Militarization and protests in North America – do we have a problem?
By Matthew Coutts | Daily Brew – Thu, 14 Aug, 2014
The shooting death of unarmed Michael Brown in a Missouri suburb earlier this week and the rampant police response to demonstrations in its wake have led many to question the scope of police militarization in the United States.
Brown’s death, a black teenager at the hands of a white police officer, has sparked tense racial outrage in the town of Ferguson and across America, highlighted most viscerally by the nights of unrest that have followed in the community.
Photographs, live streaming footage and first-hand accounts of Wednesday night clashes between protesters and heavily-armed police forces are jaw-dropping. Armoured tactical vehicles can be seen pawing down the town’s darkened streets. Officers are visible through thick clouds of tear gas, dressed in gear that shouts soldier, not peacekeeper.
Acoustic Riot Control Devices, or sound cannons, stand at the ready, grenade launchers filled with rubber bullets are seen being fired at will into crowded streets. It’s military action, on North American streets.
What is happening in Ferguson is a singular instance, comparable only in scope and response to previous conflicts between police and the public on the streets of America, and Canada. But such police responses have indeed happened before.
In Moncton earlier this summer, the RCMP manhunt for a gunman who allegedly shot and killed three officers involved, according to Vice, armoured vehicles, helicopters and a cadre of heavily-equipped officers in full combat uniforms. Faced with a threat with a proven willingness to shoot, this is perhaps the best argument for access to such equipment.
Other instances are more troubling. A peaceful anti-fracking First Nations protest in New Brunswick ended in violence earlier this year after a large police presence featuring camouflaged snipers descended on the scene and employed military-like tactics to clear their encampment.
Four years ago, when the G20 summit brought protesters to the streets of downtown Toronto, an army of officers from various forces responded with strength of numbers against peaceful demonstrators. The result, similar to Ferguson, was allegations of police brutality, an unnecessarily violent response and the wanton use of the weapons available, including rubber bullets and tear gas.
Darryl Davies, a professor of criminology at Carleton University, says local Canadian police agencies have not gone the way of militarization and are in principle committed to service-based policing.
But he says Canadian officers and the general public must resist the pressure to perceive the role of police this way, which indeed comes from south of the border, often from fictional television shows.
“What do we see? We see police officers breaking doors down, we see SWAT teams and tactical units going in,” Davies told Yahoo Canada News. “We got a bit of this during the G8 and G20, so we are seeing some signs of it. What that points to is basically the way which policing is being framed in Canada is absolutely, completely out of sync with the majority of what police do on a day-to-day basis.”
Davies added: “In the United States right now, police in many cities have gone the direction of this militarization approach.”
As Newsweek reports, the militarization of American police forces is all but official policy. The 1990 National Defence Authorization Act, updated in 1996, allows the Secretary of Defense to transfer surplus military equipment to federal and state agencies. The policy is known as the “1033 Program” and has seen everything from aircrafts and armoured personnel carriers to guns, boots and canteens transferred to local police forces.
The 1033 Program accounts for some, though possibly not all, of the military-grade presence on the streets of Ferguson on Wednesday night. It also accounts for scores of other community police forced decked out with gear more often seen in action overseas. It explains how a small Connecticut town received a $733,000 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle (MRAP) for transfer fee of $2,800 (an apparent necessity, despite the historical absence of landmines in Watertown, Conn.).
And it also accounts for how Bloomingtown, Georgia, with a population of 2,713, secured its police force four grenade launchers.
Newsweek’s Taylor Wofford writes:
Given the proliferation of military weapons and military training among America’s police departments, the use of military force and military tactics is not surprising. When your only tool is a hammer, after all, every problem looks like a nail.
Michael Kempa, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa, says he feels Canadian police forces are trending in the same direction as their American counterparts.
“There is a long history in Canada of police militarization,” Kempa told CBC’s The Current, pointing to policing around large events, such as Toronto’s G20 or the Vancouver Olympics, which are turned over to the RCMP, a national force that does not have the same direct accountability to the community.
“If they are doing the planning, and much of it has been militarized with sound cannons and armoured vehicles and the rest of it, we actually have much less control over that as citizens as we would have had in the past.”
Things may not seem so bleak north of the border, but we have seen our own police forces secure military-grade equipment. The Windsor Star reported earlier this year that the local police force secured a 10-ton armoured fighting vehicle from the Department of National Defence.
And the Nova Scotia community of New Glasgow received a similar vehicle around the same time, telling local media they intended to use it in situations that require bulletproof cover for officers and civilians.
Several other towns and cities have also seen their forces equipped with tactical armoured vehicles (TAVs), nicknamed Cougars by the military. Such vehicles have been donated to York Regional Police, Saskatoon police and others through a “Cougars for cops” program over the past several years.
In 2012, the RCMP received a fleet of TAVs from the Canadian military, complete with gun ports, sentry hatches and capable of high ballistic and explosive protection. A request for information about the use of these vehicles was not immediately returned. At the time, however, Commissioner Bob Paulson said, “It will keep our members safe, and increase their ability to intervene when communities face dangerous circumstances.”
There have been other instances of local forces securing powerful equipment. In May, the Montreal police service acquired two sound cannons to use in the case of future protests and demonstrations, according to La Presse. Toronto police kept four similar devices that had been obtained ahead of the G20 Summit. In both cases, forces were said to value their communication ability over their ear-piercing crowd dispersal function.
In his interview with Yahoo Canada News, criminology professor Darryl Davies said he’s not opposed to equipping police with the proper equipment, “But I want them in police uniforms. And I want them using those weapons properly under Canadian law, as dictated by the criminal code.”
“For me, policing has to be what the community wants the police to do and that is provide a service,” he said. “Don’t call yourself a police service in Canada and run around in army fatigues like they do in the States, kicking doors down in the pursuit of drugs.”
What’s playing out in Missouri this week is not the same as those instances that have occurred in Canada or anywhere else. But the response, those powerful and overwhelming suppression tactics by a militarized police force, are troubling. Police have a balance to maintain.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association wrote recently, in response to the Toronto police shooting of teenager Sammy Yatim, that “police play a critical role protecting public safety in our communities.”
“It is our view that the motto of ‘to serve and protect’ be a true starting point for police officers to guard against the tensions and ‘us against them mentality’ that can arise between police and the communities they are to serve,” the CCLA wrote.
One wonders how the police force in Ferguson, Missouri, perceives the public. Are they there to serve and protect. Or is it us against them?
