Government Secrets Podcast · Lee Camp and Graham Elwood

How U.S. Policing Comes From Israel & US Occupation of Haiti - Gov Secs Ep 185

August 9, 2025·1 hr 13 min·4 clips

The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk and Eric Garner tactics are described as learned from Israeli forces.

1. Government Secrets Podcast episode 185 focuses on how U.S. policing connects to Israeli police training and tactics. 2. Lee Camp and Graham Elwood host the segment, with Lee driving the policy discussion and Graham interrupting with jokes and reactions. 3. The episode asks where tactics used by U.S. police came from and why those tactics keep showing up in Black, brown, and working-class neighborhoods. 4. Lee Camp says police driving slowly with flashing lights is used to intimidate neighborhoods and make people go inside. 5. He says thousands of U.S. law-enforcement officials have traveled to Israel to learn repression strategies and surveillance techniques from the Israeli national police, IDF, and Shin Bet. 6. He names the ADL as one of the organizations that helps facilitate the training relationship. 7. He says the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange has sent federal, state, county, and municipal officers to Israel, and he cites the FBI and ICE as participants. 8. Lee Camp says Israeli and U.S. police exchange tactics through conferences and direct training in the United States as well as in Israel. 9. He says the LAPD got facial recognition and drone technology after Israeli trips, and he links that to a broader broken-windows approach. 10. He ties the discussion to Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, and the knee-to-neck chokehold used in Floyd’s killing. 11. He says advocates traced that restraint to methods used by Israeli occupation forces against Palestinians. 12. He says the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk era and Eric Garner’s killing fit the same pattern of imported police practice. 13. He says the episode’s central concern is not every officer going to Israel, but how practices spread from Israeli training into U.S. departments. 14. He says police leaders are often the most aggressive officers, and lower-ranking officers get pushed to follow them. 15. He cites a former sheriff’s deputy who said military-trained officers tended to set the tone inside the department. 16. He says Baltimore is planning a cop city and describes cop cities as training grounds for counterinsurgency and protest suppression. 17. The segment keeps a fast, comic tone even while discussing surveillance, chokeholds, and prisons. 18. Graham Elwood’s role is mostly reaction, with ad-libbed jokes about Shaquille O’Neal, tar sands of censorship, and producer edits cutting out crying. 19. Listeners interested in police accountability, Israel-Palestine, and surveillance policy would get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a calm, narrowly focused legal analysis may skip it.

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A blunt look at how policing, prisons, and ICE connect.

Government Secrets connects LAPD training trips to Israel with a broader critique of policing and punishment at home. It says Israeli companies introduced the LAPD to facial recognition and drone technology during those visits, then links that thread to broken windows policing,…

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Need the LAPD-Israel training thread and the Haiti history angle?

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