AUDASE

 

 

Police confront unarmed man in Ferguson Missouri Monday evening  

 

 

 

This is a disgrace! It demeans the United States in so many ways! Police are no longer ex soldiers in simple uniforms with a night stick or a .38 but over dressed and over armed. Civilian police must never become militarized. This kind of behavior will lead to tragedy and all of us will suffer! David A Fairbanks

 

A Militarized Night in Ferguson

By Jay Caspian Kang The New Yorker

 

 

 

Last night, as the images and stories from Ferguson, Missouri, joined the news churn, many who registered their thoughts via social media noted that what they were seeing—policemen with dogs and AR-15 assault rifles standing in a Stygian, blue-lit cloud of tear gas; crowds of protesters with their hands in the air, screaming “Hands up, don’t shoot”; members of the press being removed from the scene—did not look like America. The sentiment underlying the shock—that the United States should be better, that we have a Constitution that protects its citizens from violent excesses, that an unarmed young man ought to be able to live through an encounter with a police officer—seems almost precious, when one considers the country’s racial history. The tragedy of the story of Michael Brown is that it’s not much different from the stories of the other men—young, unarmed, and black—who have been gunned down by the police. But after last night’s militarized reaction to the protests in Ferguson, it’s worth considering whether the typical ending to the story, wherein the outrage of the community is met with silence on the part of the authorities, has changed for the worse.

Writing in The Nation in the summer of 1966, James Baldwin described an instance of police brutality that had taken place two years earlier, several months before the death of an African-American teen-ager at the hands of the N.Y.P.D. sparked the Harlem race riots.

On April 17, 1964, in Harlem, New York City, a young salesman, father of two, left a customer’s apartment and went into the streets. There was a great commotion in the streets, which, especially since it was a spring day, involved many people, including running, frightened, little boys. They were running from the police. Other people, in windows, left their windows, in terror of the police because the police had their guns out, and were aiming the guns at the roofs. Then the salesman noticed that two of the policemen were beating up a kid: “So I spoke up and asked them, ‘why are you beating him like that?’ Police jump up and start swinging on me. He put the gun on me and said, ‘get over there.’ I said, ‘what for?’ ”

An unwise question. Three of the policemen beat up the salesman in the streets. Then they took the young salesman, whose hands had been handcuffed behind his back, along with four others, much younger than the salesman, who were handcuffed in the same way, to the police station. There: “About thirty-five I’d say came into the room, and started beating, punching us in the jaw, in the stomach, in the chest, beating us with a padded club—spit on us, call us niggers, dogs, animals—they call us dogs and animals when I don’t see why we are the dogs and animals the way they are beating us. Like they beat me they beat the other kids and the elderly fellow. They throw him almost through one of the radiators. I thought he was dead over there.”

If you take out the date, there is little in this passage that anchors it to any particular moment in the past century. The beatings could have happened as easily in 2014 or 1914 as in 1964. The only difference is that the police now are armed to the teeth.

In June, the American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.) released “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” a report that tracks how equipment donations made through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Excess Property Program, along with grants from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, funnel money and matériel—including firearms, explosives, tactical vests, and vehicles—to state and local law enforcement. (A report in the Times noted that the Pentagon has also distributed silencers.) Between 2011 and 2012, sixty-three agencies polled by the A.C.L.U. reported that they had received “a total of 15,054 items of battle uniforms or personal protective equipment”; some five hundred agencies had received “vehicles built to withstand armor-piercing roadside bombs.” In many instances, the receipt of these military-grade weapons is contingent on their use within a calendar year. “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Kara Dansky, one of the authors of the A.C.L.U.’s report, told me. “When the police have these weapons, they’re more likely to use them.”

Nationwide, fifty-four per cent of the people who find themselves at the other end of these weapons are black or Latino. For many in this country, the scene from Baldwin’s essay has become so familiar that it now reads as unremarkable. But have we also become anesthetized to images of police in armored vehicles and full military gear? And has the proliferation of images on news and social-media sites made them seem any more normal? Anyone who stayed up late watching the police action in Missouri unfold saw things that did not seem, at least in theory, American. It’s long past time to ask what happens when we raise the threshold of what seems reasonable in a police deployment. If the next Ferguson looks no more militarized than the scene last night, will we excuse it?