“The police shooting of Michael Brown resonates on a personal level with me,” Eric Drooker says about next week’s cover, which was inspired by images from the scene.* (One of the most iconic was by Scott Olson, a Getty photographer, who was detained by police there.) “An artist friend of mine was killed by a cop in lower Manhattan, back in 1991. He happened to be black, and the police officer was never indicted.” Drooker continues, “As a resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I witnessed the blurring distinctions between the police and military during the Tompkins Square riots of the eighties. I’ll never forget the day the N.Y.P.D. showed up in a military tank to evict nonviolent squatter friends from buildings on Avenue B and Thirteenth Street, where I grew up. This incident triggered a vivid childhood memory of the police driving a similar armored tank on East Fourteenth street, in 1968, to quell possible ‘disturbances’ after Martin Luther King was assassinated.

“Of course, rubber bullets, tear gas, and Tasers have been used for a while—on nonviolent anti-war protests at the dawn of the Iraq invasion, not to mention Occupy—but the U.S. media has often chosen to ignore these images. Now that billions have been spent and the equipment is in place throughout the country, the intensive militarization of America’s police forces is finally being acknowledged after the horrors of Ferguson.”

*Update, 2 P.M.: More information has been added about this week’s cover.