zlacker

I remember being in Grand Central Station, NYC, not long after 9/11, and noticed a student sitting on a step — right next to their head was the barrel of a casually dangled rifle, hanging off the shoulder of a cop who happened to be standing next to them.

We’ve become pretty normalized to it, but a militarized police force wasn’t always a thing in America.

The scenes of the WTO protests in Seattle two decades ago, of cops in riot gear shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of people — those images were pretty shocking at the time. Now it’s a familiar scene, one that is currently playing out in cities around the country and beyond.