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The confrontation in Ferguson, as many observers have noticed, looks uncannily like the ones in Ukraine, Gaza and Iraq.
There is clearly some kind of a global blowback going on, in which military techniques of forcible population control developed for use at the periphery of states' areas of sovereignty are now being applied at the centre.
Leonid Bershidsky, a brilliant Russian journalist and editor, laid out the similarities in a fascinating column yesterday in Bloomberg View. "Police officers around the world are becoming convinced they are fighting a war on something or other, whether that's drugs, terrorism, anarchists or political subversion,"
"This mindset contrasts with the public's unchanged perception of what the police should be doing, which is to keep the streets safe, a conceptual clash that can lead to unexpected results."
The difference between these two kinds of policing, Mr Bershidsky writes, can be modeled as the division between the London Metropolitan Police Force established in 1829, which conceived itself as fighting crime in concert with the populace, and the repressive colonial police forces the British Empire employed in "colonies of rule" such as Ireland and India, who conceived of themselves as keeping potentially hostile local populations in line.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/08/racism-and-schadenfreude?spc=scode&spv=xm&ah=9d7f7ab945510a56 fa6d37c30b6f1709
There is clearly some kind of a global blowback going on, in which military techniques of forcible population control developed for use at the periphery of states' areas of sovereignty are now being applied at the centre.
Leonid Bershidsky, a brilliant Russian journalist and editor, laid out the similarities in a fascinating column yesterday in Bloomberg View. "Police officers around the world are becoming convinced they are fighting a war on something or other, whether that's drugs, terrorism, anarchists or political subversion,"
"This mindset contrasts with the public's unchanged perception of what the police should be doing, which is to keep the streets safe, a conceptual clash that can lead to unexpected results."
The difference between these two kinds of policing, Mr Bershidsky writes, can be modeled as the division between the London Metropolitan Police Force established in 1829, which conceived itself as fighting crime in concert with the populace, and the repressive colonial police forces the British Empire employed in "colonies of rule" such as Ireland and India, who conceived of themselves as keeping potentially hostile local populations in line.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/08/racism-and-schadenfreude?spc=scode&spv=xm&ah=9d7f7ab945510a56 fa6d37c30b6f1709
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