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>> If you want to understand why America's police act like an occupying army... then you have to start with the Drug War.

Go back much further than that. Go back to the civil rights movement. Go back to jim crow. The history of the American war on drugs was born of racism and continues its birthright. That is the real sticking point, the source of the high emotions surrounding drugs. The drug war is a proxy for much more difficult issues.

There was definitely racism in the passing and enforcing of these laws.

There was also definitely communities overran with drug related crime that were desperate for help. When a single mom can't buy her kid a bicycle because the last 3 have been stolen out from under him by addicts looking to score, she's going to ask the her elected representatives for help.

> When a single mom can't buy her kid a bicycle because the last 3 have been stolen out from under him by addicts looking to score

That seems like burglary/robbery rather than a drug-related offense.

How would a burglary intended to obtain money to buy drugs not be "drug-related"?

Does intent matter when you commit a crime? Do you get a different sentence if you use the money to buy drugs rather than food?

Intent absolutely matters - think murder vs. involuntary manslaughter, or even first degree versus second degree murder. A lot of legal definitions of crimes even include the statement "with intent to..." - "drug possession with intent to distribute" is a good example.

It's also completely besides the point here, as we're discussing the statement:

> There was also definitely communities overran with drug related crime that were desperate for help.

arguing that these sorts of drug-related crimes motivated some communities to embrace "hard on crime" attitudes.

That latter paragraph sounds a lot like the things people say when they want to deny racism was part of the war on drugs.

What often gets missed is that high up members of the Republican party are on record as intentionally escalating the war on drugs to attack their enemies (black people and anti war hippies amongst others).

So if they thought that the war on drugs wasn't a "problem" but rather an opportunity, then they have no incentive to "solve" the problem, in fact quite the opposite. Any consequences that then follow from drug related crime must ultimately fall at their door, not the person they've led into addiction by policy.

As a concrete example, Bush Sr.'s famous speech on crack involved begging a drug dealer to come to Pennsylvania Avenue so they could include that fact in it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/tours/s...

> But obtaining the crack was no easy feat. To match the words crafted by the speech-writers, Drug Enforcement Administration agents lured a suspected District drug dealer to Lafayette Park four days before the speech so they could make what appears to have been the agency's first undercover crack buy in a park better known for its location across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House than for illegal drug activity, according to officials familiar with the case.

> In fact, when first contacted by an undercover DEA agent posing as a drug buyer, the teenage suspect seemed baffled by the agent's request.

> "Where the {expletive} is the White House?" he replied in a conversation that was secretly tape-recorded by the DEA.

> "We had to manipulate him to get him down there," said William McMullan, assistant special agent in charge of DEA's Washington field office. "It wasn't easy."

The motivation for the war on drugs is not borne out of racism, but a combination of greed and public safety concern.

nope see the original conviction of very famous black singers in the 1950s its right in the court transcripts read up please

"Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice."

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

"In 2013, the ACLU published a report titled "The War on Marijuana in Black and White". The report found that despite marijuana use being roughly equal between blacks and whites, blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decriminalization_of_non-medic...

> "Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice."

This one is the original marihuana legislation, predating Nixon's war on drugs, right?

> "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

When was this originally published? I keep seeing it in a 2016 magazine, which is a bit odd given how groundbreaking a revelation it is. Especially considering the quote was collected 22 years prior, and the man died 17 years prior. Was this around and just not well known at the time?

> "In 2013, the ACLU published a report titled "The War on Marijuana in Black and White". The report found that despite marijuana use being roughly equal between blacks and whites, blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession."

Adverse impact, problematic enough, does not imply something was made with racist intent.

> Adverse impact, problematic enough, does not imply something was made with racist intent.

It shows that the intent continues to be racist. This disparity is ongoing, not historical; if it's truly not racist, why not bring the amount of possession charges in line with usage?

So sickle cell anemia is racist? You can't tell the intent of something by the impact alone.

Sickle cell anemia wasn't imposed via law.

are you arguing that it cannot be racist unless it's law? So if I start throwing around racial epithets it's not racist because it's not law?

> It shows that the intent continues to be racist.

It shows the impact, not the intent, continues to be racist. It doesn't really say anything about intent, at least without a lot more data. If white and black usage differ in kind somehow - say, pot brownies vs smoking on the street (I have no idea if there is a racial disparity here) - it could lead to a difference in police involvement without any racial discrimination.

indeed, and as another poster pointed out, it could also be because police monitor high crime areas more strictly, and so the arrests related to marijuana tends to reflect that fact.

So gun control is racist? You can't tell the intent of something by the impact alone.

Incidental arrests arise from higher police presence in minority’s neighborhoods due to higher instances of major crime in those neighborhoods.

If I go fishing for redfish I’m going to end up catching a lot more saltwater fish incidentally. Doesn’t mean I hate freshwater fish, that just means in not fishing in an area where I’m going to find many freshwater fish.

> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs

There are reasons to be skeptical of this alleged quote by Ehrlichman. As user GatorD42 pointed out when this was brought up before:

>...Baum claims Ehrlichman said that to him in 1994 while he was researching for a book he published in 1996 about the drug war. He didn't include the quote in that book, but instead published it in 2012 and again in 2016, after Ehrlichman had died (in 1999).

This is an amazing and explosive quote - if Baum had included it in his book in 1996 I am sure it would have garnered a great deal of attention. Instead Baum would not include it in his book, but instead would wait for decades later when Ehrlichman was no longer around to dispute it.

At any rate, if the quote was actually said by Ehrlichman, it doesn't actually describe the drug polices of the Nixon administration. While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs", the actual substance of his policies seem to be different than what people think it was:

>...I have been fortunate over the years to discuss the distorted memory of Nixon's drug policies with almost all of his key advisors as well as with historians. Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).

http://www.samefacts.com/2011/06/drug-policy/who-started-the...

You are deeply incorrect. The drug war is an explicit war on non-whites; the drug war disproportionately effects POC more than any other factor by an enormous amount.

http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war

This is not correct. Just look at marijuana: people stoked racist fears in order to make it illegal, and today four times as many black people as white people are arrested for possession, even though usage is roughly equal. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marijuana-prohibition-racist_...

Racism is undoubtedly a major factor.

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

I agree. "Born out of racism" is too strong. I'm not even sure what it means exactly. Was racism rampant at the time? Yes. But the war on drugs still would've happened if there was no racism. Those rugurgitated figures on black vs white drug use vs convictions misses the boat. Go to any city and recognize the color of people that control the drug market. The majority of them are not white. The police don't focus on users, they focus on dealers-- that's where the violent crime is. If you don't want to buy drugs in the city, go to a jamband show. A microcosm of this phenomenon is the nitrous scene. Who makes up the nitrous mafia? Black dudes in black hoodies. They sell to nearly all-white hippies. If you try to sell nitrous(compete with the mafia) you will be beaten up or killed. The nitrous mess is a blight on the otherwise positive, peaceful music scene. If you were to try to stop it, who would you go after? The peaceful users who are in actuality the root of the problem, or the violent dealers?

> Go to any city and recognize the color of people that control the drug market. The majority of them are not white. The police don't focus on users, they focus on dealers-- that's where the violent crime is.

The disparity is in charges of possession. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/racial-disparity-in-marijuana...

Even with simple possession charges, police are looking to bust dealers(or at least players in the game), not users. With players you can make deals and move up the chain, users are a dead end. The disparity in charges of possession doesn't necessarily signify racism to me.

The early days of the drug war, the ban on pot, was very much a racial thing. There were "scientific" studies and political speeches focusing on how dangerous it would make the negro population, how black men high on pot would be raping white women. Generations later, the crackdown on crack cocaine, as opposed to the more expensive normal cocaine, also broke down along racial lines. The drug wars in other countries, those without America's racial history, have been very different. What makes the US drug war what it is, as opposed to say Canada's or the UK's, is its grounding in America's 'unique' race relations.

In how many African countries, Middle Eastern, or Asian countries is marijuana legal?

Race has little to do with the criminalization of such drugs, as evidenced by the answer to the above question.

The international criminalization was driven in large part by Western pressure (and sometimes directly a remnant of Western colonialism).

Parts of it go back to Prohibition too. The original push to get police into cars was partially just to let them cover more ground. But part of it was that cars would separate them from the neighborhoods they covered a bit and prevent them from absorbing local mores about what sorts of activities were harmless instead of what the law said.

Criminalizing victimless behavior prevents enforcement of violent/property crime too. Would a prostitute report being raped by a john? Maybe, but it seems unlikely when they have to worry about getting thrown in the system themselves.

Other places have a war on drugs, or have regulations about lemonade stands, and they don't have the pathologically awful policing that the US has.

The US is extraordinarily violent. That's where you need to start: why is violence so common and acceptable in the US?

Violence is what every govt threatens its citizens with to ensure peace ( irony no ? )

What is not common in the US is a respect for others. The police do not respect the citizens. The citizens dont respect the police or the govt.

Respect is earned. Tell me you think the police or govt has earned our respect ? Because of this mutual lack of respect violence is almost certain.

I'm going to quote a previous comment of mine here, because I think your rhetoric is shallow:

>Violence is usually too far removed from the relevant abstractions. It's not difficult to see violence behind everything, because rules don't mean much if they aren't enforced, and it's all too easy to conflate violence with a threat of violence, or a threat of force with a threat of violence, etc.

> But that's not a very useful perspective; a well-functioning society filters violence so that it is only applied when things go seriously awry, and most of us should only ever threatened by minor inconveniences. To focus on violence is to be reductive; it is like trying to talk about programming in terms of electromagnetic laws -- yes, computers ultimately run on electricity, and social powers are ultimately enforced through violence, but the abstractions we've built atop those facts are actually very relevant and useful.

Now you are saying a specific group of people get to define acceptable violence.

This is insane... who defines that group ? Are all govts legitimate ? Do all govts get to define violence ?

There is no ethical violence or all violence is ethical because your reasons arent more valid than someone elses

I am not saying that. I'm saying that considering the government to act only violently is a gross mischaracterization of reality such that even if you define things such that it is technically true, it is not a useful position to take.

My government has never forced me to do anything with a threat of violence -- I have been threatened with different manners of obvious inconvenience, but if that is no more acceptable to you than an actual threat of violence, then I'm afraid that is an unproductive, reductive, and uncompromising opinion.

If you commit a victimless crime (speeding) and the agent of the state fears for his life while talking to you... you are dead.

How is that not violent ?

I agree with this line of reasoning as well. Drug trafficking is punishable by death in Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and Indonesia. Other East Asian countries _highly_ criminalize drugs and have significantly lower crime rates along with significantly higher rates of police reporting.

Nope, not Hong Kong. HK hasn’t had death penalty for anything for a loooong time.

Whoops, HK is only life in prison. Taiwan is death.

The US is a violent place even without guns. The murder rates for non-gun violence are still astronomical compared to other developed countries. It's likely always been violent place, so how does that change?

That is highly misleading. If you look at the overall per capita rates of violent death since 1776 it's clear that on average Europeans are far more violent than Americans. Limiting the count of deaths to just those that meet the legal definition of "murder" is disingenuous.

I'm pretty sure that the number of guns really doesn't help. If I were a police officer, I would be much more nervous in the US than most of Europe (to make an example).

I never understood why either. For some reason American music tastes (hip-hop) often glorify greed, crime, and lawnessness and our culture does relatively little to call this behavior out. It's actually NORMAL in american culture to be blase about music that is openly violent, racist, and sexist. It really is indicative of a sick society. Most people that I approach the subject about is "yeah, so what?"

Well, at least they bleep the F-word. Other countries don't do that, but they do restrain the amount of violence on TV and look where THAT got them.

What you're saying is true but only in a society where you simply allow all drugs. Ideologically I am of this inclining since I don't think the government has a right to determine what people should or should not be able to put in their own body, but at the same time I also think this is a path that is detrimental for society. A few factors you don't hit on:

- many drugs are addictive and this can lead to addicts turning to crime to try to fuel their addiction. yes we could offer more public support for such things, but these tend to be lifestyle choices that people revert to over and over.

- some drugs themselves can have a strong connection with abnormally violent and dangerous behavior - for instance, PCP.

- other drugs can have potentially extreme side effects even with minimal usage. olney's lesions / brain lesions are but one example. of course the same is true of e.g. alcohol, but the quantities involved are quite different.

- any drug that is illegal will result in a black market. this black market tends to trend towards violence. there is potentially big money to be made in drugs and criminal enterprises tend to attract criminals who don't just constrain their violation to their product.

It always felt weird to me that most of the rationale for policing drug use is based on preventing the crimes a user might commit while on drugs, rather than just the prosecuting the crimes they actually do commit while on drugs.

"You can't do heroin because you'll get addicted and might steal in order to fuel your addiction." "But I haven't actually stolen anything yet, so what crime has been committed?"

Are there any other cases of a victim-less activity where we preemptively arrest/prosecute people because that activity might lead to crime someday?

Speeding. Public intoxication. Keeping an attractive nuisance.

All victimless crimes.

Oddly enough in AZ you are supposed to have a victim for a crime yet you can be charged with criminal speeding and there be no victim.

Threatening the public is not victimless. Not sure where folks are coming up with that. I can fire a gun at a crowd, and if it doesn't hit anybody, its 'victimless'. Not a crime?

so lets follow that logic... you are driving a car down the street and because you could screw up and hit me you are attempting murder and should be charged ?

You are so far into the wrong here its sad... not only sad but the fact you cant see it is scary for the future of this nation

Reckless driving is a crime, yes.

Elements of a crime....

Legality (must be a law) ... Actus reus (Human conduct) ... Causation (human conduct must cause harm) ... Harm (to some other/thing) ... Concurrence (State of Mind and Human Conduct) ... Mens Rea (State of Mind; "guilty mind") ... Punishment.

Without a victim you have no crime

Speeding and attractive nuisances are only victimless if you squint, as they both pretty clearly are statistically harmful to others (not when I speed a bunch of people feel the need to say I'm sure).

Public intoxication less so, but it is also mostly used as a pretext to remove people from public spaces in cases where it is obvious they shouldn't be there.

Speeding is also mostly treated as a minor infraction, not quite a crime. Sure, if you really do it good, you can get detained for an extended period of time, but you really have to do it good to end up in that situation.

The reason people get mostly minor monetary fines for speeding is because we as a society really don't care if people violate the statute so long as they're not being unreasonable about it and it's mostly used as a revenue/probably cause/fishing tool. Ditto for public drunkedness, don't be an ass and it's not a problem.

Speeding, public intoxication, etc. in the typical cases don't have victims because we as a society have decided that we are not victimized by small increase in risk of a negative outcome.

However, writing statues that we expect to be violated and then leaving it up to the cops' discretion is not exactly a recipe for the fairest outcome.

Attractive nuisance is a tort, not a crime. No one gets arrested for it, they get sued if someone gets injured.

Speeding is arguably not victimless. Someone pointed out the "shooting into a crowd without hitting anyone" analogy, which is apt. You're engaging in immediately threatening and dangerous behavior.

Public intoxication is also not victimless; that's the "disorderly" part of "drunk and disorderly" (whether it gets enforced correctly/equally is a different discussion.) This is actually a great example of my point: you can get as drunk as you want, and no one will care until you start disturbing the peace, being belligerent, damaging property, urinating in public spaces, etc. If you're drunk and sitting in a bar quietly, it's not a problem. We don't arrest you because you might drive drunk later, we wait until you actually drive drunk. We treat other drugs completely differently.

"Shooting into a crowd" is an intentionally reductionist comparison meant to remove nuance so the reader reaches a specific conclusion. The fact of the matter is that we (we = society) do not condone any level of shooting into a crowd whereas we find certain situation specific levels of drunkenness and speeding perfectly fine. Speeding, public intoxication, etc. in the typical cases don't have victims because we as a society have decided that we are not victimized by small increase in risk of a negative outcome. However, there is some situation dependent hard to pin down threshold where we decide society is victimized and basically everyone agrees the crime is worth prosecuting.

It was meant to make clear the 'increased risk to the public' issue, which was apparently received loud and clear.

I think you made all the rest up. "We as a society" I read as very subjective. I for instance don't regard risky public behavior as victimless. Am I not part of your society?

It's almost certain that the decriminalization or legalization of all drugs would be a massive boon for society.

As practical examples such as Portugal show, it generally leads to a significant drop in both drug use and the detrimental factors associated with it. More police time and money can be spent on real crimes, and jails are free from many non violent offenders.

The last last point is a particularly significant benefit for the USA as the justice system has such an irrational focus on punishment over rehabilitation, so most prisons serve more as criminal training camps.

As an immigrant, I entirely disagree with that. I believe it's not a specific city or "war on drugs" problem.

As it was clear in the my own country (xUSSR), the criminals are developing their code, where "snitches get stiches" and any cooperation with law enforcement is forbidden by it (e.g. in a prison so called "thief in laws" won't to do any work).

The drugs, especially hard drugs and prostitution are not victimless crimes. Human traffiking is a problem, the impact of drug addicts who is looking for new dose is real.

Internationally, countries that export illicit drugs are countries that have a shortage of legal exports and desperately need a cash income. I think if you want to talk about The Drug War in the US, you need to talk about institutional racism and its roots in a history of slavery. There are myriad ways in which the African American community has been victimized in the US and it's all interrelated. You can't really isolate "this one thing."

>> ... countries that export illicit drugs are countries that have a shortage of legal exports and desperately need a cash income.

I don't think China lacks export opportunities, yet is the source of most all of the worlds fentanyl-type drugs. Up until a couple years ago Canada was a huge source of pot for the US. Canada has a thriving export market. Mexico too.

I'm curious about this link between racism and drugs. When I was growing up in Italy, during the 80s, drugs were a pretty big issue, and we had our own "war on drugs", but at the time there were basically no black people here, so it couldn't be linked to race.

A tldr for the US would be that we tend to arrest poor people and people of color more and punish them more than we do well-heeled white people. On average, blacks in the US are a lot poorer than whites, so they get subjected to that twice over.

It doesn't necessarily mean they do more drugs than whites. It just means that "the war on drugs" is often just one more justification for a long history of coming up with excuses to throw blacks in jail and generally crap on their lives.

The US has a talent for either framing rules in a way that causes trouble for people of color or interpreting behavior by people of color differently than the same behavior by a white person.

I get it, but I would be cautious in making it look like the war on drug was created just/mostly because of racism, because something very similar happened even in countries where that wasn't a reason.

You are suggesting that to the wrong person. The comment I am replying to is the one that brought up the war on drugs as a racist thing.

From the Republican horse's mouth:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman

Interesting, thanks.

>Crime gets reported, police investigate, criminal gets arrested, community improves from having a violent psychopath off the streets. It's a simple formula, everybody's happy

Wrong, even in simple assault cases it's possible for the victim to be charged with the assault if the person committing assault goes to the court house first and files charges. This blocks the ability of the victim to file charges and allows police to pursue them as the criminal.

What jurisdiction do you live in that permits people to file criminal charges on their own authority at a court house?

Is this not universal in US? If police on scene don't file charges or arrest anyone, it's a "race to the court house" with the first person to file having priority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_courthouse

Not only is it "not universal", it's vanishingly uncommon.

A small handful of states permit "private prosecution" of crimes, with very significant limitations. It certainly can't be used to shut down the victim in the fashion you describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_Sta...

The "race to the courthouse" article you linked doesn't even specify which country it applies to, and cites zero sources.

It appears to refer to https://definitions.uslegal.com/r/race-to-the-courthouse/, which isn't about criminal prosecutions at all. It's about certain civil law situations.

Yea INAL, but the race to the court house was the way a lawyer explained it to me. This is in fact how it works in TN. It's not a private prosecution, it's public.

https://www.marylandcriminalattorneyblog.com/carroll_county_...

"This is because without a weapon or serious injury the only crime would that could be charged is second degree assault which is a misdemeanor in Maryland. The police can only arrest in misdemeanor cases if they actually witness the events. Otherwise, the police are supposed to simply write a report and advise the combatants as to the procedures for filing charges against one another. "

Re: here because out of reply subthreads:

I'm not mixing the two up. I called the police after having my jaw broken in a one sided assault and filed a report. The assailant went to the court house and filed charges officially and one week later I was charged with assault. This was leveraged by the public prosecutor to prevent me from filing civil and criminal charges against the assailant as terms for myself not being prosecuted or subject to a trial by jury. The only people who seem to be aware of this situation are lawyers and law-savvy repeated violent offenders who use it to escape prosecution.

The link you cite is for Maryland, which is one of the few states to permit private prosecution. As is common, it comes with limitations:

https://www.enlawyers.com/1836/attorney-information/maryland...

> In most counties prosecutors review the charges before they are formally filed.

I can't find any indication TN permits these sorts of private prosecutions.

I suspect you're mixing up filing charges with making a complaint or police report. Being the first to reach out to police/prosecutors may count in your favor (credibility-wise, not on a raw legal level) as the alleged assailant filing their own complaint afterwards looks more like retaliation for fairly obvious reasons.

The militarization of the police has come primarily from the militarization of criminals. Before the Valentine's Day Massacres, criminals had better cars and weapons than the police, allowing them to fight and win against the police. Prior to the LA shooting spree, police had no way to fight a criminal armed with assault weapons and no training on how to do so without endangering the public. When I lived in St. Louis, once the riots started to happen the police got tanks and other military equipment from out of state and then never let go of them (massive over-reaction to protestors that were not anywhere near as rough as you saw on TV, but that's what happened).

I think you're right that the drug war was a factor, but I think you're wrong in why it was a factor. It's not some arbitrary distinction between what you deem to be a "victimless" crime, as if there was never such a thing in the 1700s and 1800s. The reason is that it's an arms race. The police always want to be better equipped and trained at dealing with a situation than they people they're up against. If it's unarmed protestors, they want organized formations and tear gas. If it's a drug cartel with assault weapons, the police want tanks and helicopters.

British police had no weapons in the 19th century while the population had ready access to firearms.

So if I have this straight in St Louis when the people are protesting against police brutality, the polices solution is to be more brutal? No kidding it’s an arms race.

I’ll even bet they are using kettling to invoke a reaction from protestors. They aren’t passively responding to protestors, they are active antagonizing the public to justify their brutality.

> So if I have this straight in St Louis when the people are protesting against police brutality, the polices solution is to be more brutal?

No, they brought in that equipment to deal with the riots. If it was just protesting but not rioting then that would be a different story.

The tools are a force multiplier which is necessary when you're outnumbered. There are fewer police than rioters.

>police got tanks and other military equipment from out of state and then never let go of them

This is related to the economic dynamics of military surplus and nothing more.

If you believe that then you havent read history

Wish I could upvote the above comment more than once!