Cities are cutting back on vitally needed social services, while at the same time, buying expensive military gear for their police departments.
In a society that tends to avert its gaze from the homeless, the hungry, the addicted and the mentally ill, the Occupy movement’s compassion has become an albatross around its neck. “We don’t exclude the people at the margins,” one protester at Occupy Oakland told me. “We invite them in and feed them.”
Around the country, cities are cutting back on vitally needed social services. At the same time, with the help of federal homeland security grants, they’re spending money on high-tech military gear for their police departments.
As Stephen Grant, author of Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, told Democracy Now!“there’s been a longstanding shift in North America and Europe towards paramilitarized policing, using helicopter-style systems, using infrared sensing, using really, really heavy militarized weaponry.”
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