appalled

I was watching my Facebook feed the other night out of the corner of my eye while I was doing other things on the computer.  People were reacting to the Ferguson news.

Last weekend police in Ferguson Missouri shot and killed an unarmed black teenager and the local community erupted in protests and then riots as the police department used heavy-handed tactics to deal with the problem.  Tactics that included restricting the airspace over the area, hiding the officer’s name from the public, arresting city officials and media personnel in the area and using large amounts of tear gas canisters and rubber bullets on the protesters.

One poster on Facebook commented in part “How can this be taking place?”

How?  How has it not is more to the point.  The equipment, the laws, and the attitudes for such overuse of state force have been slowly accumulated across the local, state, and federal levels for the last 30 or so years.  Training manuals, courses, and equipment now emphasize the use of force over discussion for all new police trainees.

Police training now emphasizes that the officer should do everything up to and including the use of deadly force to protect himself in any situation that he feels unsafe in.  Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 there have been more than 5000 civilians killed in the US by police forces.  This is roughly the same number of casualties that the US armed forces took during the same time during the occupation of Iraq.  In addition just for the year 2010 there were recorded more than 4800 instance of police misconduct which included everything from excessive force, sexual misconduct, and theft.

Most of these incidents go unreported as police internal review boards label the majority of these incidents as justifiable actions or police departments will settle things with victims quietly out of court.  In those few cases that do end up as criminal cases the conviction rate for police officers is about half that of the general public.

The thing is that this is not a new phenomena that sprung up overnight.  This has been building up slowly but surely over the decades one law at a time, one incident at a time, one slip of our civil liberties at a time.  The cumulative effect is only now becoming apparent as these abuses of power are becoming more and more overt.

Those of us that wrung our hands whenever these little slips in our freedoms took place were labelled as “crack pots”, “worry warts”, etc.  I suppose we could crow about how right we were and how wrong everyone else was but seeing it all unfold as we predicted it would, I don’t feel like crowing.