Do you remember the iconic photograph of the lone protester with hands at his side standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square?

Can our reactions to that image help us as we look at our own local communities? The presence of tanks and military hardware is becoming a familiar sight in communities across the United States.

After the Boston Marathon bombing, people in Cambridge and Watertown woke up to the sights and sounds of military tanks trying to wend their way through the narrow streets. Helicopters overhead and SWAT teams of riotgeared police traveled through curfewed towns. For some, these images and the gunfire of military style police compounded the trauma of the startling violence of the explosions days before.

In Ferguson, Mo., a young man with hands raised in the air is shot by a policeman. The police response to the subsequent protest invites comparisons to war zones with armored vehicles, assault weapons and body armor provided by the United States military. The victims of this “war” are the communities of color in Ferguson, children with their hands raised, reporters, protestors and any hope of respect for policing.

The story of racism, racial profiling and police violence is not new.

The use of state and military hardware and the militarization of our communities is more recent. With the creation of a war on drugs (when drug use was not identified as a problem), President Reagan reassigned funds from treatment, human services, education and housing to assault-style SWAT military hardware forced on police departments in need of more basic funds. This effort led to the criminalization of communities of color, a state of affairs we now call the New Jim Crow — the massive incarceration and disenfranchisement of African-Americans.

According to Mother Jones magazine, “Beginning in 1990, Congress authorized the Pentagon to transfer its surplus property free of charge to federal, state, and local police departments to wage the war on drugs. In 1997, Congress expanded the purpose to include counterterrorism in section 1033 of the defense authorization bill. In one single page of a 450-page law, Congress helped sow the seeds of today’s warrior cops. Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has also offered grants to local law enforcement agencies to combat terrorism and fight the war on drugs, essentially free money but only to be used for more military-style equipment. In 1990, the Pentagon gave $1 million worth of equipment to US law enforcement. That number had jumped to nearly $450 million by 2013. Overall, the program has shipped off more than $4.3 billion worth of materiel to state and local cops.”

In February, the South Portland Police Department was one of seven police departments to acquire a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP). The MaxxPro MRAP is designed to carry a two-man crew, four to six passengers, and a turret-topping “gunner.”

Former Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich has noted, “Local police departments became the recipients of military-grade weaponry, guns, tanks, armor, planes and the like. With the military equipment came the mind-set of police becoming warfighters, in a hostile environment — in one’s own community.”

There is a story of the frog in a pot of water. If you put the frog in boiling water, it will jump out. If you put it in cold water and slowly raise the temperature it will not. Can our memory of Tiananmen Square and now Ferguson, Mo., be an opportunity to see the pot of water which is coming to a boil in our communities through unnecessary militarization? Can it motivate us to demilitarize our communities and restore a commitment to safety through human relationships? Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) will soon introduce the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act in Congress—which would end the federal government’s program of providing billions of dollars worth of military equipment to local police. It’s about time to stop the trend nationally and locally.

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Catherine Hoffman, a Peace- Works member, is a summer resident of Small Point.