{"id":6814,"date":"2014-08-18T14:36:12","date_gmt":"2014-08-18T14:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/megalextoria.wordpress.com\/?p=6814"},"modified":"2018-04-10T16:38:29","modified_gmt":"2018-04-10T20:38:29","slug":"the-militarization-of-u-s-police-finally-dragged-into-the-light-by-the-horrors-of-ferguson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2014\/08\/18\/the-militarization-of-u-s-police-finally-dragged-into-the-light-by-the-horrors-of-ferguson\/","title":{"rendered":"The Militarization of U.S. Police: Finally Dragged Into the Light by the Horrors of Ferguson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The intensive militarization of America\u2019s police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction. In a 2007 paper on \u201cthe blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement,\u201d the criminal justice professor Peter Kraska defined \u201cpolice militarization\u201d as \u201cthe process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The harrowing events of the last week in Ferguson, Missouri \u2013 the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager, Mike Brown, and the blatantly excessive and thuggish response to ensuing community protests from a police force that resembles an occupying army \u2013 have shocked the U.S. media class and millions of Americans. But none of this is aberrational.<\/p>\n<p>It is the destructive by-product of several decades of deliberate militarization of American policing, a trend that received a sustained (and ongoing) steroid injection in the form of a still-flowing, post-9\/11 federal funding bonanza, all justified in the name of \u201chomeland security.\u201d This has resulted in a domestic police force that looks, thinks, and acts more like an invading and occupying military than a community-based force to protect the public.<\/p>\n<p>Full article:\u00a0<a class=\"externlink\" title=\"Go to https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2014\/08\/14\/militarization-u-s-police-dragged-light-horrors-ferguson\/\" href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2014\/08\/14\/militarization-u-s-police-dragged-light-horrors-ferguson\/\">https:\/\/firstlook.or \u2026 ht-horrors-ferguson\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The intensive militarization of America\u2019s police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction. In a 2007 paper on \u201cthe blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement,\u201d the criminal justice professor Peter Kraska defined \u201cpolice militarization\u201d as \u201cthe process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.\u201d The harrowing events of the last week in Ferguson, Missouri \u2013 the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager, Mike Brown, and the blatantly excessive and thuggish response to ensuing community protests from a police force that resembles an occupying army \u2013 have shocked the U.S. media class and millions of Americans. But none of this is aberrational. It is the destructive by-product of several decades of deliberate militarization of American policing, a trend that received a sustained (and ongoing) steroid injection in the form of a still-flowing, post-9\/11 federal funding bonanza, all justified in the name of \u201chomeland security.\u201d This has resulted in a domestic police force that looks, thinks, and acts more like an invading and occupying military [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[697,1351],"class_list":["post-6814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-politics","tag-ferguson","tag-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}