Video: What happened last night in Ferguson. Frightening raw footage of protesters running from tear gas. The Washington Post.
Primary source and video: In Ferguson, Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery gives account of his arrest. Wesley Lowery in The Washington Post.
HuffPost reporter Ryan J. Reilly arrested in Ferguson as well. "They essentially acted as a military force. It was incredible," Reilly said. "The worst part was he slammed my head against the glass purposefully on the way out of McDonald's and then sarcastically apologized for it." The Huffington Post.
@jeneps: With reporter arrests, seems like we're edging closer to the point where Obama has to do more than the written statement he released Tuesday
@radleybalko: Summary of scary sh!t: Heavily militarized police presence in Ferguson. Protests banned. Journalists threatened. News helicopters barred.
@gregorykorte: I covered the 2001 riots in Cincinnati after police shot an unarmed black teenager there. What's happening in #ferguson seems 10x worse.
Paramilitary police are changing law enforcement in the suburbs. "St. Louis County is just one of the many municipalities in the U.S. that now commands access to military equipment meant for war. The paramilitarization of suburban police forces, or the a suburbanization of paramilitary police forces, adds another question to those lingering over Brown's tragic death: Did the police response only make matters worse?...While the use of SWAT teams generally came to prominence in the 1970s as an answer to urban unrest (and as a form of police brutality), increasingly, the paramilitary tactics and equipment adopted by law-enforcement agencies are spreading beyond the cities to suburban areas and rural counties." Kriston Capps in The Atlantic CityLab.
SZOLDRA: The terrifying result of militarizing police. "Their uniform would be mistaken for a soldier's if it weren't for their "Police" patches. They wear green tops, and pants fashioned after the U.S. Marine Corps MARPAT camouflage pattern. And they stand in front of a massive uparmored truck called a Bearcat, similar in look to a mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, or as the troops who rode in them call it, the MRAP. When did this become OK? When did 'protect and serve' turn into 'us versus them'? 'Why do these cops need MARPAT camo pants again,' I asked on Twitter this morning. One of the most interesting responses came from a follower who says he served in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division: 'We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone.'" Paul Szoldra in Business Insider.
KING: A militarized night in Ferguson. "Nationwide, fifty-four per cent of the people who find themselves at the other end of these weapons are black or Latino. For many in this country, the scene from Baldwin’s essay has become so familiar that it now reads as unremarkable. But have we also become anesthetized to images of police in armored vehicles and full military gear? And has the proliferation of images on news and social-media sites made them seem any more normal? Anyone who stayed up late watching the police action in Missouri unfold saw things that did not seem, at least in theory, American. It’s long past time to ask what happens when we raise the threshold of what seems reasonable in a police deployment. If the next Ferguson looks no more militarized than the scene last night, will we excuse it?" Jay Caspian King in The New Yorker.
Did the Pentagon help fuel Ferguson's confrontation? "
Illegal Attempts By Police To Prohibit Use Of Cameras
Yes, you have a right to record the police. "The police don't have a right to stop you as long as you're not interfering with their work. They also don't have a right to confiscate your phone or camera, or delete its contents, just because you were recording them. Despite some state laws that make it illegal to record others without their consent, federal courts have held consistently that citizens have a First Amendment right to record the police as they perform their official duties in public....And the US Department of Justice under Obama has affirmed the court's stances by reminding police departments that they're not allowed to harass citizens for recording them. Sadly these rights are not always respected by the police." T.C. Sottek in The Verge.
The fire down in Ferguson is also hitting media. "Police in Ferguson, Missouri, have taken an aggressive stance toward journalists attempting to cover the protests surrounding the death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who was shot several times by an officer....Police have used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds, which has resulted in various injuries to media. Whitney Curtis, a New York Times freelancer, claimed to have been hit by a rubber bullet. David Carson, a photographer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote that he was 'ordered to leave [the] scene [and] threatened with arrest.'" Dylan Byers in Politico.
@taylordobbs: Police in Ferguson telling media to turn off their cameras on a public street. Reminder: They can't do that. https://www.aclu.org/filming-
@petersuderman: Reason has been covering police resistance to being recorded for years.
Here's @radleybalko in 2011: http://reason.com/archives/
Background readings:
Explainer: Ferguson, Mo., under siege after police shooting. The New York Times.
War gear flows to police departments amid post-9/11 era. Matt Apuzzo in The New York Times.
Is it time to reconsider the militarization of America's police? Radley Balko in The Wall Street Journal.
@ggreenwald: Police tactics in Ferguson are good reminder of the importance of @radleybalko's book on militarization of US police http://www.amazon.com/Rise-
@JonathanLanday: @ggreenwald Story I wrote on the growing militarization of the US police ... in 1997. http://www.csmonitor.com/1997/
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