Ferguson

Ferguson, Missouri, now becomes a theater of everything wrong with our growing police state. While the problem of overbearing police force and police militarization disproportionately affects some groups, this is an issue affecting all of us. At the end of the day, authoritarianism is color-blind.

As Rand Paul said in an editorial for Time today,

"When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury—national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture—we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands."

While this started with anger over a police culture too willing to use lethal force, the citizen control effort launched in response to civil unrest has taken the spotlight. I'm glad that the media isn't boxing this as some small-town racial issue, but looking at the bigger picture of police violence and questioning the overwhelming imbalance of power between those enforcing the law and the citizens who pay them to do so.

For a variety of reasons, a local police force should be no better armed than the general population that hired them.