Most of my thinking on the continuing brutality in Ferguson, MO. #Ferguson has been less about the protests themselves and more about what on earth the police might be thinking. Their behavior has been not just ruthless, but so consistently bizarre and they are clearly operating in a different world from everyone else. Their frame of reference has to be completely different from that of everyone on the outside.
But yesterday, after some short and inexplicable peace when the police took a breather, they were back at it, this time breaking out LRAD sound cannons, and I think I figured something out. Looking at the protest section of the Wikipedia article, a few of the American incidents have something in common: they’re protests organized against very large institutions. Two of the deployments were against a G20 meeting and against Occupy protestors. It was also deployed but not used at the 2004 Republican National Convention.
And here’s where I think the fault is: the Ferguson Police Department things that this is one of those. They think people are raging against the machine, and they just need to be scared away and everything will go back to normal, and the freaks will be beaten back into their little holes. What they don’t seem to fully understand is that the institution being protested is them.
Continue reading “What do the Ferguson police even think they’re doing?”