One of the things that strikes me about the police having the vast arsenals of military-grade weaponry is that it is pretty unlikely that they have that much training on how to use it correctly or perhaps at all.

It’s just there to intimidate and to look impressive, and to satisfy authoritarian fantasies.

As a nation we have decided that the police have a job that is so dangerous (it isn’t) that they can do anything they want. It’s actually funny in a way, because all their violence and body armor and tanks just show that they are a bunch of wimps. Does a real man panic and put seven bullets in a boy because he doesn’t immediate respond to the officer’s command? Of course not.

Since I first wrote a draft of this post, there has been a whole spate of articles pointing out that the military actually has a better ops manual for how to treat protesters. That is perfectly correct. The Ferguson police are militarized, but only for show. They are not well-trained and certainly not well-intentioned.