THE police are out of control in Ferguson, Missouri, proof as seen in these videos of the massive militarized police actions captured in these videos from +Daily Kos and YouTube....
Radley Balko has great look at how police should respond to civil disobedience:
Discuss
The militarization of America's police forces that has been on full
display in Ferguson, Missouri, this week didn't begin yesterday or with
the Bush administration. It dates back decades. But it has, as Radley
Balko has written in two books, gotten worse. Here's Susan Gardner, in a book review in 2006 of Balko's Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America:
Thu Aug 14, 2014 at 09:20 AM EDT
Ferguson, Missouri: Video of unprovoked police attack on peaceful demonstrators
An outright, unprovoked attack on peaceful demonstrators in Ferguson,
Missouri, protesting the killing of an unarmed 18-year old last
Saturday:
http://youtu.be/GO1SKC6dK7o
Good morning, America.
http://youtu.be/GO1SKC6dK7o
Published on Aug 13, 2014
Recorded Via Livestream from Ferguson;
Ferguson police fire rubber bullets and tear gas canisters into peaceful protest and local neighborhood, no crimes have been committed and the only violence that occurred was after police started firing into the crowd. This attack was unprovoked.
This is part 2 after they had fired tear gas & rubber bullets into the crowd and the crowd had moved down almost 2 city blocks from the original protest location. The crowd of course gets upset.
A angry city that wants answers turns into a warzone from police action. What does a police state look like? This is what a police state looks like!
Livestream was recorded LIVE from: http://new.livestream.com/accounts/90...
PLEASE SHARE. PEOPLE NEED TO SEE WHATS GOING ON!
Ferguson police fire rubber bullets and tear gas canisters into peaceful protest and local neighborhood, no crimes have been committed and the only violence that occurred was after police started firing into the crowd. This attack was unprovoked.
This is part 2 after they had fired tear gas & rubber bullets into the crowd and the crowd had moved down almost 2 city blocks from the original protest location. The crowd of course gets upset.
A angry city that wants answers turns into a warzone from police action. What does a police state look like? This is what a police state looks like!
Livestream was recorded LIVE from: http://new.livestream.com/accounts/90...
PLEASE SHARE. PEOPLE NEED TO SEE WHATS GOING ON!
Good morning, America.
A sign and a pin are pictured on the back of a
demonstrator during a protest against the shooting death of teenager
Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 13, 2014.
Geron also emphasizes personalization, pointing out that when police show up in full riot garb, especially gear that covers their faces, they dehumanize themselves to protesters. This is especially dangerous when the protests are against the police themselves, as was the case in Ferguson. “You make all of your officers look like one another. To the protesters, to the people, your officers are no longer individual human beings with faces. You’ve just made each of them a faceless symbol of the police institution that the protesters are reacting against.” The police in Ferguson are almost a textbook example of how not to react to protest. “When you start by rolling out the the SWAT team, and you then position a sniper on top of an APC with his gun pointed at the protesters, what kind of message are you sending? Did they really expect the sniper would need to start shooting people? It was just a show of force,” Geron says.Related:
“The first thing that went wrong was when the police showed up with K-9 units,” Scriven said. “The dogs played on racist imagery…it played the situation up and [the department] wasn’t cognizant of the imagery.”The mayor of Ferguson claims racism didn't exist in his town. Oh really?
While black residents accounted for 67 percent of Ferguson’s population, black drivers accounted for more than 86 percent of the traffic stops made last year by the Ferguson Police Department, according to a report produced by the office of Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster.This might have something to do with it: while just 30 percent of Ferguson's population is white...
The police force has 53 members, and three of them are black. The city’s mayor and police chief are white, as are most of the members of the Ferguson City Council.It's not just Ferguson.
But the ACLU did discover something worth knowing: after aggregating the reports and data on SWAT raids they could find, they found that the militarized police operations were overwhelmingly aimed at minorities. "Overall, 42 percent of people impacted by a SWAT deployment to execute a search warrant were Black and 12 percent were Latino. This means that of the people impacted by deployments for warrants, at least 54 percent were minorities." (For comparison, 72 percent of Americans identified as white in 2010.) The feel of the police presence is much more militarized in minority communities than white communities.Rubber bullets are unsafe. How police tried to keep reporters away from protests.
Totals are the minimum number of pieces acquired since 2006 in few categories.
This study traces the rise of infatuation with SWAT units, which today is largely used to serve drug warrants dozens of times a day across the USA, to L.A. police chief Daryl Gates' use of them and the Reagan administration's official declaration that the drug war was a part of "national security," thus opening the doors to Defense Department giveaways and discounts of weaponry to towns such as Jasper, Florida (population 2,000), which has a police force of seven and hasn't had a murder in 14 years.And here's Glenn Greenwald at First Look, writing at The Intercept Thursday:
The intensive militarization of America’s police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction. In a 2007 paper on “the blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement,” the criminal justice professor Peter Kraska defined “police militarization” as “the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.” [...] The best and most comprehensive account of the dangers of police militarization is the 2013 book by the libertarian Washington Post journalist Radley Balko, entitled “Rise of the Warrior Cops: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.” Balko, who has devoted his career to documenting and battling the worst abuses of the U.S. criminal justice system, traces the history and underlying mentality that has given rise to all of this: the “law-and-order” obsessions that grew out of the social instability of the 1960s, the War on Drugs that has made law enforcement agencies view Americans as an enemy population, the Reagan-era “War on Poverty” (which was more aptly described as a war on America’s poor), the aggressive Clinton-era expansions of domestic policing, all topped off by the massively funded, rights-destroying, post-9/11 security state of the Bush and Obama years. All of this, he documents, has infused America’s police forces with “a creeping battlefield mentality.”And here's Matt Apuzzo writing two months ago in the New York Times:
During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft. The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look and act like military units. Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of “barbering without a license.”When cops treat people the way an occupying army would, the consequences for citizens, for constitutional protections, for the police themselves are exactly the opposite of what is needed in a civilized society. "Serve and protect" is transformed into a sick joke.
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