A sample of US military veterans' reactions to Ferguson police crackdown

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Excellent find! Thank you for posting it, Xeni :thumbsup:

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Great Xeni,
The US military has its faults but much of their motivation is to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic. This means both officers and enlisted are well versed in the concept of illegal orders and go abroad to fight their enemies.
Many soldiers, who also have a concept of enemy and friend filter into the police forces after military service where the few bad apples spread the rot of believing that the the domestic civilians are the base for insurgents.

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Ironically I would guess that a lot of police officers are veterans, probably mostly of the National Guard sort - I remember reading at some point how many police officers had been shipped off to Iraq and Afghanistan, and it was a troubling number from a domestic safety standpoint. Unfortunately I would also guess that despite their military training a police force can get out of control pretty quickly because of either a lack of command and control, internal discipline, or the misapplication of the military training to a domestic “peacekeeping” operation.

Maybe what we really need is a new Posse Comitatus Act restricting the use of military equipment and tactics in domestic police forces, and requiring that anyone who has served abroad and wants to (re)join a police force go through some deprogramming and re-education.

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Except that’s quite the opposite of what the vets in the article are saying. The vast majority of our troops are level-headed kids with good training. They don’t lose their cool and start shooting. I think the DOJ needs to look into how civilian crowd-control training works and maybe send some military advisors… to our own damn country.

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One of my favorites from the linked site:[quote]If you’re a veteran, and you’re a cop, and you act like most of these asshats in #Ferguson do: shame on you. You should know better.[/quote]

EDIT: Crediting the poster of the above: @Manwich420

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What I am saying is soldiers who would never attack American civilians while in the military can get turned into these bad cops after exposure to the ‘new enemy’ along with the other police recruits. Sorry for being unclear.

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Does Ferguson represent the first domestic “live” deployment and use of LRAD? EDIT: Wikipedia says no, 2009 Pittsburgh G-20 came first.

A common theme to the reactions I read: Hey Ferguson, You’re fucking up badly.

I think @fuzzyfungus mentioned in another thread that the sniper asshat isn’t even arrayed properly–he’s sitting up in the clear, openly exposed to incoming fire, clearly suggesting that he has absolutely no fear of the people he’s targeting or even not targeting. He’s essentially in god mode. Between wars of aggression, complete surveillance of the populace (and much of the world), and the militarization of people who are supposed to serve and protect–what the actual fuck, America?

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