Conservative pundit Erick Erickson believes it shouldn’t be necessary for a “young white man” to die at the hands of police to raise the issue of police militarization in America.
In a post titled “Must We Have a Dead White Kid?”, the RedState.com editor-in-chief claimed Friday that conservatives have “long lamented” the stockpiling of arms at the Department of Homeland Security and been mocked by the media for doing so.
He wrote that it was only when two journalists, the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery and the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly, were arrested while covering protests against police in Ferguson, Mo. that the media started to pay attention to “overkill by local police forces.”
Erickson continued:
With the rise of terrorism in the United States, major metropolitan areas may need police trained to serve occasionally as paramilitary outfits. But not all police forces are major metropolitan areas.
The odds of a young white man being shot by the police in similar circumstances to Michael Brown are not as high as those of a young black man. But we should not need to have a young white man shot and killed for the rest of the nation to pay attention to the issue.
Just because Michael Brown may not look like you should not immediately serve as an excuse to ignore the issues involved. Likewise, a media suddenly invested in stories of government overreach should not be dismissive of stories of bureaucrats, not just police, abusing the public trust.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) also touched on the racial tension in Ferguson in a Thursday op-ed against police militarization for Time magazine. The shooting of an unarmed black teenager in a community that is two-thirds black makes it “almost impossible for many Americans not to feel like their government is targeting them,” he wrote.
