National Guard, okay, but not Regular Army, not for a law enforcement situation.

For a disaster, a bridge out, flood, tornado, where the troops will be a large number of strong backs to help find people, and people trained in first aid to be first responders, yes, but not when it comes to enforcing local laws.

And yes, those lines of communication should be open, but from a logistics standpoint, any help from anyone further away than the next county would take too long. Thirty minutes — yes, to talk to the Governor, but much longer before anything gets done.

It is not their fault, it is simply a fact that if the person or people you need are not already on duty, it takes time for them to get ready to do the job you need them to — gather equipment and such — and more time to travel to where they are needed.

As for how hard it would have been to contact the Governor — unless you know someone who knows someone — very hard.

Indeed, but such a connection should exist.

Police Chief and/or Mayor >> Governor’s secretary >> Gov’s Chief of Staff >> Governor

Shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. Maybe 30 if someone happens to be sleeping. If the matter is truly time sensitive, you could even send the troops to the location with orders to do absolutely nothing until further notice. The paperwork would probably be handled by the time they arrive, so no time would actually be lost.

Peter, in answer to your first question, no, they shouldn’t have been involved in local law enforcement. You are military or you are police — one or the other, not both. The military’s job is to kill people and break things. I, personally, had a job that involved keeping equipment running so the ship could get into position to launch planes . . . . so the pilots could kill people and break things.

It does not matter if there was an arrangement between the local PD and the base. Unless the base itself was threatened — and I have yet to see anyone say that it was — the Army should not have been called in. If the base had been attacked, however, the Army would have a good basis to work with the local PD and to guard crime scenes, but not in this case.

As for how hard it would have been to contact the Governor — unless you know someone who knows someone — very hard.

Stephen, I think this is a lot more important than it looks on the surface, and certainly more important than Geneva County or the Army wants to admit.

There needs to be a bright, clear line between law enforcement and military, and this is a clear violation.

That whole “kill people and break things” line — that’s a funny way of stating it, but it’s not a joke. Every time military work with people, those people fall into clear, unambiguous groups, and at a time like this, how do you think the Army would perceive a woman, hysterical because she thinks her mother is one of the victims, throwing a fit and trying to push her way past the MPs to check?

Hopefully — probably — they will be able to understand her terror and grief, but that is not the procedure they are trained for. They are not trained to care what the public thinks about them, and they are not trained to be nice, not like the police are.

But the possibility of a hysterical civilian getting hurt isn’t what scares me, it’s the camel’s nose under the edge of the tent. The O-5 needs to slapped down — and hard! — to make sure this does not happen again.

“Under the authority of a mutual aid agreement which Fort Rutgers has with local law enforcement community in Samson, Alabama…Fort Rutgers provided 22 military police personnel, and five vehicles were sent into Samson to provide non-law enforcement support in the town of Samson, Alabama,”

I can’t imagine why such an arrangement was ever made in the first place. Doesn’t either organization have legal counsel?? If it was truly “non-law enforcement support”, doesn’t the chief of police have 22 close friends he could quickly call into service for emergencies?

Did the previous arrangement they talk of between military and local law enforcement constitute Gubenatorial approval?

I can’t imagine it did. The overrides for these laws are for “state of emergency” type scenarios. I can’t imagine a Governor or President could permanently delegate that type of decision to a town’s chief of police.

And if it didn’t, how hard would it have been to ask the Governor to approve this?

Exactly the point. The chief of police should have had the governor’s number on speed dial to get a quick approval for something like this. It’s a little bit of “red tape”, but that’s a small price to pay to show respect to an important law.

They don’t? Is it a matter of pigment or is it really a matter of socioeconomic status? I suspect that regardless of either, they have just as equal access to the law as we all do.