The fatal shooting by police of an unarmed black youth in Ferguson, Missouri has — rightly — sparked outrage south of the border. It’s also turning into an occasion for some necessary reflection on what police do.

In an excellent piece for The Intercept, journalist Glenn Greenwald linked the obscure issue of the militarization of local police forces to the tragedy in Ferguson:

The harrowing events of the last week in Ferguson, Missouri — the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager, Mike Brown, and the blatantly excessive and thuggish response to ensuing community protests from a police force that resembles an occupying army — have shocked the U.S. media class and millions of Americans. But none of this is aberrational. It is the destructive by-product of several decades of deliberate militarization of American policing, a trend that received a sustained (and ongoing) steroid injection in the form of a still-flowing, post-9/11 federal funding bonanza, all justified in the name of “homeland security.” This has resulted in a domestic police force that looks, thinks, and acts more like an invading and occupying military than a community-based force to protect the public.

The issue of the militarization of domestic law enforcement is not new — not, at least, to those concerned with civil rights. In June the ACLU released a report on the issue: War Comes Home — The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.

Is a police force armed with the weapons and tactics of an invading army a good thing? Does it make us safer? These questions have received little media attention — until now.

As pointed out by Michael Kempa on CBC’s The Current, police militarization is a Canadian phenomenon, too.

Unfortunately, even current Canadian coverage of this issue tends to play it down. In an otherwise excellent article, Postmedia’s Ashley Csanady wrote:

Police in Canada do have a different approach than their American counterparts and are far less likely to bust out the big guns or sound cannons — officially known as Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs). Most Canadian police employ a community-based model that dates to 19th-century England and Sir Robert Peel. The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP) updated its community policing model in 2013 and it emphasizes de-escalation.

Our police officers may be less likely to deploy sound cannons, but there’s no question that Canadian police sometimes look more like post-apocalyptic military mercenaries than protectors of the peace. Our police services have been acquiring more and more military toys — a dangerous trend that’s gotten little in the way of critical analysis in the mainstream media.

Anyone who’s lived in anarchic Ottawa might be justified in asking: How did our police get by this long without a tank?

Let’s look at a local example. In 2010 the Ottawa Police Service bought a Lenco G3 BearCat for $340,000. The BearCat is equipped with half-inch-thick military steel armoured bodywork, .50 caliber-rated ballistic glass, blast-resistant floors, custom-designed gun ports and — seriously — a roof turret.

Anyone who’s lived in anarchic Ottawa might be justified in asking: How did our police get by this long without a tank? The CBC, CTV and MetroNews all reported on the BearCat’s purchase. The police seemed quite proud of it. But no one asked if it was necessary. No one asked if $340,000 could have been better spent on something — anything — else.

Those who question the police and police budgets are often attacked as ‘soft on crime’. The knee-jerk political reaction is always to give police free rein.

That, at least, was the immediate reaction when I brought up the BearCat purchase on Twitter:

But there will always be extraordinary tragedies, and there will always be people trying to exploit those tragedies to justify expanded police powers. A BearCat won’t prevent the next Moncton massacre.

This is the hard lesson Ferguson is learning now. Just when the riots were at their worst and tensions at their highest, the police changed tactics. Here’s how the Washington Post described it:

The heavy riot armour, the SWAT trucks with sniper posts, the hostile glares: tonight in Ferguson they were gone. A stunning change in tone radiated through the suburban streets where protests had turned violent each of the last four evenings following the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Bigger trucks, more and bigger guns — they may make us feel safer. They don’t actually make us safer. Quite the reverse.

Michael Spratt is a well-known criminal lawyer and partner at the Ottawa law firm Abergel Goldstein & Partners. He has appeared in all levels of court and specializes in complex litigation. Mr. Spratt is frequently called upon to give expert testimony at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. He is a past board member of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association and is on the board of directors of the Defence Counsel Association of Ottawa. Mr. Spratt’s continuing work can be found at www.michaelspratt.com and on twitter at @mspratt

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