With the ongoing civil chaos in Ferguson, Missouri, we once again are seeing ominous images of over militarized police posted all over social media. The frightening images look like this:

They also look like this:

Whoops. That’s not a current photo of a SWAT team. That’s not even a real SWAT team. It’s taken from the very popular TV program from the mid-1970’s, S.W.A.T. The show was popular enough that a movie and spin-off toys were derived from it.

How did we go from police as beloved protectors of the community to a force so feared that Rand Paul and even the staid Heritage Foundation issue warnings about over militarization?

One of my favorite writers, the brilliant Daniel Greenfield, writing in FrontPage Magazine, puts some perspective on how the police became militarized.

Go back to the bad old days of the 1960’s, beginning with the Los Angeles Watts riots in 1965, where police were outmatched by street fighters. The aforementioned Heritage Foundation article notes:

 The introduction of military hardware and tactics was prompted by events that exposed serious weaknesses with traditional police tactics in certain settings. These events included the 1965 Watts riot, ex-Marine Charles Whitman’s indiscriminate sniping of innocent people in Texas in 1966, and the LAPD’s confrontation with a group of heavily armed Black Panthers in 1969. The confrontation with the Black Panthers gave rise to so much mayhem that Chief Gates, with extreme reluctance, took the unprecedented step of calling the Secretary of Defense for permission to use a grenade launcher. In each instance, the police not only confronted mass violence, but were themselves specifically targeted.

I am of the Baby Boom generation, and I recall those incidents, along with others. Growing up in northwest Indiana near Chicago, I watched scenes like this as they unfolded live on television:

This is from the Chicago riots that erupted during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.  Being a very young, traditional teenager, images like this — along with awareness of other race and campus riots of the time — were frightening. I saw my country coming apart, and to me the police and the military were between me and complete anarchy.

So when I see people of an extreme libertarian bent post inflammatory images and articles to deride police and express their distaste for them, I wince. I’m guessing many of them are considerably younger than me with little knowledge of the time, but I remember those days of Watts, Detroit, and Chicago. I also know that police have done some really stupid things recently, as they did in rural Texas and in Wisconsin to a helpless baby deer.  And I know that firepower has the ability to corrupt like little else does, maybe even more than political power. But a little history and perspective is in order.

Greenfield concludes thus, and I agree with him:

It’s reasonable to suggest that the police are overmilitarized. Law enforcement tends to abuse the tools that are handed to it. But we have too many conversations that act as if the militarization is just some insane thing that the police began doing on their own for no reason whatsoever.

This was very much a cycle of escalation. And police forces were confronting terrorism and urban guerrilla warfare. They still are.