Actual Military Veterans Say Cops In Ferguson Are Excessively Armed, Untrained Wannabes

[jct74]

Actual Military Veterans Say Cops In Ferguson Are Excessively Armed, Untrained Wannabes

By Nick Wing
08/14/2014 12:46 pm EDT

The town of Ferguson, Missouri, has been flooded with heavily armed SWAT officers in the wake of the Aug. 9 killing of unarmed teen Michael Brown by a police officer. According to some reports, upwards of 70 officers decked out not just in riot gear, but in equipment suited for foreign battlefields, took to the streets Wednesday night in an attempt to disperse the largely peaceful demonstrations organized to protest Brown's death. If the nation needed a poster child for the militarization of its police forces, it just got one.

At Business Insider, Paul Szoldra, a former U.S. Marine, broke down some of the equipment he's seen law enforcement officials equipped with: short-barreled 5.56-mm rifles with high-powered scopes, six extra magazines, loaded with 30 rounds each, heavy body armor, military camouflage, and all of this riding around in armored trucks resembling mine-resistant vehicles used on the battlefield. Many combat veterans have since pointed out that the SWAT officers are more heavily armed and outfitted than they themselves were while patrolling the streets of Iraq or Afghanistan.

But while this police force may appear to be militarized, these same veterans have noted that the officers are not acting the way members of the military would. Pointing weapons at civilians, arresting people without reason and behaving generally like an occupying force on high alert are not effective tactics for crowd control or dispersing riots, the veterans say. Kelsey D. Atherton, a journalist for Popular Science, gathered a number of tweets on Storify for a project called "Veterans on Ferguson." His tagline says everything you need to know about how veterans view the mess the police force has made of this situation.

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read more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/14/police-militarization-ferguson_n_5678407.html

[Pericles]

And those are their good points.

[AuH20]

SBRs are useful for CQC (door entry) and vehicle use. Beyond that I wouldn't want one. You lose muzzle velocity with shorter barrels.

[AFPVet]

SBRs are useful for CQC (door entry) and vehicle use. Beyond that I wouldn't want one. You lose muzzle velocity with shorter barrels.

... and consequently, accuracy.

[nobody's_hero]

Good. We need more military speaking out about this. Maybe when people see that even the military thinks police are too militarized, then we can make some headway.

But never forget, and I've made this observation before, that nearly every tyrant who has risen to power in the past century (if not longer) has relied on a special police force to intimidate and protect their regimes. Every time the federal government issues grant money to a local small-town police department, they are essentially buying their loyalty, and when it comes to the town residents versus Uncle Sam, the cops will remember who butters their bread.

[libertyjam]

https://storify.com/AthertonKD/veterans-on-ferguson

Combat veterans sound off about ‪#‎Ferguson‬ (https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/ferguson?source=feed_text&story_id=712668448768314), "The general consensus here: if this is militarization, it's the shittiest, least-trained, least professional military in the world, using weapons far beyond what they need, or what the military would use when doing crowd control."