{"id":136859,"date":"2014-08-14T17:59:14","date_gmt":"2014-08-14T17:59:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=136859"},"modified":"2014-08-14T19:20:23","modified_gmt":"2014-08-14T19:20:23","slug":"militarization-u-s-police-finally-dragged-light-horrors-ferguson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/militarization-u-s-police-finally-dragged-light-horrors-ferguson\/","title":{"rendered":"The Militarization of U.S. Police: Finally Dragged Into the Light by the Horrors of Ferguson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Glenn Greenwald<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The intensive militarization of America\u2019s police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction. In\u00a0<a style=\"font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; color: #cc0000;\" href=\"http:\/\/cjmasters.eku.edu\/sites\/cjmasters.eku.edu\/files\/21stmilitarization.pdf\">a 2007 paper<\/a>\u00a0on \u201cthe blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement,\u201d the criminal justice professor Peter Kraska defined \u201cpolice militarization\u201d as \u201cthe process whereby\u00a0civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves\u00a0around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The harrowing events of the last week in Ferguson, Missouri \u2014 the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager, Mike Brown, and the blatantly excessive and thuggish response to ensuing community protests from a police force that resembles an occupying army \u2014 have shocked the U.S. media class and millions of Americans.\u00a0But none of this is aberrational.<\/p>\n<p>It is the destructive by-product of several decades of deliberate militarization of American policing, a trend that received a sustained (and ongoing) steroid injection in the form of a\u00a0<a style=\"font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; color: #cc0000;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2011\/08\/29\/terrorism_39\/\">still-flowing, post-9\/11 federal funding bonanza<\/a>, all justified in the name of \u201chomeland security.\u201d This has resulted in a domestic police force that looks, thinks, and acts more like an invading and occupying military than a community-based force to protect the public.<\/p>\n<p>As is true for most issues of excessive and abusive policing, police militarization is overwhelmingly and disproportionately\u00a0directed at minorities and poor communities, ensuring that the problem largely festers in the dark. Americans are now so accustomed to seeing police officers decked in camouflage and\u00a0Robocop-style costumes, riding in armored vehicles and carrying automatic weapons first introduced during the U.S. occupation of Baghdad, that it has become normalized. But those who bear the brunt of this transformation are those who lack loud megaphones; their complaints of the inevitable and severe abuse that results have largely been met with indifference.<\/p>\n<p>If anything positive can come from the Ferguson travesties, it is that the completely out-of-control orgy of domestic police militarization receives long-overdue attention and reining in.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2014\/08\/14\/militarization-u-s-police-dragged-light-horrors-ferguson\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Glenn Greenwald The intensive militarization of America\u2019s police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction. In\u00a0a 2007 paper\u00a0on \u201cthe blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement,\u201d the criminal justice professor Peter Kraska [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":136860,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-136859","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news","9":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}