More Fergusons are coming: Why para-military hysteria is dooming America
It’s time for officials to stop feigning surprise at what’s happening in Missouri. They’ve created a total monster
Robert Hennelly
Salon.com
Monday, Aug 18, 2014
Over the weekend, Missouri governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency in Ferguson and imposed a curfew. Once again tear gas filled the night air. Now the National Guard has been called out.
We will never know how differently things would have played out if the official reaction from the start of the unrest had been the more community engaged response led by Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol (Plan B) and not the authoritarian doubling down of the locals. All too often an initial oppressive response by authority to long-simmering resentments and alienation sets in motion a cycle of violence that develops its own momentum. (See Newark, June 1967.) At that point you’re on your way to alienated narratives that are much harder to reconcile.
Local officials were just oblivious to the level of mistrust present in Ferguson when their first response was para-military, as depicted in the front page New York Times photo of police looking more like U.S. Marines protecting the Green Zone in Baghdad, than a civilian police force.
What is still hard to reconcile is the strong disdain expressed by high-ranking federal officials for the military response by the local authorities to quell protests over the police shooting of yet another unarmed black man. President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and senators Rand Paul and Claire McCaskill, expressed alarm over how the Ferguson police in full battle regalia, made the city appear like a war zone, implying genuine surprise over the degree to which America’s local policing had become militarized.
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