“Do Not Resist” and the Crisis of Police Militarization

Three years ago, when the Tsarnaev brothers set off a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding two hundred and sixty-four, Craig Atkinson, a New York filmmaker, looked on with as much horror as anyone else. But he noticed something, too: the police in Boston and its suburbs sent armored cars into the streets and deployed officers dressed like Storm Troopers, who carried assault rifles and fanned out across neighborhoods as though they were in an infantry division in Afghanistan. Atkinson asked himself, when did local police forces, in their equipment and tactics, come to resemble armies of occupation?