The shooting of Mike Brown by a police officer in Ferguson (Missouri, USA) while he held his hands up, brought forth not only the extremely racist and heavy handed behaviour the American police force is infamous for, but also the astonishing degree to which police forces, not only in the US, but across the western world, have turned to something that resembles an occupying force.

American journalists have correctly pointed out that this is partly because a lot of the military equipment meant to be used in war zones abroad, has ended up in the hands of local police departments, as this graph portrays:

It shouldn't be a surprise as these acquisitions and the training they require, are some of the very few ways they have to increase their budgets. But that is only a small part of the picture. The problem, as I mentioned above, is global. In the US, the need to recycle military gear might be producing the spectacular images coming out of Ferguson, like these:

But the theme holds in most European countries too. And it goes way beyond gear; police is trained to hate “the enemy”, like an army would. The arrests and attacks on journalists covering the protests, stands testament to that. Here’s another example, from a story I wrote some time ago:

“If I saw you sitting there a few years ago, I’d be afraid of you. Maybe more than you would be of me. We’re told you all carry knives and will throw molotovs at us. It’s all changed since I moved out here, the brainwash has worn off”. These words are marked in a friends’ travel journal, spoken to him by a security guard in the Greek Embassy of a Middle Eastern country that will not be named here to avoid unnecessary trouble for him. My friend has long hair and a beard. For this 30-something guard who was previously serving in the infamous riot control units in Athens, he is the embodiment of what was to him “the enemy”, the anarchist, the troublemaker.

The guard said much more, about the way their superiors talk to them and try to inspire the idea they are above the citizen they are tasked with protecting, for instance. His comments backdrop any meaningful discussion of policing and its increasing militarization; scenarios in which living, breathing human beings are shaped by the conditions of their job environments, like the rest of us, and are desensitized to those conditions, again, just like the rest of us.

In Exarchia, a bohemian, ever-rebellious neighborhood in downtown Athens that has at least two squads of riot police and groups of DELTA (urban rapid intervention units) permanently stationed here at all times. The joke goes “Exarchia is the only neighborhood in the western world occupied by a foreign force”. Right outside the house where I’m usually a guest, two rather big 20-somethings in full body armour, carrying shields, tear-gas canisters and what appear to be Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, are guarding a couple of trashcans and a broken down moped, permanently. They're always twitchy. With any loud noise, their helmets come on, as if an attack is imminent.

The same picture repeats itself as one walks down toward the large avenues of central Athens. DELTA and DI.AS squads are stationed outside a parking lot, dark full body armor under the blazing sun, submachine guns hanging from their shoulders. Young faces. Some shaved heads, usually suggesting a supporter of the Greek neo-nazi party the Golden Dawn.

After an anti-fascist demonstration in October 2012, it was this group that attacked the anti-fascists in order to protect a group of Golden Dawn activists marching through a neighborhood where large and diverse immigrant communities live. Fifteen people were arrested that night and they later reported that they were tortured in custody, with the coroner’s office confirming their complaints later.

Now we hear some of them are training with the army’s special forces.

The Minister of Citizens Protection, Nikos Dendias, tried his best to defend his forces and announced that not only he believes in the Greek police but will also equip them with better and heavier weaponry to deal with “armed thugs”. This is only the icing on the cake of a long process that has seen the Greek police going from lightly equipped constables in the beginning of the last century, to machine-gun-toting youngsters more recently. So why is a minister promising more equipment and, as a side note, better pay?

It should be pointed out that under the two memorandums of understanding between Greece and its lenders (the IMF, the ECB and the EU, collectively known as the Troika) only two sections of Greece’s budget escaped the brutal cuts that followed: defense and policing. While the Greek army is a topic perhaps too complex to explore here, with massive contracts between Greece and some of its lenders (like the US, Germany and France) for the purchase of largely unneeded equipment forbidding cuts, the police is another matter altogether.

This is how DELTA squads, permanently station around the city, often look like:

Throughout Europe, as in Greece, there is this common theme playing out. The police are increasingly used to defend governments and property against grievances born out of financial policies. This includes not only public finances, but the highly sought after private investments in ailing countries like Greece. In Spain for instance, riot police are used to evict people who can’t afford mortgages, after a highly unregulated banking sector sent the Spanish economy up in flames in 2009.

The resistance from activists is substantial, and is met by police in full gear wielding tear-gas and even plastic bullets as necessary. This points to something that might explain the level of violence unleashed during demonstrations in Greece and other countries under austerity or not. Overtime has become a way for police to supplement their income. By turning peaceful demonstrations into full-blown riots, police officers get access to the bottomless pit of money available for overtime.

The more violent they are, the more likely they are to be used in future demonstrations, presenting them with incentives to endanger themselves and citizens. This is what also drives the constant demand for more and heavier equipment. Especially when police are called to defend private investment (an irony that isn’t lost on them as an off-the-record conversation with a riot police officer revealed to me) they feel they ought to be given this extra protection and money.

In the same way that the US saw the militarization of its police force after 9/11, with equipment and advanced training becoming the only sources of funding for small departments and with banks stepping in as sponsors, leading to the use of police officers as private enforcers for evictions and confiscations of property, the new “austerity Europe” is increasingly pushing its police forces away from consensus policing and into the murky territory of policy enforcement.

The city of London buying water canons, following the desires of the city’s mayor Boris Johnson nonetheless, is illustrative. Violent protests have all but vanished in the minds of the despirited public. But this unnecessary measure right now, indicates the mayor’s and the Metropolitan Police’s intentions to escalate the level of conflict in the streets of London. With increasing pressures around housing, underemployment, the complete destruction of the National Healthcare System and the increasing debt burdens of students and millennials, the targets of this escalation are becoming ever clearer.

It needs to be understood that the way police forces are set-up around Europe (and the western world in general) at present not only creates the preconditions needed for an escalation of violence, but serves to attract elements in the forces themselves that usually take generations to root out. Going forward, this could prove determinative in the ideological constitution of police. And it raises questions as to how far the state will go to crackdown on dissent.

After the torching of a worksite in Skouries (Greece), the state employed blanket surveillance to charge more than 50 people with forming a criminal organization, according to one of the activists involved. The cost of running such a surveillance operation is unknown for now. It looks like tactical expertise obtained through a decade of “war on terror” are now used against Europe’s and the US’s own citizens.

It shouldn’t be altogether surprising that this combination of financial precarity and heavy training/equipment is transforming police forces around the world into something more like mercenaries, unaccountable to the citizens they’re charged to protect. The is very little point in taking this up with police themselves. There are root causes well beneath the particular institution of the police unfurling around Europe.

Even the British police, once proud for their civic character, seem to be headed down this path, with the aptly named practice of Total Policing. Gun carrying police now patrols the streets of Scotland. This seems to be a deliberate policy around the Western world. Voices in Britain are already calling for the abolition of the MET as it is increasingly regarded as an irredeemable institution.

Such a call doesn’t ring as extreme as it might’ve in years prior, and it has common variations around the EU. It’s easy to suspect that what is happening in the South of Europe foreshadows what is to come for the north. An honest examination lays bare the financial incentives behind this drive, and the prospect of donor-driven policing, as we’ve seen in the US. Meanwhile, the drive to police dissent against private entities (as in Southern Europe), is as terrifying as ever.