"This week on Vice, the militarization of police in America." "Disperse immediately!" "We get tougher on crime by getting bigger and bigger vehicles and bigger and bigger weapons." "We've just gone too far." "And then, the new immigration crisis on our border." "This train is flying." "Ah!" "Fuck!" "There's three armored vans full of dudes who look like Starship Troopers." "There are six or seven immigration police cars that went that way." "In the summer of 2014, the fatal police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown ignited a series of protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri." "Now the incident in Ferguson didn't stay isolated for long." "It sparked protests across the country with polarizing reactions and a resultant media frenzy." "This is a good example of what can happen, uh, if there's too much armor and not enough working together." "Obviously, there is some fragment of the community that is disrespectful of the law, is disrespectful of the police, and the police know it because they're the ones who have to deal with these folks." "You're a cop and they're throwing a Molotov cocktail at you and you're hearing gunshots go off." "What are you gonna do?" "In an effort to see what started this cultural debate, we sent Thomas Morton to Ferguson to see just how the situation unfolded on the ground." "You must disperse immediately." "You are in violation of a state-imposed curfew." "Failure to comply peacefully will result in arrest and/or other actions." "Mike Brown, Mike Brown!" "Do not walk southbound on West Florissant, walk northbound towards Chambers." "Hands up!" "Don't shoot!" "Hands up!" "Don't shoot!" "Hi, it's Thomas." "We're in Ferguson, Missouri." "That tank-looking vehicle with the soldier-looking guys out there is actually police equipment." "There's three armored vans full of dudes who look like Starship Troopers." "All the dudes in camouflage with assault rifles are police officers." "The police aren't just kind of like yelling at people and shining flashlights and stuff, they're actively muzzling their rifles." "That's some bullshit!" "The police's actions completely riled up this crowd." "Something just happened, and they're freaking out." "You are unlawfully assembled." "Whoa!" "Oh, shit!" "They're firing off tear gas canisters." "Oh, fuck, they're coming this way!" "Oh, fuck, that's gas!" " Go, go, go!" " Okay." "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" "Like, no warning for that shit?" "That's insane." "They just fired in every direction." "Fuck!" "The battle between police and protesters in Ferguson is just the latest in a long, long string of terrifying incidents involving extremely aggressive policing tactics and equipment that looks like it was shipped over from Iraq." "Radley Balko has spent the last decade documenting this increasing militarization of American police forces and all the abuses and rights violations that come with it." "His book, "Rise of the Warrior Cop," lays out how small-town American cops ended up with tanks and assault rifles." "When did tanks become a facet of American policing?" "It really wasn't until the early to mid-'80s that we saw the sort of mass transfer of military equipment from the Pentagon to local police departments as a matter of policy." "The Reagan administration really wanted to take the War on Drugs metaphor and make it very literal." "Drugs are menacing our society, and by next year, our spending for drug law enforcement will have more than tripled." "Reagan sort of just informally instructed the Pentagon to start making surplus gear available." "Reagan instituted these federal grants that were tied solely to drug policing." "Reagan's drug war block grants beget the 1033 program, started in 1990 under Bush, which gave surplus army gear of the domestic police departments for use against drugs, provided they use the equipment at least once within a year," "which all but assured that they did." "And this is where we start to see the armored personnel carriers, the tanks, the helicopters, the grenade launchers..." "This really heavy-duty gear that was explicitly designed for use on a battlefield being transferred to police departments for use on American streets and American neighborhoods and against American citizens." "The 1033 program was so popular with police departments, by 1996 the DOD had given out $330 million worth of old military gear." "Now, thanks to surpluses created by our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, cops in America have 1033'ed" "$5 billion worth of used Army gear, and on top of that, since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has given cops an extra $35 billion so they can buy new gear to fight terrorists with." "You have a militarized mentality." "A lot of police departments have switched to these battledress uniforms." "You get the rhetoric." "It's the constant sort of intonation that you're fighting a war, and these are two very fundamentally different jobs." "Unfortunately, I think a lot of politicians think because they both involve carrying guns and using force, uh, that the skill sets are interchangeable." "The ever-growing demand for new military-style equipment has led to a cottage industry:" "private companies who specialize in making armored vehicles, body armor, and the like, specifically for law enforcement." "And the Department of Homeland Security doesn't just give police departments money to buy new stuff from these private suppliers, it actually helps pay for events at which the gear is sold." "One of the big questions raised by what's happening in Ferguson is where do police departments get all this kind of equipment, like giant armored Batman vans like these?" "And one of the answers is here." "We're in a convention hall space filled with vendors' booths." "It's all people hawking tactical gear to various police departments from around the country." "You guys mostly do business with military or..." "I mean, this is a law enforcement thing?" "Um, yeah, commercial law enforcement." "The safety is, uh, right here so you gotta flick that forward, and just go ahead and pull the trigger." "Does this get any attention with the police here?" "We have seen cops interested in them for less lethal scenarios." " How do you make this less lethal?" " I guess..." "With rubber or with a pepper-filled gasking round." "Got it." "Is this a raffle?" "Yes, this is the prize." "$20 to win an AR-15." "Good luck, thank you." "Thank you." "Once they're done shopping, the SWAT teams suit up and respond to two days worth of simulated emergency scenarios scattered around the Bay Area, many incorporating training supplies provided by the previous day's vendors." "There's 35 scenarios, actually." "There's hostage rescue, marine hostage rescue..." "That sounds fun..." "Land nav hostage rescue, rural terrorist camp, bomb-making terrorist, terrorists take over ace train." "Everything seems to be centered around terrorists." "I volunteered to play a dead body in a hallway." "I've already been shot so my role is just to lie down." "Sir, are you okay?" "Take me home!" "I don't know how effective this is in terms of tactical training or even just the use of the money that's being spent on I, but definitely fun." "We have received intelligence that there are about 15 followers in the compound armed with long guns, which include a couple of automatic weapons." "The cult leader realizes that they got an armored vehicle gonna start." "He goes "Okay, let's pull the trigger," sends out the RPG," " and then they start executing people." " Oh, my God." "It's really a mass suicide, but in fact, it's really a murder-suicide." "None of the scenarios we saw left much room for nonviolent solutions." "Police aren't getting trained in de-escalation and in conflict resolution." "Most of their training involves how to use this new weapon and then lots of practice on using that weapon." "And then back in here, the cult leader's basically systematically executing babies." "Show me your hands!" "Show me your hands!" "Show me your hands!" "Go left!" "Off the door right!" "I'm trying to think of the last time there was hostages on a bus in America." "All I can think of right now is "Speed."" "When the amount of hours you spend at the shooting range outnumber the number of hours you spend learning conflict resolution by 10 or 15 to one, you're going to be more likely to use the tool that you've trained more with." "Hands!" "Hands!" "So that's basically how you train people to use equipment like this for police work, but none of this has really addressed the larger question of should we train police to use equipment like this for their police work?" "Is this the best option?" "A, like, two-story tall G.I. Joe tank." "While SWAT teams and their tanks are supposed to be used for extreme, dangerous situations like hostage crises, they now end up getting used for virtually everything..." "Get out of the way!" "From crowd control to low-level drug raids." "Police, don't move!" "Police department, don't move!" "Police department!" "Get down!" "Get down on the ground!" "Get down!" "With you, with you, with you!" "Up, up, up, up!" "Get up!" "Need one!" "Speaking as a former cop, I think we've gone too far." "Norm Stamper was the chief of the Seattle Police Department during the WTO protests in 1999." "He's the guy who put cops in storm trooper uniforms on American streets in front of the eyes of the global media." "Well, I screwed it up royally." "We were totally overwhelmed by numbers, but then we did something really, really foolish." "We tear-gassed non-threatening, non-violent demonstrators who simply wouldn't obey our order." "When we dress police officers like soldiers, they're likely to act like soldiers." "Soldiers follow orders for a living." "Police officers make decisions for a living." "When that kind of mentality, that kind of attire and weaponry and equipment is trotted out in virtually everyday use, we got a problem." "We have American police departments acting like an occupational force." "Public outrage over the soldierization of the American policeman has led to an escalating, seemingly unbreakable cycle, which people protest heavy-handed policing tactics, the police react by using those exact same heavy-handed tactics, it's now escalated to the point" "that not only do the cops represent an occupying army, civilians have gone past protest and begun threatening and attacking individual officers like insurgents under an occupation." "The two cops were in their car when possibly two suspects came up and shot them." "Where speaking out against cops has traditionally been a no man's land in American politics, the situation in Ferguson and around the country has forced legislators to take notice." "No one in Congress, however, has been as outspoken as upstart Kentucky Republican Rand Paul." "So with public outrage mounting, do you think we're reaching a point where the basic citizenry are being made an enemy?" "The hard part about it... and I worry about it from my perspective..." "Is as much as I have outrage, I don't want people to think," ""Gosh, I think police are bad people."" "Police are my neighbors." "They keep me safe." "Even sometimes when they do bad things," "I tend to not want to blame them as much as I blame the system." "We've had this sort of idea that we're going to wipe out drugs by being tough on crime, and we get tougher on crime by getting bigger and bigger vehicles, and bigger and bigger weapons, and more and more intrusive searches." "Police!" "Police, get down!" "Get down!" "Get down!" "There is a disproportionate effect on the African-American community." "Hands up!" "Don't shoot!" "People wonder, "Why are people so mad?"" "Surveys say white people are using drugs at the same rate as black people," "But I think you have four times greater chance to be arrested if you're black for drugs." "Of being shot by the police, it's 28 times greater." "Please don't shoot!" "I think the one general thing that should happen is any of the federal laws that are, I think, over-criminalizing the country..." "Basically, whether it's drugs or cigarettes..." "Do we really wanna use lethal force to stop someone from selling cigarettes?" "Do we really want to use lethal force to burst into houses to see if there are any drugs present?" "I think the public at large is changing their opinions on this." "I don't care whether you're talking to the NAACP or you're talking to a white evangelical church," "I think people are starting to feel, "You know what?"" ""We've gone the wrong direction."" "We've just gone too far." "Don't move." "Get down." "America is facing an immigration crisis on its southern border." "We've seen a surge of unaccompanied children arrive at the border." "The journey is unbelievably dangerous" " for these kids." "And most of these unaccompanied children come from Central America, traveling on a network of trains known simply as "The Beast."" "Not only were 68,000 children apprehended in the last 12 months alone, there were nearly 70,000 families detained." "That's an almost 400% increase from last year." "Wanting to understand better what's behind this tremendous surge of immigrants, especially young children, we sent Suroosh Alvi to investigate this new wave of migration." "Sandra and her three children have come here from El Salvador to start their journey on top of the train known as the "Beast."" "Over 16 feet tall and traveling at speeds of up to 30 mph, over a half million men, women, and children ride on top of these trains each year." "It's been raining all day, the sky has just cleared up, and Sandra and her family are on the train and they're gonna ride it all night." "Here we go." "Here they go." "This train is flying." "This thing must be going about 30 miles an hour." "So just now, they were all yelling, "Rama, Rama," which means branch." "So we know to get our heads down so we don't lose our heads." " Ah!" "Fuck!" " Rama, Rama!" "Ruben Figueroa is a human rights activist who has spent nine years helping migrants make this trip safely." "Ow!" "Ow!" "Oh, shit!" "Ow!" "Fuck!" "People have been traveling on "The Beast" since the '90s, and it used to be a relatively peaceful journey." "Still dangerous, because you could fall, get mutilated, or being exposed to the elements, but now there are new kinds of dangers." "The cartels kidnap people, they rob, they kill." "The statistic, what the number of women getting raped, is incredibly high, it's shocking, it's upwards of 60% they say." "It's a daunting fucking journey." "Have you seen a lot of young kids on the trains?" "When you look at how difficult this journey is, it's natural to wonder why anyone would expose their families, especially young children, to these conditions." "It was a question I asked Sandra while we were waiting for the train." "Why did you leave your home in El Salvador?" "This has become a common threat in El Salvador, which now has the highest concentration of gang members of any country in Central America." "With the fourth highest murder rate in world, this small country now sees 10 murders a day and has the people of Santa Ana, Sandra's hometown, living in constant fear." "We are in Santa Ana, which is about an hour outside of San Salvador." "Like so many other parts of the country, this town is overrun by the gangs." "They're fighting, vying for control, and terrorizing the community." "We spoke to a local store owner about why so many families are willing to do whatever it takes to leave." "It was only after that their extortion demands began." "Are people living in fear?" "Are there a lot of people who want to leave?" "With the violence so bad that local reports claim nearly half the country's population now wants to leave... the authorities are waging an all-out war on these gangs." "We're at the central police station in San Salvador with the anti-gang unit." "We're about to go out on a raid with them." "We're going after eight members of the 18th Street Gang, who they believe killed two innocent people." "We're with a large group that's gonna break into 10 different groups that's gonna hit 13 different homes at the same time." "These are just four of an estimated 20,000 gang members in El Salvador." "And as we were told by police commissioner Pedro Gonzales, the director of the anti-gang unit, this is a fight that never ends." "And how did this situation get so bad that it necessitated creating an anti-gang unit?" "It turns out, the biggest gangs in El" "Salvador actually started in the United States." "Both the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs were formed by refugees of El Salvador's civil war in the 1980s." "When they came to America, they formed these organizations to protect themselves from the brutal street gangs of L.A." "The gangs became so powerful that after they were arrested, they actually became stronger in the U.S. prison system, leading to a new policy in dealing with them." "We have discovered that these gang members are also illegal aliens." "Since many of the gang members were undocumented, deporting them seemed like the most natural solution." "We're always trying to create criminal charges as part of our gang enforcement program." "When all else fails, we're gonna use the immigration laws to get these violent gang members out of the community and back to their home countries." "But El Salvador was simply no match for the nearly 60,000 criminals that were sent back there." "Now an unintended cycle has been created where the violent gangs that were exported from the U.S." "are causing the massive flood of migrants on our southern border." "Migrants like Sandra who sell everything they own to take the 1,400 mile, two-month-long journey through Mexico." "A trip which starts here at the Guatemalan border." "So that bridge over there is the legal crossing between Guatemala and Mexico, but every day hundreds of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, do the illegal crossing on these boats." "As a result of pressure from the United States government," "Mexican immigration is now following our own border patrol strategy of using checkpoints, which force migrants to travel on foot through difficult terrain." "Feels like 110 degrees out here, feels like the desert." "In this hostile environment, they have no choice but to take shelter wherever they can, sleeping in derelict buildings or even out in the open." "Despite all that, they still make it onto the trains, but the immigration police continue to increase their pressure." "So the immigration police have shown up just before this train was supposed to leave and now everybody is freaking the fuck out, scrambling, jumping off the train." "There are six or seven immigration police cars that went that way, and so everybody is just looking underneath to see where they are." "They feel like they're getting surrounded so they can round them up and corral them all." "While we lost Sandra and her family in one of these raids, this is just one of many tactics which have resulted in Mexico deporting more than 90,000 migrants this year." "Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands continue to find their way north." "At Saltillo, we watched as migrants completed their journey on "The Beast."" "This is the point where their journey ends and our immigration debate begins." "We are in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico." "Right there is Laredo, Texas, and this is the Rio Grande River." "And no matter what the governments do, whether it's tightening the border in America or the Mexican government raiding the trains in Arriaga, as we saw, everyone we spoke to said the same thing, that the governments can try what they want," "but the migrants will adjust and continue to find a way and that immigration is not going to go anywhere." "As long as there is violence in those countries, people are gonna flee." "And while the border patrol apprehended nearly a half million undocumented migrants on the Mexican border this year, we received word that, against all odds," "Sandra made her way into Texas, where her family was apprehended but eventually released to the custody of relatives in Los Angeles." "When we met you, you told us about Jose's story and the threats that he was having at school by the gangs." "How do you feel now?" "Do you feel safer?" "While they are safe from the gangs for now, the fate of Sandra and her children will ultimately be decided by a judge in immigration court." "In the meantime, she cannot work and is forced to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day." "Was it all worth it?"