Close to 100% of my Twitter feed is about police violence against non-violent protesters in the town of Ferguson, Missouri. It’s been that way all night. They’ve also been arresting reporters, aldermen, perhaps even a state Senator. I’ll have more to say about it in the morning because too much has gone on for me to try to summarize it this late in the evening.
The one observation I have tonight is that this is an incredibly odd way for the police department of St. Louis County to behave. When there is civil unrest because the local police killed an unarmed 18 year old in cold blood for no reason, the smart response is to do community outreach. But they turned the whole thing over to the county and then the decision was made to use terror on the populace. There has been one store looted and one store lit on fire, but it’s not like there was a total breakdown of law and order. Breaking out mine-resistant vehicles, sniper rifles, and full-on riot gear and firing stun grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets at peaceably assembled people is not how you overcome the overzealousness of one bad cap and repair your reputation with the community. Telling people to stop filming in the age of the smart phone is ludicrous from every perspective you might choose to view it, and so is telling people that they aren’t being denied the right to assemble as you gas them.
What’s more, I had never even heard of Ferguson, Missouri until this boy, Mike Brown, was murdered by the police. Now it’s got a reputation right up there with Selma. How is that helping the local merchants?
The president was briefed tonight by Valerie Jarrett and Eric Holder. The three of them better put their heads together tomorrow morning and figure out how to put a stop to this nonsense. And Governor Jay Nixon might want to get off his ass, too.
What can Obama do? Deploy the 101st Airborne to protect the protestors against the police?
He could. But it’s really a matter that the Governor should handle.
Do what Eisenhower did.
On what authority?
The last time the Insurrection Act was employed was during the 1992 LA riots.
This isn’t remotely close…
The answer to a militarized police force is to send in the real military?
Well, the President has the power to call in the real military to protect the country from enemies foreign and domestic.
Perhaps we could call the Ferguson police force a domestic enemy?
I bet a lot of people in Ferguson would agree with that statement.
Order the Police Dept. to stand down. Send in the National Guard, if they don’t.
Completely agree with you and BooMan. Should have happened already.
And Governor Jay Nixon might want to get off his ass, too.
Kinda fitting, don’t you think? And someone tweeted tonight that he was thinking of running for president in ’16. Today ruined any chance of that. Besides, where is his base of support? How would he stand out? Now he’s standing out for all the wrong reasons.
Why do “community outreach” when you have an armory stuffed with all sorts of great military gear that doesn’t get used much.
In my area in response to a domestic dispute, the sheriff brought in a SWAT team and an armored truck. Tragically, the man they were attempting to arrest was so terrified that he crawled into an attic and after several hours committed suicide.
Reminds me of Chicago in “68. Never any upper limit on how ignorant and myopic police can be.
Don’t put all the blame on the police. Police obey the civil authority. In ’68 the police were willing and eager participants, but Richard J. Daley was not a helpless captive of the police. The orders came from Daley. He ruled that city like an emperor.
One report I heard was that the police have no training in riot control. They have never exercised in a situation like this, so the leaders have no decision-making experience. It shows in the decisions the leaders are making and in their loss of control of individual police officers (who are all making decisions on their own independently.)
As a result, instead of lowering the tension of the crowd they are attempting to intimidate the crowd into subservience. As a southerner myself I can assure you that is the way southern police forces deal with crowds of Black people. Normally it works with southern Blacks because they have generations of experience with White extreme overreaction. The media simply does not bother to report it and the overreactions are swept under the rug.
The chief of police of North St. Louis and the Chief of Police of Ferguson worked together on the North St. Louis police force until the Police Chief of Ferguson retired 4 years ago and took the job in Ferguson. They are, it is reported, close. Clearly neither has a clue how to handle crowds or potential riots and they seem to have no control of the behavior of the individual police. they are completely out of their depth and do not recognize that their attempts to intimidate the citizens and the press simply make their situation much worse very quickly.
The careers of the chief of police of Ferguson and of North St. Louis should not last another month. They should actually both be relieved and replaced by someone who knows what they are doing – preferably someone from out of state.
You are incorrect. The St Louis Police department has plenty of training. I am sure a great deal has been shared with the suburb departments, especially the Ferguson 50 man police department (3 are African Americans, hopefully out with the blue flu).
SEE: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=567_1407996608&comments=1
Terrorizing the citizens of Ferguson is a deliberate & intentional strategy of the police, militarized racist bullies.
I’m sure that they have a great deal of police training in doing normal police work, but if you watched the incompetence of the police on the street trying to deal with the crowds of protestors the other night, it is clear that they had no training at all in crowd control or riot control.
Sitting on top of an armored vehicle pointing a machine gun at the protestors is incompetence, both on the part of the police officer sitting up there and very much on the part of the supervisors.
The video of the police officers dealing with the two reporters in the McDonald’s shows out-of-control untrained idiots making it up themselves as they go along.
The clouds of tear gas showed that when someone first threw gas, everyone in the police department simply followed and threw what they had. That is an undisciplined and poorly led police force working in a situation which neither the leaders nor the led were in control of.
There is a reason why Governor Nixon is replacing the North St. Louis Police in Ferguson, and both police chiefs (North St. Louis and Ferguson) should be out of a job very shortly. Everything about the murder of Michael Brown has been handled incompetently from the PR to the attempts to intimidate the protestors.
I believe the police officer who told the reporter than they had never had training in that kind of crowd control situation. The police in the Ferguson situation have demonstrated that they are untrained and poorly led. Everything they attempted was counterproductive.
The fact remains that crowd control was essentially unnecessary.
Your premise that the police were there to keep the peace is wrong.
The armored vehicle, the snipers, the riot gear, the tear gas, the sonic device, the rubber bullets, the illogical show of brute bully force was by design to provoke the residents into acts of violence.
Brute force was the coverup to police murder of a young Afican American citizen
Gov. Nixon saying ” the key to this is control” has placed the MO State Patrol in charge of the operations in Ferguson “with a kinder gentler approach”. However St Louis County police will still help. (Oh Boy! who’s going to drive the tank?)
The easy solution has been rejected. The name of the cop who shot Michael at least 5 times has not been officially released and the name Anonymous identified has been discredited by the police.
Justice is not secured. But the state may provide portapotties within cordoned spaces for public demonstrators.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/ferguson-missouri-militarized-police-1033-program
Where the weapons came from
He is evil, the authoritarian joker who suppresses his people and the press … but I did read it first in Russia Today and posted this link in your previous fp story –
He Didn’t Deserve to Die Like a Dog in the Street.
WTF Is this for real in Ferguson? These military SWAT team members should be deployed via USS George HW Bush to Sinjar mountain and fight off ISIS to protect America. Last night, the event made me think of the shooting of protesters at Kent State University, pointing machine guns at your own people. Take these idiots off the streets of Missouri, what a Show Me state this has become. SHAME. Yes I know Ferguson from way back, but a piece of my heart lies in St. Louis County.
Twitter links from my earlier posts …
While poking around on the ol’ Internet tubes, I came across this document of a Senate Judiciary hearing:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-107shrg85884/html/CHRG-107shrg85884.htm
It’s interesting to note two things in this hearing from 2002:
Example: I live near Hayward, a working-class town in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hayward is referenced in the report. Nowhere does it say in this Senate hearing does anyone claim that what City law enforcement needs is a tank. Yet, in essence, that is one of the things the HPD now has- a TANK. Oh, they might not call it a tank, but I’ve seen it. It looks like a tank.
It’s absurd, wasteful, and dangerous to our civil liberties.
Ali Abunimah tweet
Apparently there have been tweets from Egypt to the Fergusan protesters on how to deal with tear gas.
You can tell it’s all over and we’re finished when the internet gets shut down like it’s China.
Former police chief Tim Fitch was likely ousted by the “Affton gang” of council executive candidate Steve Stenger. St. Louis County a political cesspool.
○ St. Louis Political Eye: Local fixer in the shooting gallery
Wow … what’s behind this?
Forgive my counter-intuitive take on this… but why on earth do we want our elected officials to intervene at this point? Watching the US military go crazy with rage at US citizens is a perfect demonstration of what’s wrong with the country. How the heck else are we going to get any sort of change in this country without the lunatics running it exposing themselves as the thugs they really are?
I prefer massive demonstrations of US military incompetence televised live on cable news to the individual murders of unarmed civilians. We can mount massive rescue and protection operations for religious fanatics half way around the world, but we can’t give justice to poor people in America. Amazing.
And yes… I am intentionally referring to the tear gas and rubber bullet shooters as the US military…. they sure look like soldiers to me.
That may suit you fine from an optics perspective, but I think the residents of Ferguson would much prefer to have peaceful assembly without tear gas and rubber bullets fired at them.
A number of former military guys have pointed out that their rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan were more restrictive than what the police are doing now.
I guess when a population can’t fight back you can be less careful. Bullies.
I’m not a gunklown, but the second amendment is a two-way street.
“How to put a stop to this nonsense,” eh?
Lissen up, Booman.
He can’t put a stop to it because he cooperated in creating it. This is Obama’s baby. His real legacy. This is the Security State Frankenstein monster in all its glory, the security state upon which he signed off as soon as his ass hit the Oval Office. Put a stop to it? He can’t. He has allowed this cancerous growth to metastasize beyond any “stopping” in a governmental manner. It is “the government” now. Bet on it.
The United States has become a police state masquerading as a democracy. Only an uprising of the people…Ferguson people, Nevada/Bundy people and any other U.S. citizens who are fed up with what has happened here…can stop this now.
What’s he going to do?
Send in the Army?
Get real.
“The army”…the armed forces of the U.S., including the CIA…is the model upon which this police-enforced state is now built. Drone whole families, shoot some kid in the street…it’s only a matter of degree. We need a new administration, not another “Uh oh!!! We’ll lose the election!!!” quick fix. Obama is finished; the DemRats are finished and unless the RatPubs come up with a whole new ballgame in an incredibly short period of time they are finished as well. In order to maintain control, both sides of the PermaGov are eventually going to have to side with the same forces that are now “controlling” the streets of Ferguson using tactics that are right out of Fallujah, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Wake the fuck up.
Obama?
Game over.
Next?
Let us pray.
AG
Bringing in Bundy. I know I shouldn’t be surprised, yet I am.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend…at least for a while. All opponents of the Permanent Government are allied. Like it or lump it. Militarized cops? On the range, in the cities or in the suburbs. Same same. Deal wid it. Deal with it now or you will most certainly have to deal with it later. Up close and personal, more than likely.
Deal wid it.
AG
Every post Arthur makes here is meant to empower today’s radical right-wing movement.
Rand Paul is doing absolutely nothing to change this. Has Paul made a statement expressing opposition to the gunning down of an unarmed 18-year-old? Has he called for a tear-down of this militarized police state?
No, of course he hasn’t. Rand’s on record as being supportive of U.S. law enforcement using drones to shoot and kill armed robbers.
“Every post Arthur makes here is meant to empower today’s radical right-wing movement.”
Yeah, since you mention it, y’all’n have a pretty serious troll-feeding problem over here.
You misunderstand the Cliven Bundy types, AG. If they showed up in Ferguson, they would act as a vigilante militia and stand on the side of the police. It’s just the free real estate and slave labor that they miss.
Missouri has a goddamned Governor. How the fuck does this leap to the President over all the other elected officials of this state?
Like this:
And this:
And this:
Out of the mouths of boobs. As above, so below. The “Arab Spring” is alive and well in Ferguson. Bet on it.
Bet on it.
And this:
This system is a gestalt, rikyrah. It is one thing, although broken up into many component parts. As above, so below. As go the security state and the world cop state, so go the streets. If the big picture is rotten, the smaller pictures follow. Obama signed off on the rot. Now he pays the price.
So it goes.
What goes around comes around.
Bet on that as well.
AG
From one of the stories Arthur posts here, a story which is truly upsetting:
“Since the creation of the 1033 program by Congress in the early 1990s, the program has distributed $4.3 billion of excess equipment…”.
Yet, earlier in this thread, Arthur claims that the militarization of U.S. law enforcement is “Obama’s baby” because “he cooperated in creating it.” His own post shows this to be a lie. This is more than two decades old, and has obviously ramped up since 9/11.
What a pathetic clown AG has become in his attempts to empower the modern right-wing movement. There are commenters on this blog whose criticisms of the President I often agree with and sometimes disagree with, but at least others approach these discussions with integrity.
Not AG.
True.
Obama signed on to an ongoing criminal system.
So nu?
Is being a 2nd or 3rd or 4th or 5th generation crime boss…or as has often been the case regarding the U.S. presidency, a crime boss’s frontman…any better than having been in on the ground floor when the crime family was founded?
Please.
AG
No, the military equipping of the police is a system which is all the more disturbing by actually being lawful, a creation of Congress over two decades ago, as the story in your post points out. That most law enforcement agencies almost entirely preserve its use for African-American communities should surprise no one.
And Rand Paul is addressing this how, exactly? Maybe in his support for Voter ID laws?
Credit where credit is due to Rand Paul:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rand-paul-ferguson-time-op-ed
That is a good, strong set of statements- very pleasing.
Now, if Rand helps lead a successful campaign in the Senate to tear down the 1033 Program and lobbies the House to pass it and get it to the President’s desk, then he will have walked his talk. Somehow, I think Rand’s Big Government complaints will find almost all of their future expressions by his ongoing plan to Save America by destroying Medi/Medi/SS/SNAP/UI.
When the Governor issues a bullshit milquetoast statement but does nothing.
Clay:”The gov. just called me and he’s on his way to St. Louis now to announce he’s taking St. Louis County police out of the situation”–
Tweet from Bloomberg’s Derek Wallbank (@dwallbank) August 14, 2014
We live in hope.
○ St. Louis County Police Department responds to hacker group via Twitter: “Anonymous” account suspended
There’s a police coup going on right now in Ferguson, Mo.
The tear gas was practically still in the air in the fall of 1968 when the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence — yes, that was a thing — formed a working group to probe the civil disorder that had just occurred at that year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was there, some will recall, that police in baby blue helmets clubbed and dragged bloodied anti-war protesters through the streets, while TV viewers looked on and crowds chanted, “The whole world is watching.” To describe the incomprehensible scenes, the so-called Walker Commission coined a new term. They called it a “police riot.”
There’s been no police riot in Ferguson, Mo. — not yet anyway (and hopefully never). But what is happening in the working class suburb just outside of St. Louis is, in some ways, far worse. A tense situation in the aftermath of Saturday’s fatal shooting by a police officer of an unarmed college-bound 18-year-old named Mike Brown has been made much more tense, night after night, by brutal, bone-headed policing that makes one wonder if Birmingham’s brutal Bull Connor has been re-animated.
I thought I was losing my capacity to be shocked — but events in Missouri over just the last couple of hours have crossed a frightening line, one that makes me pray that this assault on fundamental American values is just the aberration of one rudderless Heartland community, and not the first symptoms of nation gone mad with high-tech weaponry to keep its own citizens in line.
This afternoon, several hundred citizens who gathered on a public street, in broad daylight, to air their grievances over Brown’s killing were met with a massive SWAT team, an armored personnel carrier, and men in camouflage pointing heavy artillery at the crowd. Two prominent credentialed journalists who tried to report on the event were arrested for a time, and there was a report that a state senator who questioned authorities about tear gas earlier was also in custody. All this as authorities continue to cover up the most basic information about what happened on the night Mike Brown was murdered.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Theres-a-police-coup-right-now-n-Ferguson-Mo-.html#h6zy4
AzoTIGDswZl.99
Fallujah tactics, rikyrah.
As above, so below.
It’s just going to get worse over time.
Watch.
Flashpoints will ignite more flashpoints and militarized cops will do what they do. We have our own “Arab Spring” on the way here.
Watch.
This year?
Next year?
Some year.
Watch.
AG
“Some” year?
Hell. Maybe this year.
Watch.
AG
Excellent rikyrah. Just one quibble: Mike Brown wasn’t killed at night. It was in broad daylight.
It may become as famous as Selma but only because it highlights the way that Bull Connor’s approach to “law and order” has become nationalized and put on steroids (likely the cops have too) over the past 45 years. And how that has become Orwellian since 9/11.
What is different.
One more important difference. The march on Selma was part of an organized civil rights movement with a disciplined set of strategies and tactics, march monitors, training and leadership.
Ferguson is a spontaneous reaction to an atrocity that gained leadership from the very people the police are trying to decapitate through unjustifiable detention and intimidation. That leadership has created an escape valve for the anger and tension, but the police want to shut that escape valve off so that the situation will explode and justify their extreme tactics. The police are playing a more sophisticated political strategy than was played by law enforcement in Selma.
I don’t see any politica; strategy at all.
The Ferguson Chief of Police is having Sean Hannity do his PR. That’s a damned political strategy that has effectively shut up every high-ranking black elected official in the US for fear of starting an out-and-out full-fledged race war on the eve of a critical midterm election.
The right-wing is going with the bad kid/community riot/attention-seeking press story. This is going to get buried just like the Oscar Grant story, the Trayvon Martin story, and the other four police murders in the past month.
The Cliven Bundys of the US are just looking for an excuse to swarm with their open carry firearms and reduce the demographic advantage that the Deomcratic Party supposedly has.
You know, I learn lots from your posts, Tarheel Dem, but someimes your pessimistic/cynical takes on stuff just wear me down. As I’ve probably not more than a couple of decades of living left to do, I don’t want to believe that there’s not an opportunity for good to come from all of this. I agree with the timidity of many of our leaders on the left ahead of the elections, but it just might be that there are enough brave ones who can bring about some good from this debacle.
Now I’m off to do some persuasion phone banking for Michelle Nunn, whose campaign thus far is no great act of courage but whose election would be a victory for the Democratic party and liberals, even if she doesn’t present herself as a liberal and seldom if ever refers to herself as a Democrat.
Good comes out of it only if people get out and do something. Go phone bank and put the rest of the world in the back of your mind so that you can do what you need to do to get more Georgians in Michelle Nunn’s corner.
Because one major flip of one Southern state dramatically changes the narrative and helps delegitimize the nut cases itching for a race war.
I’m 68 and running to the end of my fuse too. I fully understand your take on things and on a lot of days I’m that way too. But understand that Wes Lowery’s experience was my experience too, only Wes Lowery wasn’t told the he was released “pending further investigation” nor did he have his property confiscated and not returned. Having a few flashbacks this week.
Agreed. The police want to force anything that can be seen as violent so they can be violent.
Selma? No, Soweto.
No, but it is a predictable (inevitable?) outcome of the massive militarization of local law enforcement since 9/11, especially when coupled with the frequently authoritarian personalities/tendencies of the kind of folks who are attracted to law enforcement careers (not saying all, but disproportionately higher than the general population, I’d wager).
In much the same way that “if you build [a baseball stadium in a cornfield], [the disgraced Black Sox] will come”: if you give them all these military arms and equipment, they will find (or invent) a reason (excuse) to use them. Even when (as here), as booman rightly points out, doing so is just the opposite of what’s needed.