Tom Tomorrow gets to the heart matter re: the militarization of the cops, in his most recent cartoon. There's no question that our racist culture allows the Ferguson police to have more fun with their toys than the cops who faced Clive Bundy, but the fact is that without those toys they wouldn't be able to reenact scenes from Star Wars on the streets of Ferguson. One can't quite imagine British bobbies, faced with the same situation, and armed only with nightsticks, acting in quite the same way. They have to get their way by wielding moral authority, which means they also have to show respect to the people they are policing. All those toys change the equation; the cops are invulnerable behind walls of steel and armor.
Sort of like storm troopers.
Exactly like storm troopers.
On a much less harmful level we've seen this sort of thing take place in our fair town of Groton. We have nine fire districts in Groton, manned for the most part by a mix of volunteers and paid staff. Each fire district sets its own taxes, which are added to the town's tax bill. The fire district component of the average tax bill is relatively small in proportion to the whole, so people tend to ignore it, and ignore the meetings at which the tax rates are set and the budgets are passed. As a result, no one watches (except when things get extreme) while the boys fill their toy chests with all kinds of cool equipment, which, who knows, might someday be actually needed in the event of a super catastrophe. We have, by reliable accounts, more fire equipment than the City of New Haven. Cops are the more or less evil twins of firefighters, and they've been given an almost bottomless toy chest by the federal government, chock full of toys that are totally cool and enable them to live out their fantasies, which they are, in fact, taught to believe should be standard operating procedure (Watch the video at the link). The Ferguson cops probably truly believe that all that military equipment is truly needed to meet the threat posed by an unarmed, mostly peaceful crowd (who are mostly black, after all). All those toys and a chance to use them. A situation guaranteed to bring out the criminal that, as Mick Jagger observed, lurks in every cop. (Well, not every cop, but many. I can think of some noble exceptions.)
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