In a lot of the photos taken in Ferguson over the past week the police look like soldiers. Have the police in America become militarized?
In an extensive report issued weeks ago, the American Civil Liberties Union stated "American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight."
"Militarization of policing encourages officers to adopt a 'warrior' mentality and think of the people they are supposed to serve as enemies," the report added....
Weinberg says it's unfair to the military to call what happened in Ferguson evidence of "militarization," saying U.S. soldiers are well "trained in escalation of force."
The police apparently "had their weapons up and pointed at protesters who are obviously unarmed," he said. In the military, he learned that "your force posture matches the threat. You only raise your weapon if there is a threat that requires lethal force."
With a pointed weapon, Weinberg said, "you could make a mistake, maybe get startled, put your finger on the trigger and shoot somebody who doesn't deserve to be shot."
And threatening people unnecessarily can increase the tensions and danger, exacerbating the situation, he says. "A crowd kind of has a mind of its own that develops over time, depending on what threat they perceive."
Weinberg isn't alone. "As someone who studies policing in conflict, what's going on Ferguson isn't just immoral and probably unconstitutional, it's ineffective," Army veteran Jason Fritz wrote on Twitter. Fritz is now senior editor of War on the Rocks, which analyzes national security issues.
His was one of the tweets included in a story being shared widely online Thursday morning, with this line at the top: "The general consensus here: if this is militarization, it's the s***iest, least-trained, least professional military in the world, using weapons far beyond what they need, or what the military would use when doing crowd control."
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/14/us/mi ... index.html
