The United States military just killed an American citizen on the streets of an American city

 

On Sunday, National Guardsmen shot and killed a man in Memphis.   Much about what led to those tragic final moments is still unclear and the investigation remains ongoing.    But what information we have confirmed should concern every person reading this.    The Guard was responding to calls for service alongside Memphis Police.    That means uniformed military personnel are working the streets as local law enforcement. NO TROOPS AS COPS Memphis and Shelby County leaders publicly opposed this deployment before it began. The Republican governor explicitly promised that guardsmen would NOT be involved in law enforcement activities. But federal troops answered police calls anyway. The Posse Comitatus Act was enacted in 1878 to keep the military out of civilian law enforcement. The leaders who wrote it understood that soldiers policing civilians is one of the surest ways a free country stops being free.  Memphis on Sunday ran right past that line. American soldiers are answering 911 calls and using deadly force in an American city.  Our Watch Center investigation team is already on it.  We are filing records requests for every camera in the area and building the timeline from eyewitnesses, local reporting, and law enforcement sources.  Federal troops operating as local police is a threshold this country spent nearly 150 years refusing to cross.  Now that it has, the least we can do is make sure that when the day of accountability comes, there is an honest record of exactly how it went down.