How much does our homeland security cost us?

What tools does our nation really need to be secure? How much should we spend to feel safe?

Nation of Change has a fascinating article on what we are spending and just how much we could be spending in the near future on so-called homeland security.

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The ubiquitous fantasy of “homeland security,” pushed hard by the federal government in the wake of 9/11, has been widely embraced by the public. It has also excited intense weapons- and techno-envy among police departments and municipalities vying for the latest in armor and spy equipment.

In such a world, deadly gadgetry is just a grant request away, so why shouldn’t the 14,000 at-risk souls in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, have a closed-circuit-digital-camera-and-monitor system (cost: $180,000, courtesy of the Homeland Security Department) identical to the one up and running in New York’s Times Square?

So much money has gone into armoring and arming local law-enforcement since 9/11 that the federal government could have rebuilt post-Katrina New Orleans five times over and had enough money left in the kitty to provide job training and housing for every one of the record 41,000-plus homeless people in New York City. It could have added in the growing population of 15,000 homeless in Philadelphia, my hometown, and still have had money to spare. Add disintegrating Detroit, Newark, and Camden to the list. Throw in some crumbling bridges and roads, too.

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All told, the federal government has appropriated about $635 billion, accounting for inflation, for homeland security-related activities and equipment since the 9/11 attacks. To conclude, though, that “the police” have become increasingly militarized casts too narrow a net. The truth is that virtually the entire apparatus of government has been mobilized and militarized right down to the university campus.

http://www.nationofchange.org/how-fund-american-police-state-1330961906

The article is quite thought-provoking. If you are interested in this topic, be sure to read all of it. In fact, read all the articles at that website. They are usually very interesting.

Our nation has become extremely paranoid since 9/11. We do have things to fear, but they are not necessarily those that we do fear.

Thanks to my work and volunteering in the community that I do and have done, I have known people of all political and religious persuasions and all economic and social strata. The criminals among them were mostly either stealing cars, using illegal drugs of some sort, shoplifting, painting graffiti on things, writing bad checks, etc. -- the usual petty crimes of low IQ people or were really big thugs who wear suits and cheat people on the terms of their mortgages or their divorce settlements, pollute their environment, do the Romney-buy-out-thing and steal employee pension funds, etc.

So far in my entire life I have never met a terrorist or anyone who talked of some action that you might regard as terror.

I know that terrorists exist because I have read about them in the newspaper and as early as 1981, I had to undergo a security check in order to board a plane owned by a foreign airline. But it seems to me that, since during my life in which I have lived in very different places and dealt with all kinds of people, I have never met a terrorist, they must be a tiny, tiny minority who should be easy to pick out of the crowd simply because they are so rare.

Who could have missed a foreign national enrolled in a flight school who showed no interest in learning to land the plane?

In notice that the 9/11 hijackers were not out on the streets demonstrating. They did not make a lot of noise about their horrible plans.

The kinds of equipment, even the surveillance equipment, that Homeland Security is handing out to municipal governments is not going to be of much use against quiet, apparently reclusive types like the 9/11 hijackers. They kept a very low profile. And the photos of them in the airport helped identify them -- but after the fact. (Watching extremely nervous types in airports and elsewhere may be of great value as is making sure no weapons are brought on planes, but . . . . does that require tons of surveillance equipment in small town America?)

I have noticed that a lot of the "activist" types in my neighborhood such as those that support the Occupy movement (at least in spirit) also volunteer to help people a lot, work to elect good candidates for local government (phone calls, etc.) and belong to commissions that support government. That may just be my neighborhood, and for the most part, the supporters I know are too old to sleep in tents for very long and perhaps not typical, but that is my impression. But the young people from the Occupy movement with whom I have spoken shared the same natural kindness, openness and sweetness that I find among their older supporters. They are not at all like the criminals I have known -- and I have known some.

It seems to me that our local police are being given a lot of money to buy equipment and technology that is inappropriate for the real challenges they face -- like talking a drunk spouse into dropping his/her gun, like catching the guy who robbed the 7/11 last weekend, like figuring out which of the teenagers or young adults in the 'hood really belong to the gang and which ones just pretend to belong for their own safety.

Occupy is another excuse for the local police to gun up. This is a subject we should raise when the topic turns to our national debt. We could save a lot of money if we applied the Homeland Security funds to useful purposes and not to buying trinkets for local police forces.