#Apartheid
#FERGUSON COMPARED TO APARTHEID BY MSNBC HOST JOE SCARBOROUGH.
AMERICA'S POLICE BRUTALITY = APARTHEID & MARTIAL LAW
I'M SURE HIS CO-HOST MIKA BREZINKSI DIDN'T APPROVE OF JOE SUPPORTING BLACK PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT ELITE.
Article Sources: MSNBC; National Review; Politico; Youtube (Circa August 25, 2014)
ARTICLE: "Making Sure Ferguson Never Happens Again"
Michael Brown will be buried today.
It will be a solemn end to a brutal month that should have never happened.
The people of St. Louis County have endured a long, hot August punctuated by protests, riots, looting and streets that looked more like Fallujah than Ferguson.
It has all put the issues of race and police brutality up for debate across America and the world.
The generals of Egypt and the ayatollahs of Iran have joined a chorus of dictators who have seized on the grim images of August to condemn our country.
But there’s no need to concern ourselves with lectures coming from tyrants. Instead, now is the time for us to start asking how this altercation spiraled out of control and became an international incident.
No one knows whether the shooting of Michael Brown was justified.
Forensic evidence should give us a better idea of what happened on that fateful afternoon. But we can already pass judgment on the negligent response of local officials to the teenager’s death.
The first ingredient in this toxic brew was a police force that was radically different from the people they were paid to serve and protect.
It’s hard to practice what experts call community policing when your force looks nothing like the community they patrol.
New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has been a champion of community policing. It is a strategy designed to get the community invested in keeping city streets safe.
The choke-hold death of Eric Gardner shows that New York cops aren’t perfect, but the bank of trust that Bratton’s approach has built up keeps New York’s protests over the killing peaceful.
As the Rev. Al Sharpton said while calling for peace at the New York rally, “We are not against the police.” That’s because many come from the same communities they are policing.
Sadly, the same cannot be said for Ferguson residents. In a town that is overwhelmingly black, the Ferguson police force of 53 has 50 white cops on the streets.
That’s an ethnic breakdown that’s more reminiscent of apartheid governments from South Africa’s grim past than community policing in today’s America.
And while many are quietly criticizing the welfare culture that they claim has led to the collapse of this troubled Missouri town, these armchair sociologists should be just as concerned with a police culture in Ferguson that is unrepresentative and isolated from the very people they should protect and serve.
A second cause of the Ferguson tragedy was the callous treatment of Michael Brown’s body after the shooting.
Policing experts suggest that officers gather evidence quickly and get a body off the street as quickly as possible. Former NYPD Detective Sgt. John Paolucci said police should conduct very little examination of the body at the scene other than photographing it.
Then, out of respect to the deceased and his community, the body should quickly be removed.
But Michael Brown’s body was left in the middle of a street in sweltering heat for over four hours. Parents had to rush their children away from the area and keep them hidden in rooms with windows facing away from the grisly scene.
As Bloomberg’s John Heilemann said today on ‘Morning Joe,’ it’s inconceivable to believe such a delay would have happened had a black cop shot a middle-class white teenage boy in his affluent hometown.
Rand Paul has declared there to be two different Americas when it comes to criminal justice. This should not be an opinion open to debate.
It is a fact provable by objective evidence. Anyone still denying that reality in 2014 has their head stuck in the sand — or worse.
The third ingredient to this toxic brew is the hyper-militarized nature of the Ferguson police department’s initial response.
Republicans Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Erick Erickson condemned Ferguson’s militarized tanks, assault rifles and other war-ready equipment shipped from Washington with very little training and fewer strings attached.
The militarization of local police departments is a trend so troubling that Red State’s Erickson wrote that conservatives should not wait for a white teenager to get killed under such circumstances before they demand change.
For law enforcement officials worried about an overreaction to the events of this August, they must understand that if D.C. bureaucrats are going to ship out high-grade military equipment to small-town cops, tough guidelines and rigorous training have to be a part of the deal.
The problem is not with each and every police officer in towns like Ferguson.
The problem is cultural and these weapons demand an intense, disciplined training program to make sure we never repeat these same mistakes again.
How do we make sure this never happens again? You start with community policing — a force that represents the people they are supposed to protect.
Then we need a tough, long look at the militarization of local police departments. And finally, it is past time to put cameras on cops. As I said at the beginning of this crisis, these cameras would protect citizens, protect good cops and provide evidence that would let us know in real time what happened in cases like Michael Brown’s.
The only people hurt by putting cameras on cops are bad cops.
And we need them the hell out of the police force anyway to make sure we don’t endure a month like the one that just passed.
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