This Is The Terrifying Result Of The Militarization Of Police - Ferguson.

[phill4paul]

While serving as a U.S. Marine on patrol in Afghanistan, we wore desert camouflage to blend in with our surroundings, carried rifles to shoot back when under enemy attack, and drove around in armored vehicles to ward off roadside bombs.
We looked intimidating, but all of our vehicles and equipment had a clear purpose for combat against enemy forces. So why is this same gear being used on our city streets?

On Saturday, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed black man. In the days that have followed, the town with a population about 21,000 has seen massive protests in response to the shooting, as some witnesses said Brown had his hands up when he was killed.

Putting aside what started the protests for a moment, it's worth discussing the police response to the outrage. In photos taken on Monday, we are shown a heavily armed SWAT team.

They have short-barreled 5.56-mm rifles based on the military M4 carbine, with scopes that can accurately hit a target out to 500 meters. On their side they carry pistols. On their front, over their body armor, they carry at least four to six extra magazines, loaded with 30 rounds each.

When did this become OK? When did "protect and serve" turn into "us versus them"?

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/police-militarization-ferguson-2014-8#ixzz3ADiBRtGM

and from Times...

 

[aGameOfThrones]

“There is no reason this type of armor, which is designed for warfare, should be available in our communities except for those who need it, like law enforcement,” Honda said in a statement last week. “There’s nothing more dangerous than what a well-armored, unstoppable active shooter can do. This bill is common-sense and long overdue.”

..

 

[tod evans]

I'm afraid this is going to take more than one rope....

 

[aGameOfThrones]

 

[TheTexan]

Well, no cops have been seriously hurt during these riots, right? Clearly the bearcats are working as intended

 

[LibertyEagle]

I would have called out the National Guard the first night. But, then again, I watched the looting, the burning, being done by the scum roaming the streets that night.

Justice for Michael Brown! Gimme some rims and cheetos.

With liberty, comes responsibility. A detail many forget.

 

[TheTexan]

I would have called out the National Guard the first night. But, then again, I watched the looting, the burning, being done by the scum roaming the streets that night.

With liberty, comes responsibility. A detail many forget.

I agree 100%. It's of the utmost importance to maintain law & order. Law & order is the glue that holds this great society together.

 

[AuH20]

I would have called out the National Guard the first night. But, then again, I watched the looting, the burning, being done by the scum roaming the streets that night.

Justice for Michael Brown! Gimme some rims and cheetos.

With liberty, comes responsibility. A detail many forget.

If you don't take responsibility for yourself, somebody else will. That seems to be the trend in modern government. They willingly took the white man's trojan horse EBT cards and a host of social services & then act surprised when the police crack down on them? You already sold your dignity away many years ago. Stop complaining. That's my answer. Malcolm X explicitly warned them not to fall into this trap.

 

[James Madison]

I would have called out the National Guard the first night. But, then again, I watched the looting, the burning, being done by the scum roaming the streets that night.

Justice for Michael Brown! Gimme some rims and cheetos.

With liberty, comes responsibility. A detail many forget.

Easier to blame government/police.

 

[AuH20]

Easier to blame government/police.

I think the government is far more at fault (look at black crime rates in the 1930s -- much lower than the general pop) than the police, but at the end of the day you can't keep running on that same, tired treadmill of victimization.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

I would have called out the National Guard the first night. But, then again, I watched the looting, the burning, being done by the scum roaming the streets that night.

Justice for Michael Brown! Gimme some rims and cheetos.

With liberty, comes responsibility. A detail many forget.

Who are you chastising? We all know there were some idiots that started looting. Nobody's defending that. Frankly, the injustice of the shooting of Michael Brown weighs way more heavily on my mind than people stealing cheetos. And although it was wrong to loot, you don't seem to share this concern. Why not?

 

[PaulConventionWV]

I agree 100%. It's of the utmost importance to maintain law & order. Law & order is the glue that holds this great society together.

Yes, it's just a wonderful society, isn't it? God bless 'Murikuh.

 

[Anti Federalist]

I agree 100%. It's of the utmost importance to maintain law & order. Law & order is the glue that holds this great society together.

Well stated comrade.

We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do. - Rudy Guliani

 

[donnay]

I would have called out the National Guard the first night. But, then again, I watched the looting, the burning, being done by the scum roaming the streets that night.

Justice for Michael Brown! Gimme some rims and cheetos.

With liberty, comes responsibility. A detail many forget.

It's too bad the store owners weren't around to exercise their 2nd amendment and defend their property.

 

[AuH20]

Gun sales booming. Maybe the 2nd amendment can make a comeback. Between the cops and these bozos, there's a chance.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/08/st-louis-gun-stores-see-boom-in-business-following-rioting/

For the past two days, Steve King has been “unbelievably busy” at his gun store, Metro Shooting at 11434 St. Charles Rock Road. King said business spiked 50 percent as local residents respond to the violent events taking place in Ferguson.

“We’ve sold a variety of handguns, shotguns and AR-15s (a semi-automatic rifle),” King said. “All of the sales are having to do with home defense.”

King, who owns the store that has 17 employees and 2013 revenue of about $2 million, added that customers have ranged from new firearm buyers to those upgrading their current arsenal. He said both black and white individuals have purchased firearms at his store over the past few days.

“Usually it’s pretty slow through the summer, but this has been a huge spike for business,” King said. “People are hunkering down because those events are taking place too close to their own home … in some cases, a half a mile away. Lots of people are afraid.”

Officials at Mid America Arms, at 8205 Gravois Road, have seen a similar increase in business. Owner Al Rothweiler had to break away from his jammed-packed store this afternoon to talk to the Business Journal.

“We were closed Sunday and Monday, but today, sales have been brisk, and the store is full of people,” said Rothweiler, who estimated that his sales were also up 50 percent Tuesday compared with a typical day in August. “Everyone who bought today mentioned something about Ferguson.”

Before this week’s spike, Rothweiler said August had been a slow month for the $3.5 million business, but he doesn’t expect the spike to continue.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

It's too bad the store owners weren't around the exercise their 2nd amendment and defend their property.

Yep. Owners fleeing and leaving their property undefended is a big part of the problem. Guns usually would not even be necessary. The mere presence of owners and employees (and security guards) usually prevents looting. Once a place is abandoned, the mentality is that it's all free for the taking.

 

[osan]

Can anyone here say they are surprised at this?

In a nutshell: cop murders unarmed civilian in all too common dead-knee-grow scenario. Rest of local knee-grows then have the temerity to react unfavorably to the act of butchery (imagine that). Cops respond with militarized force to make sure knee-grows are reminded of "their place", most especially justified in their twisted, tiny, roid-raging minds in the wake of the graffiti about the only good cops being dead ones. The nerve! Cops now must teach knee-grows who be boss in da'hood, and let us never forget whose fault this is: knee-grows.

The question remains: what will be done about this, if anything, that is substantive? My prediction: nothing, and may I be proven dead wrong.

The problem for "us" is that because the local knee-grows showed the unmitigated gall to leave their homes and express their displeasure, the police will now use it as the tacit pretext for gunning down as many well-tanned hides as they please, if perchance those people don't wise-up and retreat into their crack-dens where they belong. If they do not, this will serve as prima facie proof that the hallowed police of Ferguson faced clear and immediate threats to life and limb, thereby justifying in typical fashion any response they may choose to undertake. This works well enough when used against single individuals, as typified by cases such as those of Amadou Diallo and Abner Lwima. Now that they might face a huge mass of 20 or even more obviously dangerous knee-grows, I would bet the sky's the limit.

What will the locals do? Likely: complain and eventually retreat and live with marginally increased paranoia and bitterness. They will take no substantive action - we really never do. The police will feel incrementally empowered and will become more dangerous than they were before.

And of course our darling media will, for the most part, wring their hands as they feel they must in order to present the right appearances to the viewing audience. They will "question" the police action, but only ever-so-gently, and the blatantly criminal nature of the police will never be hinted at in even the most oblique manner. No no, we will likely receive the standard play of tacit nonsense about how the world would come to a fiery end were police to be reeled in, much less eliminated. They may even go on some diatribe to remind us how "brave" cops are and how fraught with danger is their "profession". In the end, the tacit message will be that we all owe the police our adulation, if not free blow jobs every Thursday night, and our unwavering, unquestioning obedience because they are the authority to which we much give fealty.

What would please me to no end would be if the people of Ferguson got up, got pissed, got organized, and send a few of those bastards to the ER, or perhaps the slab. But naturally this would avail the nation nothing as a whole because such isolated instances are easily squelched and forgotten. Just look at Waco if you doubt this. The FBI incinerated 70+ people and few give the least damn today. The only way to put this to ends is for massively synced up action, and that I am afraid is not going to happen, barring the rise of some extraordinary circumstance.

In the end, this will likely be just another example of the SOS. May I be proven wrong on that point, as well.

 

[osan]

If you don't take responsibility for yourself, somebody else will.

One of those details lots of people seem to forget.

That seems to be the trend in modern government.

Nothing modern about it. Theye have been doing this for ages. Encourage the bad behavior, then claim authority based on "necessity". It's a perennial winner for those who covet political power.

They willingly took the white man's trojan horse EBT cards and a host of social services & then act surprised when the police crack down on them? You already sold your dignity away many years ago. Stop complaining. That's my answer.

Agreed. The problem, however, is that the rest of us get sucked into their maelstrom of willful stupidity and personal corruption.

Malcolm X explicitly warned them not to fall into this trap.

Which relates to the core reasons he was eliminated and that rat-bastard MLK jr. was elevated on high. Malcolm X sought to see the black man elevate himself, whereas King's message, when separated from the muddied waters of his phony baloney rhetoric that so many appear to find so inspiring, was to paw at the white man's back do', beggin' d'mazzah let he inside. King was perfect for reducing the so-called "black community" to the state of ash in which it now finds itself for the most part. X's communities would have been a whole other ball of wax and probably had many of the "establishment" types shitting their Jockey's. Suffice to say, America stood to have become a very different place.

 

[AuH20]

Which relates to the core reasons he was eliminated and that rat-bastard MLK jr. was elevated on high. Malcolm X sought to see the black man elevate himself, whereas King's message, when separated from the muddied waters of his phony baloney rhetoric that so many appear to find so inspiring, was to paw at the white man's back do', beggin' d'mazzah let he inside. King was perfect for reducing the so-called "black community" to the state of ash in which it now finds itself for the most part. X's communities would have been a whole other ball of wax and probably had many of the "establishment" types shitting their Jockey's. Suffice to say, America stood to have become a very different place.

Malcolm X knew the black community was still mired in a state of identity crisis, which is why he stressed for blacks to remove themselves from the persistent distraction of the white man, whether it be the American political sphere or the white man's questionable institutions. He stressed community independence and in some cases voluntary segregation. In retrospect, he was proved to be right, since the same denials keep reappearing with no progress made. The subconscious crutch embodied by the white man needs to be broken, so they can move on and rebuild.

 

[SeanTX]

I saw some video that claims that police were firing teargas grenades into peoples fenced-in back yards -- funny to hear them telling the police "no, you go home!" . We've seen so many vids of police telling people that they can't be outside their own homes, and a lot of people have been beaten/arrested over that, time for the tables to be turned . I read somewhere there's an 11pm curfew for tonight, it could get interesting ...