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The shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, a district of St. Louis County in Missouri, and the spate of civil unrest that followed – bringing the ongoing state violence inflicted on African-Americans to broad public light – could set a precedent for the future of American society, according to a senior Iraq War veteran and Pentagon defense analyst.

Terron Sims, an African-American activist who focuses on local and national Democratic politics and previously served five years in the United States Army, said during an interview last month that without a fundamental cultural and institutional change in American policing across the country, the United States could see more Ferguson-type events in the near future.

Sims was a company commander during the 2003 Iraq War whose job was to engage with the local civilian population in Baghdad on behalf of the US military. He was the main senior US Army officer liaising between the Coalition Provisional Authority, the UN, and Baghdad’s Tisa Nissan district, where he facilitated and mentored the local government – without having to resort to force. He later served as a senior operations manager and analyst tasking units for worldwide Army counter-terrorism operations and creating the Pentagon’s installation budget systems.

Following his military service, Sims served on Barack Obama’s defense policy team during his 2008 presidential campaign and represented Obama himself as a campaign surrogate. He went on to become active in Washington, DC, Democratic politics, in particular working to advance the role of black and ethnic minority communities in the political process. In 2009, he won the Josephine Marshall Award for his work in the Democratic Black Caucus and last year was selected by the Virginia Leadership Institute among top 10 black leaders.

In an interview in Washington, DC, where Sims is president of the North Virginia Black Democrats and a leading national security expert on the Board of Principals at the Truman National Security Project, he spoke about whether the Ferguson crisis offered a taste of things to come.

“This is a taste of the present, my friend. We’re already here. This is America, today,” said Terron Sims. “And if we don’t deal with the root cause in terms of widespread racial discrimination against black people, this will be our tomorrow.”

The Ferguson crisis has sparked a national debate on the culture of policing in the United States toward black communities, as well as the increasing militarization of the police due to a federal Pentagon program providing military-grade equipment to local police forces at little or no cost.

“Police conduct in Ferguson is a travesty and wake-up call. There are simply no circumstances in the US where the use of military-grade equipment could ever be justified to police civilian communities.”

On Tuesday, September 16, Lt. Col. Jon Belmar, the top police officer in St. Louis County, justified the extensive deployment of military-grade equipment to respond to Ferguson unrest. “Had we not had the ability to protect officers with those vehicles, I am afraid that we would have to engage people with our own gunfire,” Belmar told USA Today. “I really think having the armor gave us the ability not to have pulled one trigger . . . I think the military uses armor to be able to provide an offensive force, and police departments use trucks like that so they don’t have to.”

The recent provision of three grenade launchers, 61 rifles and a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle to the Los Angeles School police department prompted civil rights and education groups to write to the US Defense Department demanding an end to the federal supply program to the LA school system. One unidentified police official reportedly said that the weapons were needed “for the safety of staff, students, and personnel” and that the grenade launchers and armored vehicle would only be used in “very specific circumstances,” but did not elaborate on the nature of those circumstances.

In contrast, Sims, a West Point Military Academy graduate and company commander during the 2003 Iraq War, said, “Police conduct in Ferguson is a travesty and wake-up call. There are simply no circumstances in the US where the use of military-grade equipment could ever be justified to police civilian communities.”

During his Iraq service, Sims was principal civil military officer responsible for liaising with civilians and civilian authorities in Baghdad. He went on to become deputy chief of the US Army’s Joint Training Readiness Center at Fort Polk, finally serving as a senior Pentagon analyst before retiring into civilian life.

“The cops that are capable of shooting peaceful, black Americans don’t have relationships with the black community.”

“We had to deal with far worse than what the cops on the streets of Ferguson were facing,” Sims recounted. “But we had to be disciplined. My squadron didn’t use force against a single civilian. In fact, part of my job was making sure that our squad worked with and alongside the civilians in Tisa Nissan district, in Baghdad, to ease the transition from a military-run institution to civilian-led government.”

During our interview, Terron Sims could barely conceal his disgust at the behavior of police officers in Ferguson toward civilian protestors. “I can’t speak for the whole US Army in Iraq, but if our squadron could do it (restrain from using force), I don’t understand why American cops can’t.”

The problem, he said, is that racism continues to be a major problem in American police forces: “This is about an entrenched culture of policing that doesn’t work with and alongside communities. Instead, we have police officers roaming around seeing the local community as outsiders, or even worse, as a homogenous enemy. The cops that are capable of shooting peaceful, black Americans don’t have relationships with the black community. They don’t have any outreach.”

Asked how the police should have handled the situation, he said, “The first thing I would’ve done if I was the police chief was reach out to black community leaders. But obviously in this case, the police clearly don’t have the first idea who the community leaders are. But to be honest, if I was the police chief, I’d be asking myself hard questions about how I’d allowed it get to this point in the first place.”

A believer in the political process, Sims is currently outreach director for the Arlington County Democratic Committee and chairman of the Veterans and Military Families Caucus for the Democratic Party of Virginia, and he has also drafted policy for the Democratic National Committee. In that context, his verdict on what Ferguson means for the state of America today is damning.

“The shooting of Michael Brown did not come out of the blue,” he told me. “Let’s not beat about the bush here. It came about through a deepening culture of unaccountable racism. And it’s not just about police racism. Obviously in Ferguson we’re looking at years of police repression targeted largely at black people, but it goes deeper than that.”

“An African American male is killed every 28 hours by US police or vigilantes, with little or no accountability.”

Police repression, Sims explained, must “be understood as part of a wider racial crisis in American society. “You look at a place like Ferguson, and you see rampant unemployment, poverty and illiteracy in the black community. These trends have persisted and worsened for years. And there’s no money to improve things,” he said. “Local government is not investing in education. It’s not investing in jobs, in infrastructure. But Ferguson is not an isolated case. Shootings of innocent black people in the United States by cops is at epidemic levels. That follows on the back of massive inequalities between white and black people across America.”

It is now widely recognized that the racial divide in the United States has worsened in recent decades along economic lines. In 1970, 33.6 percent of blacks and 10 percent of whites were impoverished. In 2012, 35 percent of blacks lived in poverty, compared to 13 percent of whites. While 5 percent of white Americans are unemployed, more than double – 11 percent – are black. Nearly three quarters of whites own their own home, compared to just 43 percent of blacks. And in the last 25 years, the wealth gap between whites and blacks has nearly tripled. Median household wealth for whites is about $91,400, but a measly $6,400 for black people

Economic inequalities are compounded by the acceleration in police repression of black and ethnic minority communities over the last two years. Official police records demonstrate that, notwithstanding deficiencies in the way information is catalogued, the victims of police shootings are overwhelmingly male, heavily young and disproportionately black.

A startling independent report into “extrajudicial killings” of black people in the United States by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) – an activist organization with chapters in Atlanta, Detroit, Fort Worth-Dallas, Jackson, New Orleans, New York City, Oakland and Washington, DC – raises deeper questions. The report released in May 2013, months before the outbreak of violence in Ferguson, found that an African American male is killed every 28 hours by US police or vigilantes, with little or no accountability. In 2012, a total of 313 black people were unlawfully killed in this way.

Police forces end up being brought into black communities “with the marching orders, equipment and the mentality of an occupying army.”

The report contextualizes this systematic violence against black communities by US police forces as part of a wider system of racist repression in which local police departments are entwined with a network of domestic security structures encompassing “the FBI, Homeland Security, CIA, Secret Service, prisons, and private security companies, along with mass surveillance and mass incarceration.” Together, this domestic national security apparatus “wages a grand strategy of ‘domestic pacification’ ” through endless “containment campaigns” against groups designated as problematic or dangerous to the system.

The MXGM analysis coheres disturbingly well with mounting evidence of Pentagon contingency planning for “domestic insurgencies” triggered by social, economic, or food shocks, or natural disasters. US federal government planning documents suggest that the Pentagon’s role in militarizing local police forces is linked to growing concerns about domestic civil unrest due to the state coming under increasing strain from elevated climate, energy and economic risks.

My in-depth investigation last month into the Pentagon’s controversial Minerva research initiative has, for instance, exposed how the US Defense Department is funding universities to develop complex new data-mining tools capable of automatically ranking the threat level from groups and individuals defined as politically “radical.” Such tools, which according to NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake could feed directly into the algorithms used to fine-tune the CIA’s drone kill lists abroad, are increasingly being used to assess threats from activist and civil society groups in the US homeland.

In a society where racial tensions are intensifying, this dynamic inevitably affects marginalized black and ethnic minority communities disproportionately. Police forces end up being brought into black communities “with the marching orders, equipment and the mentality of an occupying army that inevitably results in systematic extrajudicial killings of citizens without respect for their human rights,” the MXGM report found.

“The adoption of military tactics, equipment, training, and weapons leads to law enforcement adopting a war-like mentality,” concurred journalist Adam Hudson on the MXGM report’s conclusions. “They come to view themselves as soldiers fighting against a foreign enemy rather than police protecting a community.”

Given the extent of America’s racial divide, does this suggest that the civil rights movement has failed? I put the question to Terron Sims.

“It’s not that the movement has failed – it’s that it’s not over,” he told me. “In Ferguson, the conditions have been brewing for a while. Black people are being shot all across America, but the reason it hasn’t kicked off everywhere is because the demographics aren’t the same. Ferguson has a fairly sizable and concentrated black population, unlike with the shooting of Trayvon Martin for instance in a district in Florida, where the black community is more dispersed and certainly more affluent than in St. Louis.”

Indeed, Ferguson represents a microcosm of these problems, with wealth inequalities markedly worse than the national average. For example, census figures for 2012 in St. Louis County show that nearly half of all African American men are unemployed, compared to just 16 percent for white men.

“At those levels of poverty and inequality, with no jobs available and nothing to do all day, that’s a serious level of despair and hopelessness,” said Sims. “You prod and poke a situation like that, and it’s going to start simmering. You shoot a kid in the street in a situation like that for no good reason, well then it’s going to explode.”

If nothing is done to address these bigger, deeper issues of racial discrimination and inequality, does Ferguson represent the future of the United States?

“Of course it could,” said Sims. “I’m not saying Fergusons could happen everywhere, but for sure, if things continue as they are, there’ll come a point where the combination of unaccountable, rampant and racist police repression will inflame community tensions in circumstances of growing levels of deprivation and hopelessness. And that’s where race riots could become far more of a norm than we might expect. So unless something changes, yes, Ferguson is our future.”