America's attention recently turned away from the violence in Iraq and Gaza toward the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown. While all the facts surrounding the shooing have yet to come to light, the shock of seeing police using tear gas (a substance banned in warfare), and other military-style weapons against American citizens including journalists exercising their First Amendment rights, has started a much-needed debate on police militarization.
The increasing use of military equipment by local police is a symptom of growing authoritarianism, not the cause. The cause is policies that encourage police to see Americans as enemies to subjugate, rather than as citizens to "protect and serve." This attitude is on display not only in Ferguson, but in the police lockdown following the Boston Marathon bombing and in the Americans killed and injured in "no-knock" raids conducted by militarized SWAT teams.
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A few corrections:
ReplyDelete1. No military style weapons were used against anyone in Ferguson.
2. Tear gas, (AKA RIOT CONTROL AGENT), was specifically invented to control rioters without having to kill them or club them like a cop outside the 1968 Democratic Party national convention clubbing a hippie. Police back then were MUCH more violent without being called "militarized".
3. Arriving in the back of an MRAP is only "using military style weapons against them" if they drove the MRAP over their bodies. That is something the MRAP is fully capable of doing, but they suck off road, which is why the Army doesn't want them anymore.
4. Tear gas is only banned by the Geneva convention because the GC was written by the moonbat progressive coke-drinking Kumbaiya morons of their day. There is absolutely nothing inhumane about using it against civilians. Or against using it against enemy soldiers. If anything, the USA should renounce the GC as a useless anachronism as long as Islam or communism exist in the modern world.