The Stanford prison experiment demonstrates this phenomenon when college students were randomly assigned roles as guards. Despite knowing that they were role-playing, almost all of the students began to act out their roles, as they perceived them, to include enforcing authoritarian measures and psychological torture. The experiment, which was stopped early due to its shocking results, stands for the principle that roles can define behavior.
With the recent events that have unfolded in Ferguson, a problem that has received little attention-and what attention it did receive was characterized largely by local anecdote-has now transformed into the subject of national conversation. The public is witnessing the problem firsthand: a small, local police force, equipped with late generation military-grade weaponry and training treats the community it serves as if they are an occupied territory in a war. It is hardly surprising that the community has responded forcefully. Particularly given the complicated and sensitive racial issues surrounding the killing of Michael Brown, with what appears as a wildly disproportionate police response simply fueled the fire. Would the nightly violence that gripped the nation's attention since August 9 have escalated to such a crescendo had the initial police reaction not been so, well, military? .
The answer seems obvious but what the events in Ferguson have also done is bring to light additional problems. First, it is transparently evident that the Ferguson Police Department failed and is failing to deploy its military equipment properly. Second, it seems apparent that the Department of Defense Excess Property Program (known colloquially as the DOD 1033 Program), which was designed to better equip local communities to handle law enforcement matters themselves, has done no such thing given the multilayer response of both federal and state authorities in Ferguson to alleviate the chaos that resulted from the Police Department's excessive reaction.
