Wilson didn't use any "miilitarized gear". The equipment and tactics used to try to stop the rioting are a completely separate issue.
I meant the initial protests which were not riots and which were met with what looked like the military. Perhaps a of the angst today would not be as bad if those initial peaceful protests were not met with what looked like a military attempting to dampen down a political movement.
Do you have any data to support that, or is that just speculation based on what you read in the media?
Why don't we ask Bounkham Phonesavanh, also known as Bou Bou. Do you know who Bou Bou is?
I'll refresh your memory..
Baby Bou Bou was sound asleep in what should have been the safest place in the world when the men came. His whole family surrounded him. After a house fire in Wisconsin the Phonesavanh family had moved in with relatives in a tiny town called Cornelia in north-east Georgia. There they shared a converted garage attached to a home on a sprawling rural block.
This was back in April and that night 19-month-old Bou Bou – short for Bounkham after his Laotion-born father – slept in a cot next his parents' bed. His three older sisters were on mattresses nearby.
The men slipped up the driveway in the darkness, threading their was through the narrow space between the family mini-van with its four child seats and the spare play pen that leant against the garage wall.
With a kick or a battering ram they smashed in the door at about 2am on a warm still night and lobbed a stun grenade into the room. It landed in Bou Bou's cot.
The long seconds after the blast were a blur, Bou Bou's mother Alecia tells Fairfax Media.
Stun grenades, also known as flashbangs, are military weapons designed to blind, deafen and disorientate enemies with a searing flash and an explosion louder than a jumbo jet taking off.
Alecia remembers seeing a man wearing a black tactical suit, helmet and mask holding her husband in a chokehold with one arm twisted behind his back. The two older girls, Emma, seven, and Charlie, three, were beating at the man, screaming, "Don't hurt my daddy!"
Around that moment she heard Bou Bou's terrible wail. She turned and saw another of the masked men lifting him out of the cot and turning away from her so she couldn't see the baby. She tried to run to him but someone else was shouting at her "Sit down and shut up." Bou Bou was taken away.
Alecia didn't know it then but her family had just been subject to the execution of what police like to call a "no knock warrant".
Some days earlier a police confidential informant had managed to buy $50 worth of methamphetamine from Alecia's nephew at the house. After the purchase the SWAT team was called in to arrest him, but he did not live there. Some hours later they found out where he was and went to the home and knocked on the door. He was led away without fuss.
And as obscene as this story is, it isn't a standout. It is just one in the stream of aggressive tactics used by police in the course of their duties.
Even in the immediate aftermath of Brown's shooting, the reaction by the police and their mishandling of the case was a sight to behold.
On Saturday August 9, a young unarmed black man called Michael Brown was shot dead by a white cop in the suburbs of St Louis, Missouri. Many locals were incensed, not just by the shooting but by the hostile police response in the hours after Brown died. No ambulance was called and members of his family were barked at by angry police when they arrived at the scene. Brown lay on the street for four hours as a crowd grew and tension increased.
Local and then national media arrived, as did police reinforcements.
Across America people were shocked by what they saw. Rather than lines of police officers, the reinforcements looked like soldiers. They wore the same camouflage gear people were used to seeing in news reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. And like soldiers they arrived in armoured cars and carried rifles.
************************************
Tim Lynch, director of research on criminal justice for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has written on police militarisation for years. He fears that such units in American police departments risk fundamentally changing the relationship between people and their government, and says many citizens have already lost basic constitutional protections as a result of aggressive police.
"If you dress and arm police like soldiers, and then tell them they are involved in a drug war, that is how they are going to behave," he says. This is particularly dangerous because some police are given military training. "Police should be there to protect people and their constitutional rights. Soldiers are not concerned about someone's rights on the battlefield."
This is what happens when simple policing is touted as being a form of war. Welcome to the bastard child that is the remnants of the Drug War. And this becomes even more evident when the police force uses recruitment videos that contain images of breaking down doors,
using military gear to make arrests.
Nevertheless, police recruiting videos, as in those from California's Newport Beach Police Department and New Mexico's Hobbs Police Department, actively play up not the community angle but militarization as a way of attracting young men with the promise of Army-style adventure and high-tech toys. Policing, according to recruiting videos like these, isn't about calmly solving problems; it's about you and your boys breaking down doors in the middle of the night.
As for Bou Bou, he is just yet another statistic. One of many and probably many to come unless police officers receive proper training.
And if it is just based on what you read in the media, do you really consider a small handful (single digits) of shootings by police in a population of 300 million to be excessive? That strikes me as exceedingly rare.
Single digits in a week? Maybe.
However I am curious as to where you get your assumption that deadly shootings by police is in the "single digits" when the Government does not release such figures.
Criminal justice experts note that, while the federal government and national research groups keep scads of data and statistics— on topics ranging from how many people were victims of unprovoked shark attacks (53 in 2013) to the number of hogs and pigs living on farms in the U.S. (upwards of 64,000,000 according to 2010 numbers) — there is no reliable national data on how many people are shot by police officers each year.
The government does, however, keep a database of how many officers are killed in the line of duty. In 2012, the most recent year for which FBI data is available, it was 48 – 44 of them killed with firearms.
But how many people in the United States were shot, or killed, by law enforcement officers during that year? No one knows.
Officials with the Justice Department keep no comprehensive database or record of police shootings, instead allowing the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement.
That number – which only includes self-reported information from about 750 law enforcement agencies – hovers around 400 “justifiable homicides” by police officers each year. The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics also tracks “arrest-related deaths.” But the department stopped releasing those numbers after 2009, because, like the FBI data, they were widely regarded as unreliable.
“What’s there is crappy data,” said David A. Klinger, a former police officer and criminal justice professor at the University of Missouri who studies police use of force.
Several independent trackers, primarily journalists and academics who study criminal justice, insist the accurate number of people shot and killed by police officers each year is consistently upwards of 1,000 each year.
“The FBI’s justifiable homicides and the estimates from (arrest-related deaths) both have significant limitations in terms of coverage and reliability that are primarily due to agency participation and measurement issues,” said Michael Planty, one of the Justice Department’s chief statisticians, in an email.
Even less data exists for officer-involved shootings that do not result in fatalities.
At any rate, it's a bit more than "single digits".
Could you please cite your sources for your claim that it is in single digits?