/stolen-tank-rampaged-san-diego-streets-16-years-ag/

[NotCranky]

http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/09/18/san-diego-school-police-to-return-military-vehicle/

[UCGal]

[quote=Blogstar]http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/09/18/san-diego-school-police-to-return-military-vehicle/[/quote]

In that article it said that as of Wednesday the districts plan was to paint a red cross on it to make it less menacing. LMAO.

Why in the world would a school district need a “Mine Resistant Ambush Protected” vehicle…. There are land mines in San Diego? The SDUSD Police think they’ll be ambushed?

I was talking to my husband about it – he said he’d be more worried about Mimes than Mines. LOL.

[CA renter]

There’s this, too. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but during the OWS protests, there was a particular day when multiple law enforcement personnel were using many different types of cameras, and they were trying to take pictures of every single face at the totally non-violent demonstration. They even made sure to get pics of kids who were there. It alarmed me because I knew that facial recognition software was being used by the govt, and I had a feeling that they were using the OWS protests as an excuse to see how well it worked.

Even under the cruelest of dictators, people were fine as long as they didn’t question authority and did whatever they were told to do. And the old saying that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear can be debunked on so many levels. Very scary that a law enforcement officer is using this as an excuse to violate people’s civil rights (IMO).

http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/12/three-reasons-the-nothing-to-hide-crowd

———————–

On a residential street in San Diego County, Calif., Chula Vista police had just arrested a young woman, still in her pajamas, for possession of narcotics. Before taking her away, Officer Rob Halverson paused in the front yard, held a Samsung Galaxy tablet up to the woman’s face and snapped a photo.

Halverson fiddled with the tablet with his index finger a few times, and – without needing to ask the woman’s name or check her identification – her mug shot from a previous arrest, address, criminal history and other personal information appeared on the screen.

Halverson had run the woman’s photograph through the Tactical Identification System, a new mobile facial recognition technology now in the hands of San Diego-area law enforcement. In an instant, the system matches images taken in the field with databases of about 348,000 San Diego County arrestees. The system itself has nearly 1.4 million booking photos because many people have multiple mug shots on record.

…

“If you’re not in a criminal database, you have nothing to hide,” Halverson said.

…

Founded in 2007, FaceFirst is a spinoff of military contractor Airborne Technologies and is backed by the $18 billion private equity firm Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors. FaceFirst’s main product is facial recognition software that, according to CEO Joe Rosenkrantz, has the capability to “identify everyone in a football stadium in five seconds.”

…

Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed alarm at the normalization of military-grade technology in daily police activity. She said she believes the San Diego regional government’s lack of transparency around the facial recognition program is designed to minimize opposition and public debate.

“It becomes accepted and is much harder to push back when an agency has purchased 150 devices and deployed them in the field,” Lynch said.

Biometrics is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry, with more than 70 percent of spending by the military, domestic law enforcement and the government, according to the Los Angeles Times. Next year, the FBI will unveil its Next Generation Identification system, a nationwide database of biometric information on criminal suspects and convicts that will replace the bureau’s current national database of fingerprints, corresponding criminal records and notes from past field interviews.

Keenan, the former San Diego ACLU official, pointed to the U.S.’ history of political surveillance after World War II and 9/11 as evidence that the rapid proliferation of biometric technology is part of a tightening net of social control in the United States.

“We were given a false bargain,” Keenan said. “We were told that this kind of control is to prevent another 9/11, and in fact, it’s going to be used to fight the drug war, to pursue other policies where we would not have bargained away our privacy back at that time if we knew that was the tradeoff.”

http://cironline.org/reports/facial-recognition-once-battlefield-tool-lands-san-diego-county-5502

[spdrun]

Never got why 9/11 pushed Americans to accept violations of civil liberties.

A few thousand people died. So what? More than 10x that number of people die of car crashes and gun violence every year in the US, and people scream bloody murded whenever their rights to drive or own guns might be infringed.

Talk about hypocrisy.

[phaster]

[quote=spdrun]Never got why 9/11 pushed Americans to accept violations of civil liberties.[/quote]

pretty simple really…

1) the “leadership” was/is scared and don’t think things through

2) never underestimate the market place (i.e. military industrial complex) ability to create/sell things to “leadership”

3) politicians more interested in their own political careers, than the long term welfare of the general public

4) sadly the general public has ADD, and is economically and politically illiterate

5) GoTo step 1

[Doofrat]

[quote=spdrun]Never got why 9/11 pushed Americans to accept violations of civil liberties.

A few thousand people died. So what? More than 10x that number of people die of car crashes and gun violence every year in the US, and people scream bloody murded whenever their rights to drive or own guns might be infringed.

Talk about hypocrisy.[/quote]

Because a lot, and I mean a lot, of Americans are dumb, easily spooked, herd animals.

[moneymaker]

Why don’t they just paint a big red “X” on the diesel gas tank. After taking that out I doubt it would get very far.

[Author]

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