Warrior Cops Lose a Round in Missouri

By John Grant, This Can’t Be Happening, 8/15/14

Community or Warzone?

On Monday, I decided to spend my evenings flipping back-and-forth between Fox News and MSNBC as the two cable channels dealt with the dueling stories of the United States tiptoeing into a third war in Iraq and the sudden appearance of what appeared to be a police state in a little town outside St Louis. The Ferguson, Missouri story prevailed and has gone from bizarre and dangerous war zone to relief-filled street carnival to complicated human drama with the late addition of a convenience store video.

MSNBC dove headfirst into the Ferguson, Missouri story. An unarmed 18-year-old African American named Michael Brown had been killed by an unnamed police officer. Furious, unarmed African American citizens were confronted with determined cops dressed in camouflage battle fatigues, wearing helmets with plastic face masks, brandishing automatic weapons and backed up by huge, armored-up vehicles topped with officers pointing sniper rifles at them. It was a full-bore manifestation of the militarization of community police equipped by the Pentagon with millions of dollars worth of surplus Iraq and Afghanistan war weaponry. The stated purpose of all this military weaponry in our towns is to fight the War On Terror at the local level. It seemed to aggravate an already terrible situation.

Over at Fox, the heavy focus was on Iraq and ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or in another version, ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. (The Levant refers to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, which of course includes Israel.) ISIS in western Iraq has declared itself The New Caliphate. Over and over, Fox showed excruciating video of the desperate Yazidi people trapped on a barren mountain on the edge of the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. US and Kurd forces dropped desperately needed supplies. A US military team was dropped into assess the situation. Sean Hannity fulminated at his most vigorous trying to establish fundamentalist Islam as the living resurrection of the Nazis from World War Two. President Obama was the cause of everything. George W. Bush was never mentioned. History was absent.

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Get the Military Off of Main Street

By ELIZABETH R. BEAVERS and MICHAEL SHANK, New York Times, AUG. 14, 2014

Ferguson Shows the Risks of Militarized Policing

WASHINGTON — FERGUSON, Mo., has become a virtual war zone. In the wake of the shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, outsize armored vehicles have lined streets and tear gas has filled the air. Officers dressed in camouflage uniforms from Ferguson’s 53-person police force have pointed M-16s at the very citizens they are sworn to protect and serve.

The police response has shocked America. The escalating tension in this town of 21,200 people between a largely white police department and a majority African-American community is a central part of the crisis, but the militarization of the police is a dimension of the story that has national implications.

Ferguson’s police force got equipped this way thanks to the Pentagon, and it’s happening all over the country. The Department of Defense provides military-grade weapons and equipment to local law enforcement agencies through the 1033 program, enacted by Congress in 1997 to expand the practice of dispensing extra military gear. Due to the defense industry’s bloated contracts, there is a huge surplus. To date, the Pentagon has donated military equipment worth more than $4 billion to local law enforcement agencies. And the giving goes on, to police forces in all 50 states in the union….

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