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Just a few facts will change everything you think you know about American police, writes Lee Camp, with pictures by Eleanor Goldfield from the streets of downtown Washington.
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/06/01/lee-camp-19-facts-about-american-policing-that-will-blow-your-mind/
With all the protests and anger and violence across the country, a justified discussion about policing has begun on our corporate media airwaves. (I would say the discussion is overdue, but in fact we’ve had it roughly every three years for the past 40 years.) However, despite all the coverage, a deeper debate sits ignored – A debate about why our American police system exists at all, how it works (or doesn’t), and where it came from.
The following 19 facts about American policing will change everything you think you know. First let’s start with the sheer amount of murder.
Police kill roughly 1,000 Americans per year. In 2016 The Guardian found that American police murdered 1,093. That’s three lives extinguished by police every day.
In the UK the average per year is three murders by police. Not 300. Just three. This means American police generally kill more citizens in a week than the UK will kill in a year. In 2018 Denmark & Switzerland’s police killed no one. Zero. They literally let everyone live. (You would think they would kill at least a few just to stay in practice.)
The vast majority of those Americans killed are not “hardened” criminals (whatever that means). The Treatment Advocacy Center finds that one out of every four people killed by U.S. police was severely mentally ill. If you add in simply mentally unstable or cognitively impaired, the number is much higher. Probably well over 50 percent of the time police murder someone, the victim is not of stable and sound mind.
Last year NBC news found that since 2005, only 35 officers had been convicted of any crime after having taken someone’s life. If we assume the U.S. averaged 900 police killings per year (a very low estimate) and that only one officer was involved in each killing (an even lower estimate), this means cops are convicted .28% of the time after killing someone. Less than one percent. But it gets worse.
NBC reports, “Only three officers have been convicted of murder during this period [2005 to 2019] and seen their convictions stand.” That’s a rate of conviction of .024% – For all intents and purposes police officers can murder with impunity.
What Cops Do All Day
In the nations’ capital. (Eleanor Goldfield)
Now let’s take a moment to disabuse ourselves of the liberal fantasy of policing. The vast majority of what police do in America is not run around catching the evil-doers like an episode of CSI or Law & Order or Die Hard or Starsky & Hutch or all the other TV shows and movies ever made ever.
Professor Alex Vitale notes in “The End of Policing” that most cops average less than one felony arrest per year – meaning almost the entirety of a police officer’s day-to-day consists of standing around and occasionally dealing with small or nothing crimes. These “crimes” such as loitering or “causing a disturbance” are designed to simply “put people in the system.” People of color are far more likely to be arrested for these types of crimes. Once “in the system,” the sentence for a future “crime of loitering” or “atrocity of playing loud music” can be much longer.
Vitale continues, “Even detectives (who make up only about 15% of police forces) spend most of their time taking reports of crimes that they will never solve—and in many cases will never even investigate. …Most crimes that are investigated are not solved.”
Rather than working harder to solve larger crimes, our government officials have created hundreds of smaller “crimes” for police to nail citizens for. In the past few decades there has been a surge of bans on things like sleeping in public, begging, giving away free food, “camping” in public, and sleeping in one’s car. Laws like these only serve to make homelessness (and helping the homeless) illegal and allow police to insert themselves, often upending lives. (Because people begging for change often have it too easy.)
A study in New York City found that over half of those who cycle regularly through the prison system were homeless. Does anyone honestly believe that endlessly grabbing homeless people and charging them for nothing crimes does anything to help our society or the people involved? The fact that most officers spend their days doing this is equivalent to firefighters walking around spraying people’s cigarettes with water while the actual building fires are left to burn. (More on those in a moment.)
When wealthy or even middle class people get caught doing most of these small crimes, they are either ignored by the police or let off with a warning. If a Wall Street trader in a suit and tie takes a nap on a bench, do the police lock him up? If a doctor or a dentist or real estate agent is “caught” sleeping in their car, are they brought down to the station? No. These so-called “crimes” serve to simply enforce the class structure and give police a reason to arrest the poor and the non-white.
Meanwhile, the true crimes don’t even garner a glance. The largest crimes in the nation and the world are often legal, and even when they aren’t, they have nothing to do with police. Corporate executives endlessly decide to dump toxins in our water or keep a baby powder on the shelves when they know it contains asbestos or continue sales of an herbicide when they know it causes cancer or push opioids on troubled Americans even as the bodies pile up. Generally in such cases, no one will go to prison, no one will do a perp walk with handcuffs on. And in the incredibly rare moment that a top exec is locked up, it has nothing to do with your average police officers.
Designed to Create Crime
Military police in the streets of Washington. (Eleanor Goldfield)
As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow has put it, “We need an effective system of crime prevention and control in our communities, but that is not what the current system is. This system is better designed to create crime, and a perpetual class of people labeled criminals.”
The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. And if we slightly rephrase that, we get, “America is the largest prison state in the world.” But the mainstream media doesn’t like the sound of that, so they won’t say it.
Police in some regards commit more crime than average citizens. Police now seize more from citizens via civil asset forfeiture than the amount of property stolen by street criminals in burglaries.
Cops often protect inanimate objects against the unarmed citizens they have taken an oath to serve and protect. For example, in Standing Rock the law enforcement were steadfastly guarding a pipeline against the people who actually owned the land through which it stabbed and drank the water it would ultimately contaminate.
So we’ve established police are not doing the job most people think they are and that they kill a lot of innocent people while acting like military patrols on the streets of the “Land of The Free.” Now let’s get into how poorly they’re trained at actually doing the jobs they shouldn’t be doing.
Police academies spend [on average] 110 hours on firearms and self-defense, yet only eight hours on conflict management. This means, generally speaking, police spend 12 times as many hours learning how to shoot and kill people as learning how NOT to shoot and kill people.
In most states hair stylists are required to have far more training than police officers. Even CNN reported, “The minimum training requirement for Michigan police officers is 594 hours. To work with electrical signs, you’ll need 4,000 hours of experience.”
Former Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis has said police departments don’t want to hire officers who are empathetic. And pro-police website Officer.com has published articles saying empathy could be dangerous for policing.
Some cities also don’t want smart cops. In fact, a court back in 2000 upheld the right of police departments to avoid hiring intelligent officers. …So yes, in some American cities the authorities actively fill the department’s ranks with dumb people who can’t relate to your situation. That certainly sounds like the opposite of what you’d want for a job opening that includes the phrase, “Gun included.”
Dark Roots
Confrontation in DC. (Eleanor Goldfield)
And finally, we must ask, “If our policing system is a draconian, military-style, Orwellian model used to consolidate an entrenched class hierarchy, then where did it come from? How did we get here?”
As detailed in “Our Enemies in Blue,” the American police system originated from slave patrols, which turned the streets of towns into patrol routes for what was a quasi-military force. From its earliest days the American model was a racist tactic to protect the higher class people from the downtrodden and oppressed. The numbers don’t lie. The system has not largely changed since those early days.
Prof. Vitale writes, “The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements.”
These 19 facts should fully flip the script on how we view police in America. We need a completely new/different/smaller/less-violent model. And we need it starting 400 years ago.
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By Chris Hedges, Scheer Post.
June 1, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/the-treason-of-the-ruling-class/
Capitalist democracy has devolved into a mafia State.
The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a “public thing” or the “property of a people,” has been transformed into an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to commit financial fraud and theft.
The loss of control over our system of rulership, the misuse of all democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money upwards into to a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power, ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to have a monopoly on violence. Violence employed by police and security agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces, protect the exclusive interests of a tiny, ruling criminal class and expose the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling elites.
“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience,” Stokely Carmichael warned. And if your opponent is bereft of a conscience, then state violence is inevitably met with counter-violence. Tyranny takes the place of reform. The danger of widespread sectarian violence in America is now very real.
There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American body politic, is impossible; revolution; or tyranny. The more things deteriorate, the more the elites feel threatened, the more brutal the police, the National Guard and the organs of state security will become. The longer the serfs defy their masters the more the populations in the jails and prisons, which are already the largest in the world, will swell.
If the mafia state is not overthrown, then America will become a naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be met with draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country have already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray. The huge social divides, largely built around race, will be used by the neo-fascists in power to divert a legitimate rage by a betrayed working class to set neighbor against neighbor. Neo-fascist “patriots” will be unleashed like attack dogs against people of color, Muslims, feminists, intellectuals, artists, the media and liberals. Dissent, even nonviolent dissent, will become treason.
The uprisings in the streets of American cities are not only about the wanton murder by police of yet another person of color, but a frantic fight to wrest back power over our own lives. They go far behind police brutality, a daily reality for those trapped in our internal colonies where 1,100 citizens are murdered by police every year, almost all unarmed. The uprisings are fueled as well by the seizure of the institutional and structural mechanisms that once made some form of equality, always imperfect and always colored by an animus towards the poor and people of color, possible.
Half the country lives in poverty or a category called near poverty. The working class and the working poor are priced out of the health care system. The schools do not educate their children, who live without adequate food and often clean water, are repeatedly evicted from their homes, have their utilities shut off, cannot find jobs, are crippled by punishing debt peonage and with the pandemic are dying at disproportionally higher rates. They get the message the oligarchs are sending. They, and their children, are expendable. They don’t count. Their lives are of no consequence, unless they are locked in a cage where their bodies can generate as much as $60,000 a year for the multitude of corporations, including the for-profit medical services, food services, money transfer services, commissary services, phone services, private prisons and prison contractors, not to mention the large corporations and state governments that exploit the cheap and bonded labor of 1 million of our 2.3 million prisoners.
The prison system is a multi-billion dollar a year industry with lobbyists in state capitals and Washington making sure these bodies remain in cages or are put back into cages soon after they are released. The neo-slavery in our prisons is the corporate model envisioned for all of America.
The two ruling parties are equally complicit in this assault. The Democratic Party, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, is trying to sell us a presidential nominee, Joe Biden, who was one of the principal architects of de-industrialization and responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of good, union jobs. Biden and Bill Clinton also destroyed our welfare program, where 70 percent of the recipients were children, and orchestrated the doubling of our prison population and the tripling and quadrupling of sentences.
Biden, as Naomi Murakawa points out in “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” was a driving force behind the notoriously harsh penalties in the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, and the three-strikes legislation in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which also provided funding for 100,000 new police officers and the aggressive prosecution of 60 new capital crimes. He sponsored legislation to dramatically curtail the ability of those in prison to appeal and led the passage of the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 and The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. He oversaw the militarization of the police and the massive expansion of death-eligible crimes, which he has repeatedly bragged about.
Biden was also at the forefront of the re-segregation of our public school system and has repeatedly called for cuts to Social Security. He was instrumental in the disastrous trade deals such as the North American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and austerity programs as well as establishing the most pervasive system of mass government surveillance in human history. Watching Stacey Abrams, who certainly knows better, twist herself into contortions to lavish praise on Biden, even tossing the #MeToo movement overboard, is another sad example of the corrosive disease of careerism. Biden, one of the most important architects behind the wars in the Middle East, where we have squandered upwards of $7 trillion and destroyed or extinguished the lives of millions of people, is personally responsible for far more suffering and death at home and abroad than Donald Trump.
If we had a functioning judicial and legislative system, Biden, along with the other architects of our disastrous imperial wars, plundering of the country and betrayal of the American working class, would be put on trial, not offered up as a solution to our political and economic debacle. The myopia of the ruling elites is that they think they can foist Biden on us because he is not Trump. But the game is up. The façade of democracy no longer works.
It is only the dwindling and largely white middle and professional classes who still believe the fiction that this election offers a choice or that we live in a democracy. The working class and the working poor know better. Their lives were, as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, one long emergency before the pandemic. Now they face the prospect of bankruptcy this summer when unemployment and stimulus checks run out, the moratorium is lifted on evictions to double or triple the unhoused population of 11 million people and unemployment skyrockets to 25 percent. Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for sick pay, and some 43 million Americans have just lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. Food banks are already overrun with tens of thousands of desperate families.
And in the midst of this crisis, what did our kleptocratic rulers do? They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves at our expense, while tossing crumbs out of the windows of their private jets, yachts and palatial homes to the suffering and despised masses.
The CARES Act handed trillions in funds or tax breaks to oil companies, the airline industry, which alone got $50 billion in stimulus money, the cruise ship industry, a $170 billion windfall for the real estate industry, private equity firms, lobbying groups, whose political action committees have given $191 million in campaign contributions to politicians in the last two decades, the meat industry and corporations that have moved offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. The act allowed the largest corporations to gobble up money that was supposed to go to keep small businesses solvent to pay workers. It gave 80 percent of tax breaks under the stimulus package to millionaires and allowed the wealthiest to get stimulus checks that average $1.7 million. The CARES Act also authorized $454 billion for the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a massive slush fund doled out by Trump cronies to corporations that, when leveraged 10 to 1, can be used to create a staggering $4.5 trillion in assets. The act authorized the Fed to give $1.5 trillion in loans to Wall Street, which no one expects will ever be paid back. American billionaires have gotten $434 billion richer since the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added $34.6 billion to his personal wealth since the pandemic started.
How long can you expect people to watch their children go hungry? How long can you expect people to watch their loved ones suffer and die because they can’t get medical care? How long can you expect people to be abused by lawless police and a court system designed to railroad the poor into jails and prisons? How long can you watch the rich profit from your misery?
I would prefer that our revolution eschew the poison of violence, which I know too intimately from my two decades as a war correspondent. But I also know that when everything around you conspires to crush you, the only way left to affirm yourself is to destroy, not only the structures and institutions that have oppressed you, but often yourself. I saw this when I lived in the impoverished neighborhood of Roxbury in Boston and when I worked as a reporter in Gaza. This understanding was something Malcom X, who came out of poverty, always understood and Martin Luther King, a product of the black bourgeoisie, learned later.
It is ultimately the ruling elites who will determine the mechanics of resistance. When they close every escape route, when they speak exclusively in the language of force, then the language of force becomes the only form of communication. Trump’s demand that states use the National Guard to crush the protests and threat to deploy the U.S. military in the streets of American cities only heightens the anger and frustration that led to the uprisings.
The ruling elites are, at the same time, desperately seeking scapegoats. The idea that Antifa, which on the spectrum of terrorist groups would rank alongside the Boy Scouts, is behind these clashes is as ridiculous as the idea that Russia is responsible for the election of Trump. This desperate search for explanations that absolve the ruling elites saw Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national-security adviser, blame the violence on “foreign actors,” adding that “this is right out of the Russian playbook.” This trope is always trotted by despotic rulers to discredit dissidents who are branded as the enemy of the people.
The longer the ruling elites refuse to address the root causes behind these protests, the more they loot the treasury to enrich themselves and their fellow oligarchs, the more they engage in futile and absurd efforts to deflect blame, the more unrest will spread. The last desperate resort by the oligarchs to save themselves will be to stoke the fires of racialized violence between disenfranchised whites and disenfranchised people of color. This, I fear, is the next chapter in this saga. I saw this tactic used to deadly effect in the former Yugoslavia. These are dark times. They are about to get darker.
Chris Hedges writes a regular original column for Scheerpost.
By Alan Macleod, Mintpress News.
June 1, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/george-floyd-protests-police-escalating-violence/
While Some In Media Have Condemned The Protests As Violent “Looters” Imposing “Tyranny” Upon The Country, Much Of The Violence Is Being Deliberately Instigated And Propagated By An Out Of Control Police Force That Appears To Have Gone Berserk Over The Widespread Public Challenge To Their Authority And Their Impunity To Act As They Wish.
Six days after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, asphyxiating him by keeping his knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes, America is still burning with outrage. Violent clashes have broken out across the nation as the killing has proven to be a catalyst for protests against a racist justice system.
While some in media have condemned the protests as violent “looters” imposing “tyranny” upon the country, much of the violence is being deliberately instigated and propagated by an out of control police force that appears to have gone berserk over the widespread public challenge to their authority and their impunity to act as they wish.
Pierre G.@pgarapon
Wtf!!! #BlacklivesMaters #brooklynprotest
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Zeeshan Aleem
✔@ZeeshanAleem
NYPD hitting a protestor with a car door in BK. Wow it’s almost like this isn’t really about protecting the public.
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In New York City, videos have emerged of multiple incidents of NYPD cars plowing into protestors. Demonstrators in Brooklyn had placed a yellow road barrier between themselves and a stationary police car. A second police cruiser accelerates into the crowd, knocking multiple people to the ground before fleeing. The first car follows suit, driving into yet more people. On Saturday evening, a second incident involving the NYPD driving into crowds of protestors also occurred.
Escalating Police Brutality
A common police tactic in protest situations is to escalate the violence themselves, hoping demonstrators will respond in kind, giving them an excuse to use even more excessive force. At the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, police intentionally verbally, physically and sexually assaulted the smallest, oldest and weakest women in an attempt to provoke violent reactions, according to former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges.
The tactic appears to be in operation across the country. Memphis police were caught singling out a woman from a crowd, shouting “get the girl in the grey hoodie” before swarming her. In Salt Lake City, the police threw an elderly man with a cane to the ground. In Seattle, cops brutalized a protester, one officer leaning his knee on the man’s neck in exactly the same manner as Chauvin used to kill Floyd. In Houston, a mounted police officer trampled a female bystander looking the other way, as the horse advanced into a seemingly peaceful, passive crowd. In Minneapolis, researcher Tanya Kersson shared video footage of amped-up police attacking her on her own property, firing at her and her house. Before doing so, an officer can be heard giving the order to “light ‘em up,” an expression used by the military when bombing the Middle East. Back in New York City, images emerged of police assaulting a young woman, Dounya Zayer, shouting that she was a “stupid fucking bitch,” before throwing her to the ground. Footage shows she was quickly backing up, attempting to avoid confrontation. Zayer ended up in the hospital due to her injuries. Cops in Erie, PA, were caught on camera kicking a young girl lying in the street in the face. The reason, according to protesters, she was lying in the street covering her face was that she had been hit with tear gas.
Power and prestige appear to be no shield from police violence. Hollywood actor John Cusack was also attacked. Police officers reacted to him filming a burning car by running at him with batons and hitting his bike. TV producer Andrew Kimmel alleges that Minneapolis police slashed the tires on his car, as well as those of every other one in the parking lot. Multiple elected officials have also reported being attacked by police. Video of all these events has been included below.
Desiree Stennett 
✔@Desi_Stennett
· May 31, 2020
Replying to @Desi_Stennett
I’m headed home. I live downtown. I walked down to the protest. @ldtestino is driving me home. Several blocks of Downtown have been shut down by police.
Desiree Stennett
✔@Desi_Stennett
I tried to send this earlier but couldn’t in the chaos. A Memphis police officer is yelling “Somebody get her. Somebody get the girl in the gray hoodie.”
Then they swarm.
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Timothy Burke
✔@bubbaprog
Salt Lake City cops shove down an elderly man with a cane for the crime of standing along the street:
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Mike Baker
✔@ByMikeBaker
Watch this.
After a Seattle officer put his knee on the neck of someone he was helping arrest tonight, observers shouted for him to stop. Then the other officer reached over and physically pulled his partner's knee off the neck. https://twitter.com/mattmillsphoto/status/1266960081389629440 …
Matt M. McKnight
✔@mattmillsphoto
Replying to @mattmillsphoto
Cops arrived and started arresting looters. #seattleprotest
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#blacklivesmatter@vikthewild
Dont let them tell you it was peaceful in Downtown Houston #BlackLivesMatter #GeorgeFloyd
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Tanya Kerssen@tkerssen
Share widely: National guard and MPD sweeping our residential street. Shooting paint canisters at us on our own front porch. Yelling “light em up” #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd #JusticeForGeorge #BlackLivesMatter
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Whitney Hu 胡安行@whitney_hu
Update: Got her permission with a fuck yeah. The cop pushed her so hard at Barclays & she flung back. She is tiny. Now she’s in the ER after a serious seizure. I’m waiting for updates but have to wait outside because of COVID-19. Please keep my protest sister in your thoughts.
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Dounya Zayer@zayer_dounya
This is the officer. He threw my phone before throwing me. As you can see I was already backing up. All I asked was why.
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John Cusack
✔@johncusack
Cops didn’t like me filming the burning car so they came at me with batons. Hitting my bike.
Ahhm herea the audio
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Kevin Krause
✔@KevinRKrause
She says she was walking home with her groceries when police fired some sort of pellet in her face. Says she’s not a protester. #DallasProtests
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Andrew Kimmel
✔@andrewkimmel
Minneapolis Police slashed every tire on my rental car, as well as every tire of every car in this parking lot.
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Attacks On Journalists
Police also appear to be making a point to shut down reporting of the situation, as a huge amount of attacks on journalists have also been reported. Minneapolis police shot freelance reporter Linda Tirado in the face, leaving her permanently blind in one eye. Other journalists have also been shot; Louisville police hit one local reporter for WAVE, an NBC affiliate while she was reporting live on air. The first response from the anchor in the TV studio was to ask if they realized she was a journalist, suggesting that shooting others with pepper bullets would be acceptable. The reporter was actually standing well away from any action, appearing to be camped out near police lines. Denver Post employees were also attacked while covering their local demonstrations. Photographer Hyoung Chang noted that police aimed and shot him twice. “If it was one shot, I can say it was an accident,” he said. “I’m very sure it was the same guy twice. I’m very sure he pointed at me.” Another Post employee, Elise Schmelzer was also targeted while wearing a reflective vest that read “press.” Los Angeles Times reporter Molly Hennessey-Fiske also reported that police attacked her and a group of other journalists, firing tear gas at point blank range at her. A CBS news crew, completely alone in a deserted parking lot was set upon by police, firing rubber bullets at them, hitting their sound engineer. Minnesota police also shot a Reuters crew on Saturday with rubber bullets, one being hit in the face, the other in the arm and the back of the neck, despite – or perhaps because – they were clearly labeled as journalists.
On Friday an entire CNN team, led by presenter Omar Jimenez was arrested by State Patrol troopers live on air, the images continuing to be broadcast to the nation even as Jimenez and his crew were led away in handcuffs. CNN commentator Keith Boykin (an African-American) was arrested by NYPD while covering the New York protests. In a perhaps not unrelated incident, an NYPD officer was filmed making a white power hand gesture at protestors. An Australian crew for Nine News was also arrested.
Perhaps most blatantly, however, Denver police threw a reporter into a burning fire for trying to take a picture of them. The incident was caught on live television.
Linda Tirado@KillerMartinis
an update: I am permanently blind in my left eye, and the docs absolutely refuse to let me go back to work for they say six weeks. I’m definitely not allowed to be near smoke or gas.
Usually if I had to stay home I’d spend a lot of time amplifying folk but reading hurts today
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Christopher Bishop@ChrisBishopL1C4
This just happened on live tv. Wow, what a douche bag.
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Brian Stelter
✔@brianstelter
Here's the full video of @CNN's crew being detained and arrested by the Minnesota State Patrol, live on @NewDay.
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Los Angeles Times
✔@latimes
"I’ve covered protests involving police," writes @mollyhf from Minneapolis. "I’ve also covered the U.S. military in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan. I have never been fired at by police until tonight." https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-30/la-reporter-tear-gas-police …
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Big T@tessrmalle
#denver police caught on camera throwing a reporter into a fire for trying to take a picture of the scene #DenverRiots #BlackLivesMatter #FTP
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Michael George@MikeGeorgeCBS
This is the moment Minneapolis Police fired on our CBS News crew with rubber bullets. As you can see, no protesters anywhere near us- we all were wearing credentials and had cameras out. Our sound engineer was hit in the arm. #cbsnews
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Julio-César Chávez
✔@JulioCesrChavez
Tonight I was shot in the arm and the back of my neck with rubber bullets in the middle of covering the Minneapolis protests. My security advisor was shot in the face; his gas mask protected him.
Here’s what happened: http://reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protest-update/reuters-cameraman-hit-by-rubber-bullets-as-police-disperse-protesters-idUSKBN237050 …
Here’s what it looks like:
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America’s Militarized Police Force
In many comparable countries, such as the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway or New Zealand, regular police officers are always unarmed. Yet America’s cops are increasingly kitted out and trained as if they are special operations troops in a warzone filled with enemy combatants. Increasingly, today’s cops more closely resemble Latin American death squads than their peers in Europe. Between 1998 and 2014 the value of military hardware given to U.S. police departments ballooned from $9.4 million to $796.8 million. Police departments now have access to armored personnel carriers, tanks, and other weapons of war. Authorities even flew a Predator Drone like those used to bomb the Middle East over Minnesota earlier this week. Police are also increasingly trained like and by soldiers, using tactics honed by groups like the Israeli Defense Forces when dealing with Palestinian citizens. Thus, the oppression meted out abroad is increasingly being turned upon domestic opposition, and historically, the only way to maintain enormous levels of inequality, like those seen in today’s United States has been through violence. Yet at the same time as budgets for police hardware have gone through the roof, funding for public hospitals has decreased, leading to a situation where police officers resemble robocop or Iron Man and doctors are told to wear garbage bags to protect themselves from a pandemic.
The National Guard has been deployed in multiple states, with over 10,000 troops scheduled to flood Minneapolis streets. President Trump is encouraging them to open fire on whomever he deems as “thugs” and “looters.” “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on Friday. Thus, it appears the only response from authorities to protests about police brutality is more police brutality.
The irony is that being a police officer is not a particularly dangerous job. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that a myriad of professions are far more dangerous than law enforcement, including farming, groundskeeping, gardening, virtually any job to do with construction, steel working, mechanical engineering. Being a pilot, a teamster, a trucker or even a bartender carries with it a greater risk of death on the job than policing. Indeed, simply being self-employed or working at all past 65 is as lethal as being a police officer. In contrast, death at the hands of police is a leading cause of death for men of color (like George Floyd).
A Culture Of Impunity
America’s police are able to use seemingly unlimited amounts of force, safe in the knowledge they will rarely if ever, be held to account. For example, during a Friday rush hour traffic jam in December, instead of apprehending a pair of suspected robbers, 19 Miami police officers opened fire on a stationary hijacked UPS truck from all angles, riddling it with bullets and killing its kidnapped driver, Frank Ordonez, plus another innocent bystander. Such is the culture of deference to authority, however, that UPS immediately thanked the police for their actions. Ordonez’s union certainly did not do the same, retorting that police “murdered” him.
Minnesota law enforcement officials have been especially immune from the consequences of their actions, being protected from justice by a succession of state prosecutors, including potential vice-president Amy Klobuchar. Between 1999 and 2007, she declined to bring charges against more than two dozen killer officers. In 2006, Chauvin himself killed another man, Wayne Reyes. He was not charged and would go on to shoot and/or kill again multiple times, including on Monday.
Police appear to be relaxed about escalating scuffles into full-blown violent confrontations. Indeed, if history is any judge, it may be exactly what they wish to occur. Chauvin himself was only arrested for murder after it sparked worldwide outrage, and police continue to appear confident that any action they take while in uniform will be backed up by the power of the state, regardless of how unjustifiable it was.
Feature photo |A policeman aims a shotgun at protesters during a demonstration next to the city of Miami Police Department, May 30, 2020, downtown in Miami.
Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.
By Danielle Schulkin, Just Security.
June 1, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/white-supremacist-infiltration-of-us-police-forces/
Systemic racism in US Police Forces is than “a few bad apples.”
On Sunday morning, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked President Trump’s National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, whether he thinks “systemic racism” is a problem in law enforcement agencies in the United States. O’Brien responded: “I don’t think there is systemic racism. I think 99.9 percent of our law enforcement officers are great Americans,” said O’Brien. “But … there’s a few bad apples.”
There are two flaws in O’Brien’s response. First, O’Brien ignores the well-documented support by law enforcement officers of alt-right extremist ideology throughout the country. Second, O’Brien misunderstands the nature of systemic racism—a term that means that institutions we have in place produce racially disparate effects on minority populations—in his discussion of individual officers.
An FBI intelligence assessment—titled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement” and published in 2006 during the administration of President George W. Bush—raised alarm over white supremacist groups’ interest in “infiltrating law enforcement communities or recruiting law enforcement personnel.” The report, based on FBI investigations and open sources, warned, for example, that skinhead groups were actively encouraging their members to become “ghost skins” within law enforcement agencies, a term the report said white supremacists use to describe members who “avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.”
In 2015, a classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide, obtained by The Intercept, stated that “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.”
FBI Assessment 2006 White Supremacist Infiltration Law Enforcement by Just Security on Scribd
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on right-wing extremism and its relationship to “violent radicalization” in the United States. The report’s principle researcher on the subject, Daryl Johnson, later told The Intercept:
“Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the ATF — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups.”
This may not be a coincidence.
An investigation published in 2019 by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers are members of Confederate-sympathizing, anti-Islam, or anti-government militia groups on Facebook. Within these private groups, members often are openly racist. Police officers have also been linked to groups like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, who believe in defending white Americans from “enslavement” and are actively hostile to immigrants. The investigation identified active-duty and retired police officers as active members in explicitly racist Facebook groups such as “Veterans Against islamic Filth” (the group deliberately lowercases “Islamic” in its name) and “PURGE WORLDWIDE (The Cure for the Islamic disease in your country).”
The leader of the Oath Keepers movement, Stewart Rhodes, bragged in 2009 that his anti-government group includes “thousands of retired and active law enforcement officers.” On May 30, during protests in New York City, a New York Police Department (NYPD) officer appears to have made a hand gesture that has been linked to white supremacist groups, which the New York Attorney General asked to be reported to her office.
kiki@kikimurphy_
watching a stream of the union square protests to see this police officer throw up what looks to be a white power sign. stay safe out there, these cops are monsters.
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The Plain View Project, a database of public Facebook comments made by nearly 2,900 current and former police officers in eight cities, suggested that nearly 1 in 5 of the current officers identified in the study made public posts or comments that appear “to endorse violence, racism and bigotry,” as reported by Buzzfeed News and Injustice Watch in a study of the database. For example, there are 1269 identified problematic posts from active duty Philadelphia police officers on the site. Of the 1073 Philadelphia police officers identified by the Plain View Project, 327 of them posted public content endorsing violence, racism and bigotry. Of those 327, at least 64 hold leadership roles within the force, serving as corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, or inspectors.
The history of racism and white supremacist membership in law enforcement agencies is long and well-documented. In the 1990s, a federal judge found that there was a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang” of Los Angeles police deputies – self-styled “the Vikings” – that existed with the knowledge of police department officials. In 2015 and 2016, the San Francisco police department attempted to fire at least 17 officers after investigations revealed they were sending racist text messages. Last year, a police officer in Oregon was linked to the leader of an alt-right white nationalist group.
The Ku Klux Klan historically – and even in recent years – has had ties to local law enforcement. In 2014, a police department in Central Florida fired two officers, one of whom was the deputy police chief, for being members of the Ku Klux Klan (commendably, the information in that case came from the FBI via the Florida Department of Law Enforcement). In 2015, a North Carolina police officer was pictured giving a Nazi salute at a KKK rally.
The failure of police units to discipline police officers over allegations of excessive use of force and/or for racist behavior or actions is part and parcel of the systemic issues protesters have demonstrated over for many years and in recent days.
The officer charged with George Floyd’s murder, Derek Chauvin, was the subject of at least 17 misconduct complaints prior to Floyd’s death, almost all of which resulted in no discipline and the rest of which concluded with only a letter placed in his file. News reports say the nature of the complaints is unclear from the information the Minneapolis Police Department released, and that the department wouldn’t provide details.
In 2018, Buzzfeed News reported that at least 319 NYPD employees committed offenses, including harassment and assault in some cases, that were sufficient cause for termination between 2011 and 2015, but for which they were not fired. “Thirty-eight were found guilty by a police tribunal of excessive force, getting into a fight, or firing their gun unnecessarily,” according to the news outlet. Some officers who declined to be identified told Buzzfeed the internal investigations into the actions were “rife with favoritism, racism, and pressures to just plead guilty.”
Disciplinary systems that struggle to hold officers to account for other offenses will similarly fail to remove racist police officers, undermining public trust in entire departments. In Chicago, according to the Citizens Police Data Project, only 7 percent of all police complaints have resulted in any disciplinary action, including allegations of police officers using racial slurs. In 2018, the chief of police in Elkhart, Indiana not only did not discipline an officer but promoted him to sergeant despite the officer “using police communications equipment to refer to white power,” reports ProPublica.
Minneapolis Lieutenant Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, was previously a named defendant in a discrimination lawsuit brought by four black Minneapolis police officers against the Minneapolis Police Department for discrimination. In their complaint, the plaintiffs allege that the Lieutenant openly wore a “White Power badge” on his a motorcycle jacket. Kroll, who admits that he is sometimes called racist but rejects the characterization, has referred to the Black Lives Matter movement as a “terrorist organization.”
As further indication of the extent of racism within law enforcement, under the Obama administration,15 police departments across the United States entered into consent decrees for police reform, which are binding agreements on police to enact court-enforced reforms, such as “preventing discriminatory policing and excessive force,” among other measures. The Justice Department report of its consent decree in Chicago, for instance, revealed that police department received over 30,000 complaints of officer misconduct in five years and determined that a “systematic pattern of excessive force within the Chicago Police Department has eroded trust among minority communities.”
Notably, on March 31, 2017, Trump’s former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, ordered the Justice Department to review Obama-era consent decrees on police department reform and curbed their use by requiring political appointees to sign off on any future settlements. The Trump administration restriction on the use of the decrees was characterized as a transition away from protecting civil rights to promoting law and order. During his nomination hearings, Attorney General William Barr said he supported the Sessions’ policy. To date, the Trump administration has not issued any new consent decrees against police forces within the United States.
Of course, clearly by no means all police units or all members of police forces in the United States are members of racist or white supremacist groups or support alt-right ideology. Notable examples of strong relations with citizens and community-led policing in response to this past week’s protests include New Jersey police officers marching with Black Lives Matters protestors, the Dallas and Georgia’s police chiefs listening to and walking with protestors, and police in both New York City and South Florida kneeling in solidarity with protestors. In Flint, Michigan, Genesee County Sheriff Christopher Swanson removed his riot gear and
Franklin White@FranklinWSVN
Demonstrators & Police Chiefs from Miami Dade County kneel and say a prayer following the death of #GeorgeFloyd @wsvn #MiamiDade #7News #wsvn @OfficialJoelF
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But the term “systemic racism” does not mean that individuals who operate within the system are generally racists. Instead, it means the institutions we have in place produce racially disparate effects on minority populations. And, in that regard, there are well-documented empirical studies of systemic racism in law enforcement agencies—including the use of policies like stop and frisk and disparate rates of policing activities including traffic stops, searches of motorists during traffic stops, levels of respect shown during stops, misdemeanor arrests, marijuana arrests, use of SWAT teams, individuals jailed for inability to pay petty fines for moving violations, militarized policing of different neighborhoods, resolution of murders of white versus black victims, sustained complaints against police officers, and unarmed victims of police shootings.
The evidence of links to explicit white supremacist groups is surely only the tip of a racist iceberg. Other forms of racism that affect all our institutions—without sparing law enforcement agencies—include explicit and implicit racial bias. O’Brien’s comments leave no assurance that he has a command of the facts or if he does that he is willing to acknowledge or seriously grapple with them.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/02/trum-j02.html
By Jacob Crosse
2 June 2020
On Monday evening, President Donald Trump delivered a fascistic speech from the Rose Garden in which he announced the deployment of military forces in the capital and an escalation of police repression to end nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd one week ago (see: “Coup d’état in Washington: Trump declares war on the constitution”).
Trump’s remarks followed leaked audio from a conference call earlier on Monday between Trump, Attorney General William Barr, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and state governors. In the call, Trump laid out the administration's plans for a police-military occupation of the country, which received no serious pushback from any on the call.
Vowing not to have a repeat of Sunday evening, when Trump was forced to turn off the White House lights and retreat to a “secure bunker,” he ordered the deployment of active duty military police to occupy the White House grounds. Nine M35 two-and-a-half-ton troop carriers, carrying over 200 soldiers, entered the grounds at approximately 5:00 pm.
Trump’s decree was accompanied by incitement to police violence against the population. As Trump delivered his remarks, 25 minutes before the 7 pm curfew was to take effect, horse-mounted police, armored personnel carriers and hundreds of black-booted military police bearing riot shields fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of roughly 1,000 peaceful protesters without warning.
Trump’s demand that governors and mayors deploy even greater force to “dominate,” arrest, prosecute and impose long prison sentences on protesters was an attack on democratic rights and assertion of authoritarian rule without precedent in US history.
In the teeth of these threats, nationwide protests continued throughout the US. In over 125 cities, youth and workers of all races have defied vicious police repression, curfews, right-wing thugs, vehicular assaults and mass arrests to continue to demand justice for victims of police murder. As of Monday morning, the Associated Press reported that over 4,400 had been arrested, likely a drastic undercount. In Chicago alone, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart estimated that 2,000 had been arrested over the weekend. In Atlanta, some 200 people were arrested Monday night.
The National Guard has been activated in 21 states, with over 17,000 out of a possible 350,000 soldiers deployed at this time to assist in putting down “civil unrest.” In a number of states, including Kentucky and California, National Guard troops have been shifted from support roles and mobilized alongside heavily armed riot police to directly attack protesters.
The first reported police killing of a protester took place early Monday morning in Louisville, Kentucky, where thousands have marched for six days to denounce the police murder of 26-year-old emergency medical technician Breonna Taylor in March as well as the May 25 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Official reports claim that David McAtee was shot and killed when forces “returned fire.” The reports do not say whether McAtee was killed by police or National Guard soldiers.
McAtee, a 53-year-old barbecue restaurant owner described by his mother Odessa Riley as a “community pillar,” was unarmed. He was left in the street for 12 hours after he was gunned down. According to family members, McAtee died shielding his niece from a barrage of gunfire.
In Omaha, Nebraska, Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine announced Monday that the state would not be pursuing charges against bar owner Jake Gardner, who shot and killed 22-year-old James Scurlock outside his bar Sunday evening.
Kleine ruled that Gardner, a twice deployed Marine and vehement Trump supporter, had acted in “self-defense” and feared for his life. Video evidence shows that Gardner’s father had shoved one protester, who in turn had pushed back. The tape shows Gardner confronting Scurlock, who was with two friends at the time of the tussle.
On Sunday it was announced by Governor Tim Walz that Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison would be leading the prosecution of Derek Chauvin, the fired Minneapolis police officer caught on video holding his knee on George Floyd for nearly nine minutes and ignoring his victim’s cries that he could not breathe until he was dead. After a delay of several days, Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder and homicide, lower-level charges that carry much lighter sentences than first- or second-degree murder.
None of Chauvin’s three fellow cops, who helped restrain Floyd and keep angry bystanders away as the 46-year-old was being asphyxiated, have even been charged. On Monday, Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo suggested that the three might be charged, telling CNN that “Mr. Floyd died in our hands and so I see that as being complicit.”
Democratic operative Al Sharpton hailed the appointment of Ellison to oversee the prosecution as a victory for the protesters and sign that “justice” would be achieved. Sharpton is seeking to reprise his role in the police killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, i.e., spreading illusions in the Democratic Party in order to contain and dissipate protests against police violence. Despite Sharpton’s claims of “victory” in these earlier cases, none of the killer cops were convicted and the Obama administration refused to press federal civil rights charges.
Ellison, a supposed “progressive” Democrat and supporter of Bernie Sanders, appeared on Sunday news interview programs to join in denouncing “outside agitators” and back the deployment of the National Guard and imposition of curfews in Minneapolis and St. Paul. On Monday, he sought to temper hopes of swift justice for Floyd, telling CNN he was in no hurry to “rush to judgment.”
Also on Monday, experts hired by George Floyd's family released an independent autopsy concluding that Floyd died of “asphyxiation from sustained pressure” when his neck and back were compressed by Minneapolis police officers during his arrest. The pressure cut off blood flow to his brain, the autopsy determined.
This conclusion is at variance with the autopsy report released Monday by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, which, while agreeing that Floyd’s death was a homicide, said the cause of death was “cardiopulmonary arrest [heart failure] complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” The medical examiner made no mention of asphyxiation and said heart disease was a factor in Floyd’s death.
Protests have continued in Minneapolis despite the brutal police crackdown and extension of the nightly curfew, which began at 10 pm Monday night. According to Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, 476 protesters have been arrested since Friday.
Walz was effusive during the conference call with Trump Monday morning, thanking him for his “strategic guidance” in urging the full deployment of the National Guard to suppress peaceful protests.
In New York City, mass protests against police brutality continued despite the ongoing threat of COVID-19 that has killed nearly 16,500 in the city. Protesters were set to defy a newly imposed 11:00 pm curfew as thousands of multiracial youth remained in the streets as of this writing. New York police have arrested over 1,000 people.
Despite mostly peaceful marches throughout Southern California Monday, National Guard troops have been deployed to Los Angeles. As of this writing, police have arrested at least 50 people in Los Angeles for allegedly “looting.”
Despite the widespread nature and participation of broad sections of the population in the protests, which have taken place in every US state and capital, governors and mayors of both parties continue to propagate the myth that “outside agitators,” Antifa and “anarchists” have “hijacked” the protests. These baseless claims are being amplified in an attempt to break up the protests against state violence, justify more police violence on a massive scale, and carry out unconstitutional measures to criminalize political opposition to the government’s policies.
"He's describing fascism."
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/01/unhinged-call-trump-urges-governors-use-military-and-throw-demonstrators-jail-10
Shortly after several media outlets reported on President Donald Trump's remarks during a call with U.S. governors Monday morning, The Daily Beast obtained and published the full audio of the call:
The Daily Beast Politics · Trump Audio
Earlier:
President Donald Trump reportedly ripped U.S. governors in a conference call Monday morning for failing to do enough to "dominate" the tens of thousands of people who have taken to the streets across the U.S. to protest the police killing of George Floyd.
The president urged state leaders to crack down even more harshly on demonstrators—who have already been treated brutally by law enforcement—with mass arrests and lengthy prison sentences.
"You have to dominate, if you don't dominate you're wasting your time," Trump said, according to audio of the call obtained by CBS News. "They're going to run over you, you're going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate."
Trump called on state officials to track demonstrators and hit them with a decade in prison as a deterrent against future protests. "You've got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you'll never see this stuff again," Trump said.
"This is fascism," tweeted Evan Greer, deputy director of internet privacy group Fight for the Future. "He's describing fascism."
One anonymous person listening in on the call told Ed O'Keefe of CBS that the president's tone and words during the call were "unhinged."
The Washington Post, citing three anonymous officials who were on the call, reported that Trump pressed governors to "take back the streets and use force to confront protesters and said if they did not, they would look like 'fools,' alarming several governors on the call as they communicated privately."
"You have to use the military," Trump said, according to the Post.
Trump's comments came hours after thousands of people poured into the streets of Washington, D.C. and other major cities around the U.S. over the weekend to protest Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. On Friday night, according to the New York Times, Trump was rushed into a secure and underground bunker by Secret Service agents as protests erupted outside the White House.
While Trump has yet to deliver a formal address to the nation on Floyd's killing and the uprising it sparked, the president has tweeted out incendiary threats against demonstrators and criticized local officials for not being sufficiently brutal in their handling of the mass protests.
On Saturday, the president said the U.S. military "can have troops on the ground" in Minneapolis "very quickly."
"We have our military ready, willing, and able, if they ever want to call our military," Trump said.
Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker, a Democrat, reportedly raised alarm about Trump's response to the nationwide demonstrations during the conference call Monday morning.
"I have been extraordinarily concerned with the rhetoric coming out of the White House making it worse," said Pritzker. "People are feeling real pain out there. We have to have national leadership in calling for calm."
