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Militarized Police in Baton Rouge Draw Global Attention

Above: Photo: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

PHOTOGRAPHS AND VIDEO of heavily armed police officers wearing body armor and helmets arresting protesters in Baton Rouge over the weekend reverberated on social networks and in the world’s media, focusing new attention on the militarization of police forces across the United States.

The image that drew the most comment, taken by Jonathan Bachman for Reuters, showed a young woman in a dress standing serenely on a road outside the Baton Rouge police headquarters as two Louisiana State Police officers dressed for battle rushed to arrest her.

Ieshia Evans, a nurse from Brooklyn, was arrested on Saturday outside the Baton Rouge Police Department during a protest against the killing of Alton Sterling. Photo: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters
Ieshia Evans, a nurse from Brooklyn, was arrested on Saturday outside the Baton Rouge Police Department during a protest against the killing of Alton Sterling. Photo: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

The woman was later identified as Ieshia Evans, a nurse and mother from Brooklyn, who had come to protest the killing of Alton Sterling by two Baton Rouge police officers last week.

Evans, who was released on Sunday, wrote on Facebook that she had no desire to speak to the media until she could get home to her young son. “I appreciate the well wishes and love, but this is the work of God,” she added. “I am a vessel!”

She was one of 102 protesters arrested on Saturday night outside the police station on Airline Highway. Another of those detained and held overnightwas DeRay Mckesson, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist, who was live-streaming video from the shoulder of the road when he was tackled by an officer.

Another photograph taken by Bachman, showing a police officer’s knee pinning an African-American protester’s head to the pavement, struck a chord with photo editors in Iran and Russia, where the crackdown on peaceful protesters made complaints from the United States government about repression of dissent in those countries seem hypocritical.

There were more arrests on Sunday, and more images of what looked like a clear mismatch between the threat of violence from protesters and the aggressive use of force by police officers confronting them.

As the Baton Rouge Advocate reported, a demonstration in a residential neighborhood of the city on Sunday only got more heated when about 300 marchers were blocked by officers wearing gas masks and driving an armored vehicle with an ear-splitting sound cannon called an LRAD, or long-range acoustic device.

As the standoff got more tense, the protesters screamed, “They’re going to gas us,” and “Put down your guns,” video recorded at the scene showed.

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