It’s no secret that the situation in Ferguson, Missouri at the moment is a mess, to say the least. It’s also no secret that race has played a huge role in the escalation of a tragic instance of police violence into pseudo-martial law in a small town. What has been kept under the radar, for the most part, until a week ago was the slowly expanding and militarizing police force.
I want to take the events in Ferguson and step back for a moment and analyze the broader picture. You see, to be frank, I don’t care about the killing of Michael Brown anymore than I do about the killing of Keith Koster. I don’t care about the killing of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. anymore than I do about the killing of Troy Geske. Why? Because these are four people amidst the over 400 who are killed annually. In fact, new studies indicate that the number of people killed by police, not only may be much higher annually, but in the past decade has surpassed all the Americans who died in Iraq (evidently, police kill 8 times more people than terrorists do).
When I turn on the TV or log on to the internet, I don’t see individual instances, rather a growing trend towards militarization and unwarranted aggression, and it is this trend, not any racial or socioeconomic element, that I want to explore after the jump.
