National Guard Ready for the Front Lines of Michael Brown Protests in Ferguson

Armed members of the National Guard could end up quelling racially charged protests that could turn violent after a Ferguson, Missouri, grand jury on Monday refused to indict 28-year-old white police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black civilian shot and killed by Wilson last summer.

The National Guard has been in Ferguson for a week, after Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency on Nov. 17. Nixon’s action was pre-emptive: The National Guard was also dispatched to Ferguson this summer, but only after people protesting Brown’s shooting clashed with Missouri law enforcement officers.

Those protests revealed a militarized American police state. After rioting and looting broke out after the shooting, law enforcement officers unleashed weapons of war provided to police through the Pentagon’s Excess Property Program, which has supplied police across the country with some $4.3 billion in gear since 1997.

In Ferguson, this program provided assault rifles, bulletproof vests, and military vehicles built to withstand blasts from improvised explosive devices. An October report on police response conducted by Amnesty International determined that police violated "international standards on the intentional use of lethal force." The federal government is also conducting an investigation into the shooting. 

It’s not unusual for the National Guard to be deployed to quell unrest across the country. However, these deployments have the potential to turn deadly, as they did at Kent State University in 1970, when Guardsmen fired on unarmed Vietnam War protesters, killing four and wounding nine others.

In an effort to prevent fresh violence — two-thirds of Ferguson’s population is black while the police force is almost entirely white — Nixon has changed how law enforcement authorities would respond to any new violence. Last summer, the Missouri State Highway Patrol was in charge of the response. Now, the St. Louis County Police Department is expected to take the lead.

During this summer’s unrest, International rivals used images from the protests to embarrass the United States on the international stage. In a series of tweets in August attributed to the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khamenei accused the United States of racial discrimination and of violating African Americans’ civil rights, Foreign Policy reported. FP also reported that Russian media used the protests to accuse the United States of double standards for press freedom after journalists covering the protests were arrested.

The more immediate concern in Ferguson is that the grand jury decision will set off a wave of violent confrontations. Leading up to Monday’s decision, community organizers hinted at unrest if Wilson is not indicted.

"If they can’t serve justice in this, the people have every right to go out and express their rage in a manner that is equal to what we have suffered," Ashley Yates, a co-founder of Millennial Activists United, said last month, according to the Guardian.

If this occurs, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay said last week that the National Guard "will be used in a secondary role."

"The way we view this, the Guard is not going to be confronting the protesters and will not be on (the) front line interacting directly with demonstrators," Slay said, according to the Associated Press.

Ferguson isn’t the only city where protests could turn ugly. The FBI has already warned law enforcement officials that the decision could lead to violent protests across the country, according to ABC News.