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xchrom

(108,903 posts) Wed Sep 24, 2014, 07:11 AM Sep 2014

Why Do Tea Partiers Get to Parade Around Armed, While Peaceful Protests Are Met With Tanks?

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/why-do-tea-partiers-get-parade-around-armed-while-peaceful-protests-are-met-tanks

In the weeks following the brutal police shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri, something unexpected has happened to mainstream American media. For the first time since Florida used the drug war as an excuse to become the first civilian police force to arm itself with tanks and M16 rifles, there is serious, national discussion of the problems inherent to militarizing the police.

“It didn't take long to go from Florida to Texas to New York, to other parts of the country,” said Deborah Small, civil rights activist and attorney, in a conference call with the Drug Policy Alliance’s Asha Bandele this week. “Initially this weaponry was justified as necessary to respond to ‘violent drug gangs that were heavily armed and had outdone the police.’ But quite frankly, after 9/11, that increase in military weaponry morphed with the war on terror.”

Now, the argument was, “We have to be prepared not only to respond to potential gun violence by drug cartels, but also by terrorists. It can be anywhere, anybody, and have any kind of weaponry we may not even know about.”

In the course of a couple of decades, the American police went from using rifles with silencers to asking for tanks and anti-bomb equipment. Today more than 500 police departments in the U.S. possess tanks designed to deal with incendiary explosive devices, “and yet there have been no cases that I’m aware of, of people actually using them to fight local police departments,” Small said.