Former Congressman – and Cleveland mayor – Dennis Kucinich wrote a must-read post yesterday:

The Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770, was a catalyst toward the American Revolution. Five civilians were killed by the British soldiers. The Declaration of Independence, in condemning the offenses against liberty by George III, stated:

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

 

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

 

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction  foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

• For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us

• For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states

Indeed, the top expert on the militarization of America’s police forces – Washington Post writer Radley Balko, who has testified to Congress and written books on the subject – confirms that the Founders would have seen the militarized police as an unconstitutional standing army:

Balko starts with the provocative proposition that police as we know them in modern America are unconstitutional. “The Founders and their contemporaries would probably have seen even the early-nineteenth-century police forces as a standing army, and a particularly odious one at that,” Balko writes. “Just before the American Revolution, it wasn’t the stationing of British troops in the colonies that irked patriots in Boston and Virginia; it was the England’s decision to use the troops for everyday law enforcement.”

 

Balko links that decision to the oft forgotten Third Amendment, which forbids the quartering of troops in Americans’ homes against their will during peacetime. The Third Amendment is rarely litigated, and the Supreme Court has never heard a case primarily concerning the amendment, but Balko argues that it was included in the Bill of Rights out of a larger concern that a standing army could be used for the purposes of enforcing the law. “The actual quartering of British troops in the private homes of colonists was rare…It was the predictable fallout from positioning soldiers trained for warfare on city streets, among the civilian populace, and using them to enforce law and maintain order that enraged colonists.”

In a post headlined, “Militarized Police: The Standing Army the Founders Warned About“, New American notes:

In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal last August, Radley Balko presented chilling and convincing evidence of the blurring of the line between cop and soldier:

Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-20/founding-fathers-fought-revolutionary-war-stop-type-militarized-police-we-now-have-u

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