External resources relating to Blurring the lines between the police and the military

La Marin is not only one of the busiest bus stations in Ecuador's capital, Quito, but also one of the city's crime hotspots with frequent muggings and thefts...

In the early hours of Saturday, March 12, Yemeni security forces under the direction of Yemen’s Central Security Service (CSS) (which is commanded by Yahya Salih and is home to the U.S. funded and trained “counter-terror unit”) stormed the anti-government protesters’ camp near Sana’a University. The ensuing battle between the protesters and state security forces resulted in over 100 injured and two dead protesters. The violence continued across Yemen on Sunday with more injured protesters and one death reported in the southern port city of Aden...

SURKH ROD, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A few minutes and a few bullets were enough to turn Abdullah from an 11th grade student with dreams of becoming a translator to the despairing head of a family of more than a dozen.

His father and oldest brother were shot dead last August at the start of a midnight assault by NATO-led troops on their house in Afghanistan’s east. Abdullah himself was hooded, handcuffed and flown to prison, where he was detained for questioning and then released...

The report, Preach What You Practice: The Separation of Military and Police Roles in the Americas, from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) provides a background briefing on key distinctions between military and police functions. It calls on the Obama Administration to change direction, and stop encouraging the military forces of other countries to take on roles that would be illegal for the U.S. Armed Forces to carry out at home. The authors, a team of WOLA’s regional security experts, set out specific steps to be taken by both United States and countries in the region.

South African special forces troops have begun a six-month deployment along the troubled border with Zimbabwe, where rape, robbery and other crimes are commonplace, and the flow of desperate migrants continues unabated.

"This is a battle to stop people coming across the border illegally - it is not a war. The soldiers know they [migrants] are just trying to survive. It's very different from what they are trained to do, and it is very difficult," Colonel Gert Faul, the South African National Defence Force commander in Limpopo Province, told IRIN.

Two companies of Parabats - elite South African paratroopers deployed in recent years to Sudan, DRC and Burundi as peacekeepers - have arrived at a highly porous border in the first phase of a deployment that will see soldiers from various units return to all South Africa's land borders in the next few years...

Indonesia has won praise for cracking down on Islamist militants behind a string of deadly attacks and at the core of the fight have been the heavily armed black-clad officers of its anti-terrorism unit -- Detachment 88...

Commencing with the quantitative attributes of the industry, the chapter will first show that private policing armament in Israel has significantly raised the number of firearms circulating through the streets and homes, distinctly accelerating small-arms proliferation.  It will also outline the scope and dimensions of the private policing industry active in Israel...  The following two sections of the chapter then go on to describe how the spread and growth of private policing have deepened Israeli militarization in unprecedented ways...  Finally, addressing the strongly gendered implications of these developments, I will trace ways in which the process of militarization, enhanced by the private policing industry in Israel and the accelerated proliferation of the arms it sanctions, has intensified exsiting gender disrimination and violence against women.

The annual Security & Policing (S&P) exhibition is marketed to both sellers and buyers by the Home Office, the department responsible for MI5, as a “closed” gathering from which the public and media are barred. All visitors must receive official approval prior to entry. Officials insist that the sensitive nature of some of the equipment on display – from mobile phone interception devices to sonic crowd control instruments – in the vast Farnborough International conference centre make it necessary to prevent any external scrutiny. But documents seen by i show that Britain has nonetheless thrown open the door to delegations from countries known to have poor human rights records. A list of the 61 countries invited to the show, obtained under Freedom of Information rules, includes six countries which feature of the Government’s own list of “human rights priority” countries, among them Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Colombia. It also includes Brazil, Hong Kong, Kenya, Nigeria and Thailand – all countries where there have been recent allegations of police abuse.

The GSG 9 der Bundespolizei (originally the German abbreviation of Grenzschutzgruppe 9 or Border Guard Group 9) is the elite counter-terrorism and special operations unit of the German Federal Police...

The legal cases against Tahoe Resources are being carried out in a larger context of opposition to the Escobal mine. The violence, repression, and criminalization community leaders continue to face is not limited to what transpired on April 27, 2013...

The militarization of police units has been a longstanding policy in Latin America well before it received attention from the U.S. media. U.S. bilateral assistance to countries in Latin America has encouraged the adoption of military equipment and military training for local police forces.   While the U.S. prohibits the armed forces from assisting police forces at home, the practice of technology transfer and military training in-country has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean for years. The logic is that crime and violence have overwhelmed local police forces—weak and corrupt to begin with—and therefore the armed forces are necessary for the state to provide security.   But that comes with huge risks...

Internal Zimbabwean police documents passed to the Guardian suggest the army has been responsible for murder, rape and armed robbery during the ongoing brutal crackdown in the southern African country. In more than a dozen investigation reports shared with the Guardian by police officials frustrated at the apparent impunity of the military, a series of alleged attacks are described, including two murders and the rape of a 15-year-old girl.