From Salon:A Former Marine Explains All the Weapons of War Being Used by Police in Ferguson

[kpete]

A Former Marine Explains All the Weapons of War Being Used by Police in Ferguson
There’s at least one line every Marine knows: “Never point a weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot.” The St. Louis County Police Department apparently never received that memo.

Lyle Jeremy Rubin August 20, 2014


As smoke hangs over the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, it’s important to understand its source. Some of this understanding will require us to reassess the history of police militarization in the United States. This will mean acknowledging its origins in the aftermath of the Watts Riots (1965) and the birth of the SWAT team shortly thereafter. It will mean noting the conservative reaction to the Warren Court’s civil libertarian protections in the 1950s and 60s to President Nixon’s launching of the drug war at the end of that same tumultuous decade. It will mean harping on President Reagan’s wholehearted embrace of racial policing and mass incarceration in the 1980s. It will mean interrogating the devastating effects of the 1208 Program (1990), which became the 1033 Program (1996), both of which authorized the transfer of military hardware to domestic precincts, a practice that has only accelerated in the wake of the Battle of Seattle (1999) and the attacks of September 11, 2001. The basic contours of this trajectory can be found in Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2013). As Tamara K. Nopper and Mariame Kaba argue in Jacobin, however, any serious reckoning must account for the ongoing dehumanization of black people, tout court.

One small way to measure the police violence against black people in Ferguson is to attend to its details. It is in that spirit that I present this simple catalog: (see link below)



HERE (way to many great links & pics to post here):
http://www.thenation.com/article/181315/catalog-ferguson-police-weaponry?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=email_nation&utm_campaign=Email%20Nation%20%28NEW%29%20-%20Most%20Recent%20Content%20Feed%2020140821&newsletter=email_nation

[elehhhhna]

1. every gun training tells you not to aim at shit you're not going to shoot

common sense