The focus on the tanks and guns and other toys is obscuring the crucial point about our killer cops - they are NOT "rogue officers", they are NOT killing Americans with their armored trucks and machine guns and spy toys, they're killing them with their regular ol' handguns, their usual electrocution tasers, their usual chemical weapons-grade gas and as in the Garner case, their bare hands. They're killing them with INTENT, because they're trained to be soldiers in an enemy land. And we're the enemy. And they're just doing their job.
The reason this keeps getting repeated, over and over and over - 400, 500, 600 corpses a YEAR, year after year after year - our police are being trained as soldiers, occupying enemy territory, in constant mortal danger and therefore annihilating the enemy with overwhelming force is their only hope. To even survive! They're trained to be terrified and they're trained to kill. And until the training is repealed, reversed, discontinued, this will just keep happening.
Look up "situational awareness."
Look up "threat assessment."
Look up "tactical response."
In very few clicks, you can get to the sites of the people who are offering these training programs. Inevitably, they are ex-military (trained on YOUR dime) who get hired by local police departments (WHOSE dime?) to teach them how to kill the enemies. That would be US....
"Situational awareness" = everything that twitches may be a threat.
"Threat assessment" = if you feel spooked, you are under attack.
"Tactical response" = empty your magazine until nothing twitches anymore.
Hmm, there's a lotta twitchy stuff out there. That be US, again. A hairtrigger killing machine is the desired goal of this training, and if you put ten modern "well-trained" policemen in the Michael Brown or Tamir Rice situation, you'll end up with ten more corpses. The cop feels "threatened", so he's trained to empty the magazine - hairtrigger instant response and he really, truly IS he's "just doing his job." There's nothing "rogue" about this - but how many times do we have to hear that before we stop blaming the equipment? I didn't vote for any of this, but until our cops are drastically re-trained, rehabilitated from their terror alertness, civility training as opposed to military training, it's a prescription for more of the same. And I say rehabilitated, because we are right now putting our police is a horrible mental bind - they need explicit, legal and psychological guidelines as well as a retraction of the anti-terror "shoot first" response.
To greatly compound matters, all our state and federal penitentiaries are run by gangs. Black, brown and white. The guards have made a tacit deal with them that as long as you don't kill the guards, they can do what the want. But NO prosecutor or grand jury will ever send a white cop to a gang-ruled penitentiary for killing an unarmed black, it's a death sentence. You could send them to the minimum security prisons, the ones we send our millionaires to... but we won't. And the cops all KNOW this, meaning they're 007's - a license to kill, and the WORST possible result will be they can't be a cop anymore. Oddly enough, I didn't vote for any of this either.