One of the major flashpoints of protest in America right now are “cop cities”. These are mock cities, little fake neighborhoods being built for police to train in.
Local feelings on these are more mixed than the protesters sometimes realize, but I’m going to talk about how to stop them.
It’s too late to stop the one in Atlanta, construction is too far along. But they’re being proposed all over the country, and there’s a secret to it that the protesters haven’t picked up on: A lot of places already have them.
“Cop Cities” already exist within driving distance of most population centers. Most were built after 9/11 to train soldiers for Iraq. They’re called MOUTs (Military Operations in Urban Terrain facilities).
There are a range of objections to these new civilian MOUT construction projects, including cost, practicality, and environmental considerations. Whether you agree or disagree with the idea that cops should have practice cities to train in, these are a land use problem and a budget problem.
The way to stop these projects is to lean on cost and practicality objections on the grounds that they already exist.
It’s a guarantee that none of these cities or police departments have asked to use a MOUT on an army base. They haven’t even checked to see if the thing they want to spend millions on is already there for them to use. Naturally, any conservative who isn’t a construction contractor would prefer they check, both for financial and cultural reasons.
Conservatives respect the military, and they feel like it’s “harder” than the local police. The police are always trying to be more like the Iraq era military. These “cop cities” are part of that.
But there’s another side to it, which is that domestic police have totally lax rules of engagement that shock military professionalism. Veterans talked about this a lot in 2020: they are trained to have much more restraint or discernment about firing on somebody. There are reasons for this beyond morality, like at a certain point shooting too many civilians causes unnecessary problems. This is also true in American cities. Police training hasn’t caught up with police equipment in terms of exchanging ideas with the military.
So here, we have a situation where arranging their use of these MOUTs with supervision could save states and cities billions, save dozens of forests, and get them training in how to avoid pulling a trigger from a professional source that they respect as “tough” instead of seminars from the “Killology” guy.
There might be legal barriers, but with DOJ coordination, this could be a net win for everybody. It saves money, it protects protesters, it feels cool to the police, but it also reduces shootings, including by taking them out of their insulated office culture which can sometimes encourage illegal behavior.
With everything the protesters have been put through, with everything the police have been put through, and with the violence, including loss of life on both sides by police fire, it’s worth seeing if they can just use the ones they have.
