Ah yes the famous police state of the netherlands. "We have higher crime rates than nordic countries so therefore we must have more and more and more militarized police" is not exactly my idea of reasoned thinking.
Why should I live in a more dangerous society than the Netherlands (which isn't "nordic")? Or Australia? I fit in those places fine. Why can't we have that at home? Why is this level of crime acceptable just because it is lower than 1980? What liberty do I give up by having some guardsmen standing around?
His point is that the crime rate being lower in these places does not happen due to them having militarized police, so assuming that militarized police in general, much less literally using the military for policing will drop the crime rate doesn't track.
You can see my comment below for some facts about the Netherlands. They do, literally, have a militarized police (the gendarmerie) which has civilian duties while operating under the defense ministry (and having military duties as well). They operate at airports, do border control, protect state assets (especially in capitol), do crowd control at major events, contain riots etc. You will see them if you go and even try to look.
Their normal police is very similar to America's in number and capability. They may be trained better, which seems like an argument for better training.
I have the opposite hypothesis: I think more police, even from the NG, will help. I think if our society is more criminal, for whatever reasons, it should be policed more. I do not see any good arguments for how having a few hundred NG deployed will strip me of any important liberty, and I think it is much better than tech solutions in that regard.
We now have a test case, and we can come back and see.
The Royal Marechaussee is 1/10th the size of the National Police Force and as you noted have quite specialized tasks. They are not the people handling day to day crime and interactions with civilians for mundane police actions. They also receive plenty of training related to the policing duties and are trained on how to police civilians. The national guard does not, and even MPs receive very different training and operate in a very different manner to the regular police.
This is very different than universally militarizing your police force across the nation or employing soldiers untrained in policing as police.
What do you believe the venn diagram of soldier and police skillsets looks like?
I think it looks like a normal venn diagram. Some things are similar and some different and it depends on what deployments or forces each has worked on. That's why NG troops are getting extra training in police duties and working together with normal police.
My point is that an ever more militarized police directed by a vengeful president is not actually going to make society safer. I too would like programs that actually address the causes of crime but instead we are going to get more violence done to the poor, racial minorities, and people using their voices.
DC has incredibly strict gun laws. I doubt many of the weapons used in crimes are legal. I don't think you will be truly any less free having national guard soldiers walking around. Actually seems better than the usual dystopian tech solutions people come up with. Maybe they will try it for thirty days and people will like it.
DC isn't an island. It's super easy for people in the region to get hold of guns, it's just that they'll be in a lot of trouble if they get caught actually doing crime in DC with a gun. The question of whether guns used in crime are legal or not seems moot to me, they are equally deadly if misused.
> it's just that they'll be in a lot of trouble if they get caught actually doing crime in DC with a gun
Actually, the whole issue is that this is not true! Statistically speaking, the average crime in DC, whether involving a gun or not, goes uncaught, unresolved, and ultimately unpunished.
Because it's not like it is surrounded by countries with lax gun laws. You can't buy a semi-automatic rifle or a handgun and a pile of ammo with the same ease in, say, Belgium that you can in West Virginia. Like, which country in Europe do you think has the laxest gun laws, for comparison? Having lived in both Europe and the US, I don't think you appreciate how easy it is to obtain a gun in the US.
There are a lot of weapons from the former Yugoslavian war still floating around in Europe, both single pieces an much larger caches. These pop up with some regularity in crime busts and given the number of weapons that went missing (> 1 million weapons remain unaccounted for) this will likely remain a problem for a long time to come.
At least the Ukraine/Poland border now scans the bulk of the vehicles to prevent the next issue like that. But the ones that are already in the EU are going to surface only bit-by-bit as they get used or uncovered. Given how hard it is to obtain weapons here they are very valuable.
It's so different that for as long as I've lived here I have seen a gun maybe a handful of times, the vast majority of those were guns holstered on the hips of police on patrol (and not even a single time in their hands) and a gun that a private owner was maintaining who uses it exclusively to shoot at a range. Other than that, no guns here, at all.
No, I think the answer is that is only different in that Americans in DC are more criminal. Both places have strict gun laws with licensing requirements. In both places you can get illegal guns, and these are the ones used in crime if a gun is used, otherwise it will be an illegal knife. However in the Netherlands the laws are followed and/or policed better. Maybe now in DC the laws will be enforced better too, and maybe Americans just need a little more show of police force to behave. I predict that few people lose any liberty and that this experiment reduces certain crimes (like street murder, assaults, random robberies/muggings) a lot.