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US cop who shot unarmed black teen named

WASHINGTON: At the best of times, amid peace, harmony, and all that good stuff, Americans know never to mess with cops, a distinctly American term whose etymology is traced to everything from the copper badges policemen wore to the Latin word capere — to grab or apprehend. In the worst of times, they would like to turn and run, but it is not wise to do that either.Even when one is pulled over by a traffic cop in America, recommended practice is you sit with both hands, fully visible on the steering wheel, and wait for the cop to walk over to you with his hand never far from his gun holster (after he has finished checking out your license place and record on his computer-equipped patrol car). When he flashes a blinding tactical torch made by companies such as Blackhawk or BrightStrike on your face (if it is nighttime), you respond quietly to his request, made with exaggerated politeness, for, "license plate or registration...sir."It is America at its menacing best, a ritual that is repeated thousands of times in neighborhoods and city streets across the country. Even lawmakers, government officials, and journalists are not spared of the hazard, as reporters for Washington Post and Huffington Post discovered this week in Ferguson, Missouri, where the press gang had descended to cover racial tensions following the shooting of an unarmed black youth by a white police officer, now identified as Darren Wilson .Cops barged into a McDonalds which the two reporters were using to work on their story, asked them to hoof it. When one of them began shooting a video of their eviction with his cellphone, the cops roughed them up, handcuffed them, and arrested them. They were shoved into a patrol car where a clergyman who had already been arrested was seated.The reporters were released within half-an-hour with no charges (it is not illegal to shoot videos and they did not resist arrest) after news of their arrest rippled across social media (no word about the clergyman). But Michael Brown was nowhere near as lucky.(Demonstrators protest in the street where teenager Michael Brown was killed on August 14, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.)The 18-year-old black youth was shot dead on August 9 when he reportedly had his back to the police officer and has his hands up in the air in a gesture of surrender (after, according to the police, he first assaulted the office and tried to snatch his gun). On Friday, police released documents alleging Brown was a "primary suspect" in a "convenience story robbery," although he was said to have walked out on a store clerk with a box of cigars after an argument.Ferguson's police force has 53 police officers of whom 50 are white and three black, although the city is 70 per cent African-American.Besides racism, the incident has now focused attention on the overt militarization of cops in what many people are calling the Police States of America , a country with the largest prison population in the world, mostly of blacks and minorities. Visuals of police in Ferguson and other places in full military combat gear, "images we're used to seeing from places like Gaza, Turkey, or Egypt, not from a midwestern suburb of 21,000 people," in the words of one writer, has bestirred a society that has been indifferent to the arming of American police.While the easy availability of weapons leading to overall gun violence has been subject of much attention, the militarization of the police has received less scrutiny. Terms such as SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams and MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles are common in policing vocabulary. American police, say civil libertarians like Radley Balko,"author of "Rise of the Warrior Cop," are becoming too much like soldiers.Indeed, much of their demeanor and weaponry comes from America's military and its take-no-prisoner mindset. The Defense Department's excess property program, known as the 1033 Program, "permits the Secretary of Defense to transfer, without charge, excess US Department of Defense (DoD) personal property to state and local law enforcement agencies (LEAs)." The program has transferred more than $4.3 billion in military equipment to local law enforcement since its inception in 1997, including half a billion dollars worth equipment in 2013 alone.No wonder American police now look better armed than many militaries across the world with armored carriers and weapons more suited to the battlefield. The US may have lost wars to the much-ridiculed "Charlies," "gooks," "towel heads," and "sand niggers" (pejorative terms used for Vietnamese, Taliban, Arabs etc), but they sure look ready to beat up their own people at home.