And it's ok to mow them down.

Speaking at a breakfast hosted by New York City's Police Foundation Thursday, the commissioner unveiled a new unit-the Strategic Response Group or SRG-that will be made up of hundreds of officers tasked specifically with counterterrorism and "disorder" policing.

"They'll be equipped and trained in ways that our normal patrol officers are not," the commissioner said. "They'll be equipped with all the extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns that are unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances." Bratton said the SRG "is designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris."

The NYPD spokesman then clarified, they won't actually be carrying machine guns into protests. They'll just "have access to the weapons 'either on them or in their vehicles'". So, they won't be "carrying" them, but they might be "on them"...as hats?

It is pretty insulting that citizens would demand police accountability. And tying up traffic is an unforgivable offense, so i can see why Commissioner Bratton would want to arm his men with machine guns. If we've learned anything from the Civil Rights movement, it's that peaceful protest and civil disobedience are stepping stones to extremism.

Disappointingly, De Blasio seems to be on board with this mischaracterization of protesters as terrorists, supporting the SRG initiative, though refraining from outright endorsing the idea that officers should carry machine guns.

I'm trying to figure out how a reasonable person could see and hear the public outcry against the use of excessive police force and lack of accountability and walk away from that thinking the solution is to arm the police with even bigger guns. That's what you do when you want to shut people up, not if you want to fix a problem. The police are supposed to be working for the citizenry. They shouldn't be a regime that seeks to terrorize the people into obedience. There's a slippery slope here, but it's not the protesters who are in danger of sliding.