How to Create a Ferguson

Tensions between residents and the police have shaped the aftermath of Brown’s death in unpredictable and alarming ways. Those include the nightly clashes between young residents, most of whom are African American, and a predominantly white police force dressed in full riot gear and armed with tear gas and rubber-coated bullets.

  WAPo

[Ferguson resident] Ricky Jones, 34, shouted his grievances. "Insurance is high, gas is high, but that's not why I get mad," he said. "At the end of the day, when I'm driving home, they ask me to pull over and get out of the car. No 'license and registration, please.' Get out of the car. Lay on the ground. Put your hands on your head."

  Orlando Sentinel

The office of Missouri’s attorney general concluded in an annual report last year that Ferguson police were twice as likely to arrest African Americans during traffic stops as they were whites. ."

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This year, St. Louis County invited researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles to help study complaints that county police had engaged in racial profiling and to help them improve protocols for matters ranging from traffic stops to neighborhood monitoring.

This came after a former lieutenant with the county police who had been accused of ordering officers to target black people at stores was fired.

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A St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation in 2003 found that dozens of small police departments in the region suffered from poor training owing to a lack of funding, leading to inadequate investigations of complex crimes and an uneven use of force. The newspaper further found that this led to problematic officers moving easily between one city’s force to another without punishment.

  WaPo

In June, the ACLU published a crucial 96-page report on this problem, entitled “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.” Its central point: “the United States today has become excessively militarized, mainly through federal programs that create incentives for state and local police to use unnecessarily aggressive weapons and tactics designed for the battlefield.”

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The ACLU report summarized: “excessive militarism in policing, particularly through the use of paramilitary policing teams, escalates the risk of violence, threatens individual liberties, and unfairly impacts people of color.”

Police militarization also poses grave and direct dangers to basic political liberties, including rights of free speech, press and assembly.

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Police militarization is increasingly aimed at stifling journalism as well. Like the arrests of Lowery and Reilly last night, Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman and two of her colleagues were arrested while covering the 2008 St. Paul protests. As Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (on whose board I sit) explained yesterday, militarization tactics “don’t just affect protesters, but also affect those who cover the protest. It creates an environment where police think they can disregard the law and tell reporters to stop filming, despite their legal right to do so, or fire tear gas directly at them to prevent them from doing their job. And if the rights of journalists are being trampled on, you can almost guarantee it’s even worse for those who don’t have such a platform to protect themselves.”

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A June article in the New York Times by Matt Apuzzo (“War Gear Flows to Police Departments”) reported that “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.” He added: “The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look and act like military units.”

All of this has become such big business, and is grounded in such politically entrenched bureaucratic power, that it is difficult to imagine how it can be uprooted.

  Glenn Greenwald

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