Photography by AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Christian Gooden
It is not often that Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill and Republican Sen. Rand Paul agree on Capitol Hill. But during a terse discussion of federal programs that provide military equipment to police departments, they were on the same page. “I am confident that militarizing police tactics are not consistent with the peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly,” McCaskill said in September. Paul also bluntly stated his opinion: “This is crazy out-of-control.”
The distribution of military guns and equipment to police forces is partly an offshoot of the War on Drugs from the 1980s, says Brady Baybeck, an associate professor of political science at Wayne State University. “Police forces received grants from the federal government to buy surplus military equipment,” he says. “With the War on Drugs, police were considered undergunned.”
The process accelerated after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “For many years after 9/11, police got equipped massively because of the so-called terrorism threat,” Baybeck says. He contends that some police forces are now “crazily overproportioned.”
Baybeck earned his doctorate at Washington University and has served as an associate professor at UM–St. Louis, living in the area for several years. He’s familiar with Ferguson and North County. “I don’t see why many people said they were shocked that this happened,” he says. “You could see it coming 10 years ago. There is much frustration and anger in North County.”
When that frustration and anger spilled into civil unrest, part of the police response included armed personnel carriers with high-caliber machine guns. That display of force, plus the use of tear gas and sound cannons, might have accelerated the threat of violence, says Tamara Madensen, a criminal-justice professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The director of the Crowd Management Research Council, she co-edited the book Preventing Crowd Violence and has written policing guides sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice.
“Riot gear before a riot can instigate violence,” she says. “We know aggressive police action will increase protester aggression. The initial response set the tone. Tactics were used by police that were not used in other places. For some in the crowd, this was an incentive for violence.”
