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Shannon Wheeler's Too Much Coffee Man Portal at The Portland Alliance
http://www.ThePortlandAlliance.org/nytpa
Campus Cops With M-16s
By Juliet Lapidos
Police waitedto advance
on a crowd
after tear gas was used in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 17, 2014.
Picture Credit
Charlie Riedel
/Associated Press
After Ferguson cops greeted unarmed protesters with tear gas and combat vehicles, there was public gnashing of teeth over whether police departments really need military gear, acquired from the Pentagon through the federal 1033 transfer program. Some national politicians, notably Republican Senator Rand Paul, criticized the militarization of law enforcement.
Military surplus ends up not only in the hands of big-city police departments or suburban police departments like the one in Ferguson, but even—as it turns out—on college campuses. Last week The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that nearly 120 colleges and universities have acquired equipment through the 1033 program since 1998.
Working off of records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, The Chronicle found that colleges collected equipment running the gamut from office supplies to M-16s to weapons one would only expect to find on a battlefield. The Arizona State University police received 70 M-16s. Lincoln University, in Missouri, ordered 15 military backpacks and 20 bayonets. And the University of Central Florida police department owns an M-79 grenade launcher.
the rest of the story: http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/campus-cops-with-m-16s/?emc=edit_tnt_20140916&nlid=62349865&tntemail0=y
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
A Funeral in Ferguson
Two weeks after the killing of Michael Brown, we have become painfully familiar with his parents through their public appearances and television interviews, their faces drawn, their sorrow apparent.
Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, constantly dabbing tears from her face, sparing in her responses, but powerfully articulating her agony with the words she chooses. Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., with shaved head and full beard, a large man often clad in a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “No Justice, No Peace” and a baby picture of his son. The senior Brown is stoic, resolute in his speech, but even in the power of his presence there is the certainness that a hollow space has been made.
On Monday, they are scheduled to bury their boy as the whole world watches.
No one should know what that feels like.
Whatever one may feel about the contours of this case — about what led Officer Darren Wilson to shoot the teenager, about the relationship of the police to people of color, about the protests and unrest that followed, about the militarized police response to the unrest, about the quality of the investigations and the level of confidence people have in them, about the perverse sense of theater emerging from the rhythms of the days under the glare of media lights — we can all, in our shared humanity, feel for parents who lose a child.
As a parent myself, I can’t fathom the ache and inextinguishable anguish that must accompany such a loss.
Losing any loved one is painful, but losing a child — particularly in such a violent way and particularly a young child — must be exceedingly painful. It also upsets the order of things. Children should outlive you. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, the way the world and life would have it. But, in a moment, the world stops making sense.
I don’t think anyone can be properly prepared to deal with the news of such a thing. In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday, the mother recounted, with tears streaming down her face, the feeling of getting the call that her son had been shot, before getting to the scene:
“Before even getting there, somebody call you on the phone and tell you something like that, and you miles away. It’s terrible.”
The father recounted the excruciating wait once he and the mother arrived on the scene and how upsetting it all was:
“We couldn’t even see him. They wouldn’t even let us go see him. They just left him out there, four and a half hours, with no answers. Wouldn’t nobody tell us nothing.”
It’s hard to imagine a more painful scenario and the grief it must carry.
Charles M. Blow is The New York Times‘s visual Op-Ed columnist. His column appears on Monday and Thursday.
Mr. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper’s graphics director, a position he held for nine years. In that role, he led The Times to a best of show award from the Society of News Design for the Times’s information graphics coverage of 9/11, the first time the award had been given for graphics coverage. He also led the paper to its first two best in show awards from the Malofiej International Infographics Summit for work that included coverage of the Iraq war. Mr. Blow went on to become the paper’s Design Director for News before leaving in 2006 to become the Art Director of National Geographic Magazine. Before coming to The Times, Mr. Blow had been a graphic artist at The Detroit News.
Mr. Blow graduated magna cum laude from Grambling State University in Louisiana, where he received a B.A. in mass communications. He lives in Brooklyn with his three children.
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