Military veterans see deeply flawed police response in Ferguson

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Military veterans see deeply flawed police response in Ferguson
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff August 14 at 12:52 PM

Jet-black rifles leveled at unarmed citizens and mine-resistant vehicles once used to patrol the roadways of Iraq and Afghanistan rumbling through small town America. These are scenes playing out in Ferguson, Mo., which has been racked by protests for the last week following the fatal shooting of an unarmed 19-year-old named Michael Brown.

For veterans of the wars that the Ferguson protests so closely resemble, the police response has appeared to be not only heavy-handed but out of step with the most effective ways for both law enforcement and military personnel to respond to demonstrations.

“You see the police are standing online with bulletproof vests and rifles pointed at peoples chests,” said Jason Fritz, a former Army officer and an international policing operations analyst. “That’s not controlling the crowd, that’s intimidating them.”

The protests in Ferguson began in earnest just a day after Brown was killed, when a prayer vigil for the slain teen turned into an evening of looting.