The Root Problems with Police in America

Let me begin by saying that yes, there are good officers on every police force.  That said, I suspect every police force in the nation also has officers who have no business wearing a badge and carrying a gun.  One of the big problems as noted in prior posts is that rather than weeding out these unfit officers, the entire system within departments is focused on protecting them seemingly under a mindset that views admitting that some officers are toxic and need to be removed somehow discredits the entire force.  As people are now realizing (new study shows 74% of Americans see a problem with police), not getting rid of these toxic and unfit officers is what is what is destroying the image of the entire force.  If someone is racist, prone to brutality and gets an adrenaline rush by abusing citizens, they simply do not belong on a police force anywhere.  Add to this mix the militarization of police forces and  it is a recipe for problems.  A Washington Post column looks at the problem and possible solutions, which include ridding the country of an occupant of the White House who fans racism, division and violence.  Here are excerpts: 

Every day — every night, to be more precise — more bad apples roll before our eyes. The video is horrifying; the camera unflinching. So, more Americans — white Americans, even Republican Americans, a majority of Americans except, it seems, those who work behind fortified barricades for President Trump — have come to understand: The problem of policing is not individual apples, but bushels full of them. It is a diseased tree.

A diseased tree with three infected and intertwined branches that each must be lopped off. The worst, by far, is systemic racism in police departments nationwide — and here perhaps the arboreal metaphor fails, and the disease is in the trunk itself, if not in the soil of our national history. The second is the embedded culture of brutality and tolerance of brutality among police officers. The third, connected to the second, is the militarization of police departments, with combat-style equipment designed for battlefields and heedlessly deployed in American streets, that reinforces this culture of violence and, as Trump would have it, “domination.”

Those who were inclined, who had the distance — and, yes, the privilege — to be inclined to give officers and departments the benefit of the doubt can no longer soothe themselves with the illusion that these are random, unrepresentative incidents. Technology in the form of omnipresent video cameras has conclusively ended that debate. Those who are white can no longer rest comfortably in the fiction that this is a problem confined to the other.

[W]hile there should be no doubt that police brutality has a racial cast, there is also no doubt that lighter skin offers no absolute immunity. Witness the violent assault Monday on peaceful protesters of every hue at Lafayette Square. Witness the unprovoked shoving Thursday of 75-year-old Martin Gugino by police officers during a demonstration in Buffalo: Officers push Gugino, shove a baton into him, his head hits the pavement, he is motionless and bleeding, and the officers march on. We are not all George Floyd now, because not all of us are at similar risk. But all of us are at some risk when police believe they can act like this.

The gratifying news is that the public gets it, more than ever before. A new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds that three-fourths of those surveyed believe Floyd’s killing is not an isolated incident but part of a broader problem in the treatment of African Americans by police.

The shift is remarkable. Just six years ago, after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the death of Eric Garner after he was put in a chokehold by New York City police, just 43 percent thought the incidents signified a broader problem, compared with 74 percent today.

No single measure will suffice to fix the situation; many individual steps can help.

Training to create a police culture of intervention against out-of-control colleagues, not a blue wall of silence. Swift — and, where appropriate, criminal — consequences . . . .Revamping police union contracts to end unwarranted protections for violent officers, including shielding their disciplinary records from public view and making it difficult to remove them.

Restoring the Justice Department’s role — abandoned by the Trump administration — in reshaping the behavior of rogue departments. Reconsidering the doctrine of qualified immunity that has shielded officers from civil liability for their abuses.

And demilitarizing police departments. Under a 1997 law, more than $7 billion in surplus military equipment, from grenade launchers to armored vehicles, has been transferred at no cost to local police departments. . . . . As researchers Ryan Welch and Jack Mewhirter explained in 2017, even controlling for household income, population characteristics and violent crime levels, “more-militarized law enforcement agencies were associated with more civilians killed each year by police.” In short, “Militarization makes every problem — even a car of teenagers driving away from a party — look like a nail that should be hit with an AR-15 hammer.

[A]nother necessary element of the solution: a president who will help change the culture of brutal and racist policing, not reinforce it. Not send out his national security adviser to contend that the problem is limited to “a few bad apples that have given law enforcement a bad name.” Acknowledging the scope and nature of the disease is an essential precondition to curing it.

Gay Bar Owner Shot At By Police After Giving First Aid to Peaceful Protesters

Ruby Deluxe owner Tim Lemuel.

The ongoing protests over police brutality have underscored something that I have believed for a long time: America's police departments have a serious problem of officers who should never been hired because of their bigotry and/or a mindset where they feel free to abuse the citizens who they are supposed to protect.  Sadly, most internal affairs offices are far more focused on protecting officers than weeding out the bad apples - something I learned first hand after I filed a complaint against Norfolk police officers years ago (before phones had video options) for anti-gay harassment and mistreatment I experienced. Obviously, better screening of applicants is needed as is a thorough review of existing officer ranks to rid them of bullies and bigots.  Perhaps too, strict liability for chiefs of police for the misdeeds of their officers might make the department leadership finally stop protecting those who should not wear a badge and carry a gun. A piece in The Advocate looks at a case of police brutality in North Carolina where police shot at a bar owner while on his own business premises.  Here are story highlights:

Over the weekend, police targeted a queer bar in North Carolina amid ongoing protests across the nation following the death of George Floyd.

According to The News and Observer, Tim Lemuel, owner of the bar Ruby Deluxe in Raleigh, North Carolina, discovered on Sunday evening the bar had been vandalized with a white supremacist symbol and that the doors and windows were broken.

The next day, he and his staff showed up to protect the building from more damage as protests continued in downtown Raleigh.

Lemuel and his staff had set up a first aid station in the parking lot to treat peaceful protestors who had gotten injured. They also handed out water bottles and light snacks to the near 1,000 people who took to the streets. 

According to Lemuel, they had been doing this work for almost seven hours without interruption from authorities when law enforcement approached them with weapons. 

In video that has since gone viral, an officer can be heard screaming at Lemuel, “Move! Move!” to which Lemuel yells back, “This is my business. I rent this place. I rent here!”

The group of officers didn’t stop. As they kept approaching, wielding their guns, one screams out, “You’ve been told!” followed by, “I don’t care where you go, you gotta go!”
Two shots were then fired, after which the officer yells, “Move! The game is over. Get out!”

[W]e weren’t chanting. We weren’t yelling. We weren’t gesturing to them. There was nothing that we were doing to instigate a response like that."

According to Lemuel and Varani, the deputies had been watching them for hours but chose not to approach them or express any concerns until the moment they pulled out their weapons.

Lemuel later took to Facebook in response to a heated discussion on Reddit about the situation.  “I own a business," he wrote. "I was there during normal operating hours. I was on my lot and kept my friends contained within the lot. We had been there for 7 hours. The deputy sheriffs could have, at any point, come over to see what we were doing or voiced their concern. This basically sums up the reason folks are mad. No thought what-so-ever [was] put into the decision to come at us guns blazing.

“I also think they had no business using riot control cs, tear gas, firing foam batons, or whatever blanks they fired," he continued. "I was out the day before and witnessed so many officers shooting grenades at civilian's chests and heads.

When the video hit the Internet, city council members were quick to disavow the act — including council member Saige Martin, one of two out LGBTQ+ people elected to the council last year.

“It is a safe space for so many people,” Martin the Observer of Ruby. “It is a home to queer folks. For the response to be the game is over? When I heard that, it made the hair on my body stand up.”

Martin added that the experience reminded him of “Black and brown trans and queer bodies that started the queer liberation movement in New York in Stonewall,” adding, “We are still dealing with those same issues for those same people today. And hearing those words echo so aggressively as if there was a game to be had? I think (it) speaks perfectly well to the kind of culture and thinking that exists and pervades law enforcement today.”

Raleigh city council member Nicole Stewart was also distraught at the situation, telling the Observer, "Had it been anybody, it would have been bad enough. The idea that it was an individual, a business owner, trying to help other individuals in our community made it that much more startling. And I couldn’t let it sit.” Stewart has called on police chief Cassandra Deck-Brown to investigate the incident.

The country has a very real problem with a toxic segment of its police personnel.  The bigots and those too ready to use violence need to be removed and never allowed to wear a badge again. 

The Dangers of Turning Police Officers into Revenue Generators

I have long believed that we have far too many police officers who due to temperament, racism, and general bigotry have absolutely no business wearing a badge and carrying a gun.  It is a recipe for disaster and the result is that we see more and more unarmed individuals - especially blacks and other minorities - abused, mistreated and all too often killed.  Lurking behind all of this is a factor that is often overlooked: as cities and municipalities have faced budget shortfalls, the police have been used to generate cash flow by increasingly stopping and ticketing people so that revenues from the fines and court fees help finance the municipality.  The result is that police are on the hunt for those they can stop and ticket in order to keep the desperately needed cash rolling in.  This allows politicians - typically Republicans - to boast that they have not raised taxes as court fines and fees help close deficits and fund the police and court systems. A piece in Mother Jones looks at the perverse and dangerous situation.  Here are highlights:

In April, several days after North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him, the usual cable-news transmogrification of victim into superpredator ran into problems. The dash cam showed Scott being pulled over while traveling at a nerdy rate of speed, using his left turn signal to pull into a parking lot and having an amiable conversation with Slager until he realized he'd probably get popped for nonpayment of child support. At which point he bolted out of the car and hobbled off. Slager then shot him. Why didn't the cop just jog up and grab him? Calling what the obese 50-year-old Scott was doing "running" really stretches the bounds of literary license.

But maybe the question to ask is: Why did Scott run? The answer came when the New York Times revealed Scott to be a man of modest means trapped in an exhausting hamster wheel: He would get a low-paying job, make some child support payments, fall behind on them, get fined, miss a payment, get jailed for a few weeks, lose that job due to absence, and then start over at a lower-paying job. From all apparent evidence, he was a decent schlub trying to make things work in a system engineered to make his life miserable and recast his best efforts as criminal behavior.

Slager had a record for gratuitously using his Taser. Timothy Leohmann, who leapt from his car and instantly killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, had been deemed "weepy" and unable to "emotionally function" by a supervisor at his previous PD job, who added: "I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies." Ferguson's Darren Wilson was also fired from his previous job—actually, the entire police force of Jennings, Missouri, was disbanded for being awful.

When you ask why such "bad" cops are nevertheless armed and allowed to patrol the streets, one begins to see that lurking beneath this violence is a fiscal menace: police departments forced to assist city officials in raising revenue, in many cases funding their own salaries—redirecting the very concept of keeping the peace into underwriting the budget.

We saw a glimpse of this when the Justice Department released its report on Ferguson in March.  . . . . Even as he was jailing black ladies for parking tickets, Brockmeyer was allegedly erasing citations for white Ferguson residents who happened to be his friends. After the report's publication, he resigned so that Ferguson could "begin its healing process."

But consider: In 2010, this collaboration between the Ferguson police and the courts generated $1.4 million in income for the city. This year, they will more than double that amount—$3.1 million—providing nearly a quarter of the city's $13 million budget, almost all of it extracted from its poorest African American citizens.

Evidence also suggests that this new form of raising revenue—policiteering?—goes far beyond Ferguson. . . .  "Essentially, these small towns in urban areas have municipal infrastructure that can't be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning," said William Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice who has been studying the sudden rise in "nontraffic-related fines."

Take the St. Louis suburb of Pagedale, where, among other Norman Rockwell-worthy features deemed illegal, "you can't have a hedge more than three feet high," Maurer says. "You can't have a basketball hoop or a wading pool in front of a house. You can't have a dish antenna on the front of your house. You can't walk on the roadway if there is a sidewalk, and if there is not a sidewalk, they must walk on the left side of the roadway. They must walk on the right of the crosswalk. They can't conduct a barbecue in the front yard and can't have an alcoholic beverage within 150 feet of a barbecue. Kids cannot play in the street. They also have restrictions against pants being worn below the waist in public. Cars must be within 500 feet of a lamp or a source of illumination during nighttime hours. Blinds must be neatly hung in respectable appearance, properly maintained, and in a state of good repair."

A different strategy in San Diego simply tacks on various fees to an existing fine. A 2012 Union Tribune investigation revealed that while speeding is a simple $35 fine, other government agencies can tack on as many as 10 other surcharges, including: a state penalty assessment, $40; county penalty assessment, $36; court construction, $20; state surcharge, $8; DNA identification, $16; criminal conviction fee, $35; court operations, $40; emergency medical air transportation penalty, $4; and night court, $1. When it's all said and done, that $35 ticket comes to $235.

There is still no comprehensive study to determine just how many cities pay their bills by indenturing the poor, but it is probably no coincidence that when you examine the recent rash of police killings, you find that the offenses they were initially stopped for were preposterously minor. 

"Once the system is primed for maximizing revenue—starting with fines and fine enforcement," Holder said apropos Ferguson, "the city relies on the police force to serve, essentially, as a collection agency for the municipal court rather than a law enforcement entity."

In Alabama, a circuit court judge, Hub Harrington, wrote a blistering opinion three years ago asserting that the Shelby County Jail had become a kind of "debtors' prison" and that the court system had devolved into a "judicially sanctioned extortion racket."  
When the poor come to understand that they are likely to be detained and fined for comically absurd crimes, it can't be a surprise to the police that their officers are viewed with increasing distrust. In this environment, running away from a cop is not an act of suspicion; it's common sense.

[W]hen budgetary whims replace peacekeeping as the central motivation of law enforcement, who is more likely to write up more tickets, the good cop or the crummy one? When the mission of the entire department shifts from "protect and serve" to "punish and profit," then just what constitutes good police?

Morgan Freeman - F*ck the Media on Baltimore Coverage

One of the biggest problems blocking any correction of politics and social conditions in America is the decline of American journalism and television news coverage.  Serious news coverage is become harder and harder to find while "reality shows" and inane entertainment news proliferates.  Then there are outlets like Fox News where facts and coverage are twisted - and often ignored - to further a particular political agenda.  Compounding the problem, of course, is the laziness of far too many Americans who fail to educate themselves on issues and then go and vote when they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to really knowing what the issues are.  The proverbial soccer moms from my old neighborhood underscore the problem: they worried about PTA infighting, children's sports, and every other thing that had no effect on the state of the nation or world, but were complete idiots on important matters.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the sad state of our media today.  Here are highlights:

I’m seated across from Morgan Freeman, the Oscar-winning acting legend, discussing his latest film Five Flights Up. One of the through lines of the movie, a sweet little rom-com also starring Diane Keaton, is a young Muslim man whose truck has been stopped by the NYPD on a bridge. A televised standoff ensues, with media figures and the public wildly speculating about the cause of the stop. Most, as is their wont, immediately jump to the “he has a bomb” conclusion.

“Isn’t that always happening?” says Freeman of the media’s penchant for unsubstantiated, biased conjecture during live news events. “Look at MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. Go between those three. There’s a take, there’s a take, and there’s a take. It’s just commentary. CNN wants to be pure news, but the others are just commentary. They’re just commenting on things.”

Which brings us to the TV news media’s coverage of the Baltimore protests in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American who was arrested on April 19 for possession of a switchblade. He was later found dead while in police custody, having sustained injuries to his spinal cord and larynx.

Citywide protests ensued, and while some were peaceful, the media focused all of its coverage on the rioting in near-pornographic fashion, leading journalist and African-American scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates to comment, “Cameras actually distort the story. The story already happened. The story began with policy and apexed with Freddie Gray’s death. The story is simple. Gray died in state custody. Unlikely anyone will be punished. (Which explains the riots.) 

[T]echnology lets us see behind the scenes a little bit better,” he continues. “Police have a standard reaction to shooting somebody. I fear for my life and I fear for my safety. Now, at least you can see, ‘Hey, his hands were up in the air! What part of your safety were you afraid of? The guy was running away, what part of your safety was in danger?’ There was one situation I saw where a cop told a guy to get out of the car, said, ‘Show me your driver’s license,’ and the guy reached back into the car and the cop shot him!”

“Anyway, off the media,” he says, waving his hands in the air and chuckling. “F-ck the media.”

We have real problems in this country and lazy and biased media coverage is not helping correct the situation. 

After Ferguson - When Whites Just Don’t Get It

I don't like to beat a dead horse, but in the wake of the Ferguson grand jury outcome - an outcome manipulated by the prosecutor - 3it remains time to face the reality that America has a huge race problem.  And even whites who are not racists become complicity given the manner in which the system is rigged based on race.  Not talking about it is not a solution just as not talking about the ugliness of homophobes and "family values" hate groups doesn't solve the problem of LGBT discrimination in this country.  An other column in the New York Times looks at America's race problem and the challenges faced by many totally innocent and law abiding blacks.  Here are some excerpts:

WE Americans are a nation divided.  We feud about the fires in Ferguson, Mo., and we can agree only that racial divisions remain raw. So let’s borrow a page from South Africa and impanel a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine race in America.

The model should be the 9/11 commission or the Warren Commission on President Kennedy’s assassination, and it should hold televised hearings and issue a report to help us understand ourselves.

We as a nation need to grapple with race because the evidence is overwhelming that racial bias remains deeply embedded in American life.

If such racial bias exists among professional referees monitored by huge television audiences, imagine what unfolds when an employer privately weighs whom to hire, or a principal decides whether to expel a disruptive student, or a policeman considers whether to pull over a driver.

This “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” series is a call for soul-searching. It’s very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human. Three-quarters of whites have only white friends, according to one study, so we are often clueless.

What we whites notice is blacks who have “made it” — including President Obama — so we focus on progress and are oblivious to the daily humiliations that African-Americans endure when treated as second-class citizens.

“In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in,” a 23-year-old black man wrote in May 1992. “In the shoe store, they help the white man who walks in after me. In the shopping mall, they follow me.”

He described an incident when he was stopped by six police officers who detained him, with guns at the ready, and treated him for 30 minutes as a dangerous suspect.

That young man was future Senator Cory Booker, who had been a senior class president at Stanford University and was a newly selected Rhodes Scholar. Yet our law enforcement system reduced him to a stereotype — so young Booker sat trembling and praying that he wouldn’t be shot by the police.

My sense is that part of the problem is well-meaning Americans who disapprove of racism yet inadvertently help perpetuate it. We aren’t racists, yet we buttress a system that acts in racist ways. It’s “racism without racists,” in the words of Eduardo Bonillo-Silva, a Duke University sociologist.

I don’t know what unfolded in Ferguson between Michael Brown, a black teenager, and Darren Wilson, a white police officer. But there is a pattern: a ProPublica investigation found that young black men are shot dead by police at 21 times the rate of young white men.

That’s the gulf that an American Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help bridge just a little.

This occurs partly because of deeply embedded stereotypes that trick us, even when we want to be fair. . . . . White Americans may protest that our racial problems are not like South Africa’s. No, but the United States incarcerates a higher proportion of blacks than apartheid South Africa did. In America, the black-white wealth gap today is greater than it was in South Africa in 1970 at the peak of apartheid.

Most troubling, America’s racial wealth gap, pay gap and college education gap have all widened in the last few decades.

There is a huge problem even if many don't want to talk about it.  And just as with homophobia, what's really behind it all is the inability of far too many Americans to see those who are different - "other" if you will - as equally human.

Too Many Police Departments Are Playing Soldier in the Suburbs

Turmoil continues in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the shooting - some believe murder - of an unarmed black teenager and the images that we continue to see of the Ferguson police officers look more like scenes out of Iraq or Afghanistan.  At a fundraiser dinner last night I was seated with a friend who coincidentally is originally from Missouri who said the problem in Ferguson has gone on for years where the lily white police force confronts the majority black population all too frequently.  Besides the militarization of America's police force one problem no one seems to want to mention is that there are many police officers who have no business wearing a badge or carrying a gun.  They are too often macho bullies who allow power to go to their heads and bad things happen as a result.  I don't mean to denigrate the good police officers, but the bad apples need to be removed.  A piece in the New York Times looks at how we got to this bad state of affairs in this country.  Here are excerpts:

TO understand what’s been happening in Ferguson, Mo., where protests and violence following a cop’s shooting of an unarmed teenager summoned up a police response that looked more like a military invasion, it helps to flash back to the heyday of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

The S.L.A., one of the loopiest and most dangerous of the homegrown terrorist groups that flourished in the madhouse of the early 1970s, was already famous for kidnapping and “converting” Patty Hearst when its members engaged in a nationally televised shootout in Los Angeles in the spring of 1974.

The firefight, in which six terrorists died without injury to police or bystanders, helped publicize the innovations of a small group of Angeleno police officers. Eight years earlier, after the Watts riots, they began to develop the combat-ready police unit that played a central role in taking down the S.L.A. That unit was America’s first special weapons and tactics team, or SWAT.

In an era of riots and hijackings, the SWAT model understandably spread nationwide. But as the riots died away and the threat of domestic terror receded, SWAT tactics — helicopters, heavy weaponry, the works — became increasingly integrated into normal crime-fighting, and especially into the war on drugs.

This was phase one in the militarization of America’s police forces, as described in Radley Balko’s essential 2013 book on the subject, “The Rise of the Warrior Cop.” Phase two, in which the federal government began supplying local police with military hardware, began in the 1990s and accelerated after 9/11, under the theory that Islamic terrorists could strike anywhere, and that it might take a cop with a grenade launcher to stop them.

In the name of local preparedness, Washington has been bestowing antiterror grants and Pentagon surplus on communities barely touched by major crime, let alone by terrorism. Tanks and aircraft, helmets and armor, guns and grenade launchers have flowed to police departments from Des Moines (home of two $180,000 bomb-disarming robots) to Keene, N.H. (population 23,000, murder rate infinitesimal and the proud custodian of an armored BearCat).

Last week, The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis ran the numbers for Missouri and found that the state’s Department of Public Safety received about $69 million from the Department of Homeland Security in the past five years alone. Which helps explain why the streets of a St. Louis suburb flooded so quickly with cops in gas masks and camouflage, driving armored cars and brandishing rifles like an occupying army. It’s our antiterror policies made manifest, our tax dollars at work.

And it’s a path to potential disaster, for cops and citizens alike. The “S” in SWAT was there for a reason: Militarized tactics that are potentially useful in specialized circumstances — like firefights with suicidal terrorist groups — can be counterproductive when employed for crowd-control purposes by rank-and-file cops. (The only recent calm on Ferguson’s streets came after state cops started walking through the crowds in blue uniforms, behaving like police instead of storm troopers.)

The disease is the entire range of aggressive police tactics (from no-knock raids to stop-and-frisk), the racial disparities they help perpetuate and our society’s drug laws and extraordinary incarceration rate.

[T]he military hardware issue, the BearCats and grenade launchers and what we’ve seen unfold in Ferguson — that does seem easy, uncomplicated, clear. Crime rates rise and fall, but crime-fighting is a constant for police; dealing with terrorism and insurrection, however, decidedly is not.

And this is where it’s ended: with a bunch of tomfool police playing soldier, tear-gassing protesters, arresting journalists and turning Ferguson into a watchword for policing at its worst.  Time to take their toys away.

Calls Grow for Demilitarization of Police

The images coming out of Ferguson, Missouri are certainly providing fodder for America's enemies that engage in human rights abuses.  Not only was a unarmed 18 man killed inexplicably by police, but the actions of the police to protesters look like something out of a police state.  Those who chant about American exceptionalism need to take a good hard  look at what is happening here in their own back yards.  Of course most of those who engage in that form of xenophobia tend to be conservatives/Republicans who nowadays are thinly veiled white supremacists, so seemingly the murder of unarmed young men isn't an issue so long as the victims are black. Tellingly, among those roughed up by police are news reporters, some of who had their camera equipment seized - a sign to me that even the police know that their conduct is improper and that they fear images being disseminated by the media.  A piece in the New York Times and another in the New Yorker look at the frightening militarization of the police in America.  First excerpts from the Times:

For four nights in a row, they streamed onto West Florissant Avenue wearing camouflage, black helmets and vests with “POLICE” stamped on the back. They carried objects that doubled as warnings: assault rifles and ammunition, slender black nightsticks and gas masks.

They were not just one police force but many, hailing from communities throughout north St. Louis County and loosely coordinated by the county police. 

Their adversaries were a ragtag group of mostly unarmed neighborhood residents, hundreds of African-Americans whose pent-up fury at the police had sent them pouring onto streets and sidewalks in Ferguson, demanding justice for Michael Brown, the 18-year-old who was fatally shot by a police officer on Saturday.

When the protesters refused to retreat from the streets, threw firebombs or walked too close to a police officer, the response was swift and unrelenting: tear gas and rubber bullets.

To the rest of the world, the images of explosions, billowing tear gas and armored vehicles made this city look as if it belonged in a chaos-stricken corner of Eastern Europe, not the heart of the American Midwest. As a result, a broad call came from across the political spectrum for America’s police forces to be demilitarized, and Gov. Jay Nixon installed a new overall commander in Ferguson.

“At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said, “I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message.”

Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, voiced similar sentiments.

But such opposition amounts to a sharp change in tone in Washington, where the federal government has spent more than a decade paying for body armor, mine-resistant trucks and other military gear, all while putting few restrictions on its use.
 

The increase in military-style equipment has coincided with a significant rise in the number of police SWAT teams, which are increasingly being used for routine duties such as conducting liquor inspections and serving warrants.

For years, much of the equipment has gone unnoticed. But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drawn down, police departments have been receiving 30-ton, mine-resistant trucks from the military. That has caught the attention of the public and caused controversy in several towns.

Nowhere has the deployment of military-style equipment been on starker display than this week in Ferguson. 

Yes, it is a frightening development.  The New Yorker piece provides some eye witness accounts:

Nothing that happened in Ferguson, Missouri, on the fourth night since Michael Brown died at the hands of a police officer there, dispelled the notion that this is a place where law enforcement is capable of gross overreaction. Just after sundown on Wednesday, local and state officers filled West Florissant Avenue, the main thoroughfare, with massive clouds of tear gas. They lobbed flash grenades at protesters who were gathered there to demand answers, and, at times, just propelled them down the street. That they ordered the crowd to disperse was not noteworthy. That the order was followed by successive waves of gas, hours after the protests ended, became an object lesson in the issues that brought people into the streets in the first place. 

Two journalists, Wesley Lowery, of the Washington Post, and Ryan Reilly, of the Huffington Post, and a St. Louis Alderman, Antonio French, were arrested. (The journalists were let go without charges; the alderman, as his wife told reporters, was released after being charged with unlawful assembly.) What transpired in the streets appeared to be a kind of municipal version of shock and awe; the first wave of flash grenades and tear gas had played as a prelude to the appearance of an unusually large armored vehicle, carrying a military-style rifle mounted on a tripod. The message of all of this was something beyond the mere maintenance of law and order: it’s difficult to imagine how armored officers with what looked like a mobile military sniper’s nest could quell the anxieties of a community outraged by allegations regarding the excessive use of force. It revealed itself as a raw matter of public intimidation.

Inside of a week, two black teen-agers have been shot by police and, in both instances, the bureaucratic default setting has favored law enforcement, fuelling a perception that the department is either inept or beholden to a certain nonchalance about the possibility of police brutality. I watched the events that led up to the eruption of tear gas with Etefia Umana, an activist who is chairman of the board of an organization called Better Family Life, and who lives about fifteen hundred feet from the spot where Brown was shot. Umana explained to me that the durable anger in Ferguson is fueled by the enigma of the officer’s identity and the perceived possibility that, should the department fail to bring charges against him, his name may never be known.

The day began with questions about why a young man was killed just days before he was due to begin college. It ended as a referendum on the militarization of American police forces.