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ERA officials claim that the situation in St. Louis remains dangerous and that the agency’s paramilitary forces are needed to maintain order in the city.
    “Look at the map,” says Col. George Barris, commander of ERA forces in St. Louis. He points at a street map tacked up on a wall in the central command post, in what used to be the Stadium Club at Busch Stadium. Large areas of the map—mostly in the northern and southern sides of the city, as well as the central wards—are shaded in red, with black markers pinned to individual blocks within the red areas.
    “Those are the neighborhoods still under dusk-to-dawn curfew,” Barris explains. “The little black pins are the places where our patrols have encountered hostile action in the past 48 hours alone. Street gangs, looters, assaults against civilians—you name it. Now you tell me: do you really want us to just pack up and get out of here?”
    It’s inarguable that vast areas within the city remain volatile, particularly on the north side where three days of rioting late last December caused almost as much damage as the earthquake itself. Several parts of the city are so unsafe that authorities can patrol them only from the air, forcing SLPD to use military helicopters—including secondhand Mi-24 gunships recently purchased from Russia—instead of police cruisers.
    Yet many persons in the city believe that the continued presence of federal troops in St. Louis is only exacerbating the crisis. “Look at what we’ve been through already,” says LeRoy Jensen, a Ferguson community activist who made an unsuccessful run for the city council two years ago. “People up here lost their homes, their jobs, some of them their families … now they can’t even leave the house without being challenged by some ERA soldier. Everyone who lives around here is automatically assumed to be a criminal, even if it’s just a mother stepping out to find her kids after dark. How can we go back to normal when we’re living in a combat zone?”
    Jensen points out that when $2 billion in federal disaster relief funds were made available through ERA to Missouri residents after New Madrid, very little of the money found its way to poor and lower-middle-class residents. Like many people, he charges that most of the cash went to rebuilding upper-class neighborhoods and large companies that didn’t really need federal assistance in the first place.
    “The government based the acceptance of loan applications on the ability of people to repay the loans,” Jensen says, “but how can you repay a federal loan if the store you worked at is gone? Yet if the government won’t help to rebuild that store, then you can’t repay the loan. It’s a catch-22 … but if you get mad about it, then along comes a dude in a uniform, telling you to be quiet and eat your rations. And when the food runs out, like it did last Christmas, then they send in the helicopters and soldiers again.”
    Jensen also claims that ERA crackdowns on north-central neighborhoods in the city are based on social and ethnic attitudes among ERA troopers. “When was the last time you heard of a white kid in Ladue or Clayton getting busted by the goons?” he says. “Answer: you never do. But all these ERA troops, they’re rich white kids who got out of being drafted to Nicaragua by getting Daddy Warbucks to get ’em into ERA, so now they’re trying to make up for being wusses by kicking some nigger ass in north St. Louis.”
    As heated as Jensen’s remarks are, they have some justification. The Emergency Relief Agency was established in 2006 as part of the National Service Act, which also reestablished the Civilian Conservation Corps and started the Urban Education Project. Under NSA, all Americans between the ages of 18 and 22 are required to serve 18 months in one of several federal agencies, including the armed services. At the same time, ERA was founded to replace the Federal Emergency Management Agency after FEMA