Why are Ferguson cops so completely out of control?

[phantom power]

Why is this happening? I’ve seen a lot of people point out, correctly, that the most baffling thing about this is that the cops are dumb, dumb, dumb. The sad fact of the matter is that if they had allowed the protests to happen peacefully and not met the protesters with a bunch of loaded guns stuck in their faces, this story would have likely died down, especially with Iraq at the front of the news cycle. It’s a depressing fact, but true: Despite the hard work of many activists and journalists to make police state overreach an issue, it never seems to get top priority in the world of politics or media. Instead, the police decided to escalate this and provide journalists and people on the ground with an endless number of shocking images of police aiming loaded weapons at the heads of people with their hands in the air, police dressed to the nines like an invading army meeting people who have picnic baskets and are singing and dancing, police arresting journalists in McDonalds and an alderman in his car. They single-handedly turned this story into a front page one that’s at the top of the news hour. If the intention was to make this shooting story go away, well, this is the most incompetent display of all time.

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So why are the cops overreacting, when that very overreaction is backfiring on them so badly? They clearly can’t help themselves. That’s the only logical explanation. They’re so overwhelmed by their sense of entitlement to shut the protests down that they can’t think straight.

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Time for some blunt talk: Right wing America has spent the past six years passing around paranoid urban legends that push this notion that Obama is trying to organize some secret “takeover” of the country, often involving fears that conservative white people will be rounded up into camps and other such nonsense. The racist paranoia of this is often subtextual but unmistakeable. Even for conservatives who know that these urban legends are hooey, the narrative that “they” are trying to take “our” country away is firmly ensconced. It’s part of every Sarah Palin word salad rant. It’s the source of the word “Obamaphones”, even though phone subsidies date back to Reagan. It became very blunt with Todd Starnes freaking out over Obama saying the blandest possible thing about the situation.

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Six years of whipping yourself into a paranoid frenzy is a lot of years. I don’t even know if it’s possible for a mostly white—and with 99% certainty, mostly conservative—police force to meet a crowd of mostly black protesters in a calm, rational state after spending six years wallowing in this kind of paranoid thinking. If you’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for the violent “takeover” that right wing email chains have been predicting for years, is it even possible to see a bunch of peaceful protesters for who they are? I’m guessing not. No, you’re going to think the mythical war has finally come, and you’re going to act like it.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/14/why-are-ferguson-cops-so-completely-out-of-control/

[BillZBubb]

1. The are out of control because they can be in this situation.

Society almost always gives them a free hand to deal with minority issues. They know that. They can keep people of color "in their place" however they want.

[global1]

2. This Thought Occured To Me......

This is happening in a black community and we have a black president. Can you imagine if this was happening in a white community now instead of Ferguson? Think of the reaction by Right Wing America.

[CanonRay]

3. It's not just Ferguson, it's the St. Louis County SO

Look at the pics, they are all over the place.

[NutmegYankee]

4. The police have a mentality that it's a WAR on the streets everyday.

They even speak to each other in such terms before going on patrol. So they make the streets a war zone.

[gordianot]

5. I expect at some point in the future the open carry crowd will try to use this to their advantage.

Look what happened in Ferguson if armed it would not have happened. My take would be if armed a massacre.

[phantom power]

6. Anybody who would try to argue that is either deeply deluded or lying.

If the Ferguson protesters had showed up armed those militarized cops would have gunned them down in the street.

[gordianot]

9. I agree with you, and yes the open carry people are deluded and dangerous.

[jwirr]

7. Very good analysis. And it would fit with the over reactions on almost all levels of society to the

simple idea that we are becoming more liberal as a nation even while we look more rw. The hand writing is on the wall - we white people are not going to be the majority for much longer - in fact I doubt that we are now since the poor, the youth and women are leaning left.

But the problem is that the rw sees this in terms of force rather than political. They are afraid of being treated the way they have always treated us "others". So they fight back by using people like the bundy militias, rw police forces, cutting resources for the poor, suppressing the vote, gerrymandering, obstructing Congress and other hurtful methods that will only backfire in the end.

They want to use force to keep control we want to use the vote to gain our point. What they are doing is counterproductive and will end badly regardless of their motives. Hopefully when we are truly in the majority we will be able to show them that their fears are groundless.

In the mean time there are some really dangerous issues that need to be addressed: black unarmed children are being killed by both civilians (Zimmerman) and police and nothing is done about it and when there is a protest about it the police act against the people. The other issue is the militarization of our police forces making them a threat instead of a protection.

[Iggo]

8. They're not out of control.

They're doing exactly what they're being told to do.

[hifiguy]

11. Hammer, meet nail.

Exactamundo, iggo.

the job of the police is to protect the 1% from the rest of us. They have no other function.

[TheKentuckian]

12. That is correct.

[Eleanors38]

10. First thing that came to my mind: Who's in charge?

Once institutions are broken down, discredited and deligitimized sufficiently by authoritarians, cynics and the ever-present fuck-ups, then any group, individual, LEO, and private radio blow-off can be magnified into a gas giant of power and influence.

The whole country smells like raw gasoline, and has so for years. There isn't much leadership ANYWHERE or in any form. I've seen some pretty irresponsible crap spewed in DU over the last day or two concerning Ferguson. Do some of us really want to see what has been "offered" as moral consistency on the part of those we hate? Do some of us want to see the violence we claim to abhor?

[Blue_Tires]

13. The most direct answer is because

black lives have no value to LEOs and the legal system...Which I have tried to point out here for years...

That widespread mindset is the primary driver for everything we've seen on CNN...