skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Robert Mackey
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/twitter-restricts-access-trumps-threat-shoot-minneapolis-protesters/
DONALD TRUMP’S BLOODTHIRSTY threat to have protesters in Minneapolis shot by the military, issued in a tweet early Friday morning, prompted Twitter to restrict access to the president’s message, ruling that it violated the social network’s policy against “glorifying violence.”
In the tweet, posted just before 1 a.m. Eastern Time, Trump first wrote that “THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd,” the black man whose killing on Monday by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his throat as he gasped for air has prompted protests and rage. The president then threatened to have soldiers open fire unless local authorities in Minneapolis regain control, adding, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
The tweet was soon covered by an initial warning message, which said the president’s comments violated the platform’s rules, but had not been removed because “it may be in the public’s interest” to be able to read them.
A screenshot of a warning appended to a tweet from Donald Trump on Friday morning.
Readers who clicked past that screen were able to read the inflammatory tweet, but with the warning message above it.
A screenshot of a tweet from Donald Trump, which came with a warning from Twitter about the president’s violent threat.
As Twitter noted in its explanation of why it had added “a public interest notice” to the tweet, that last phrase was even uglier to older Americans who might remember where they first heard it. The words were spoken in 1967 by Walter Headley, a racist Miami police chief, who told reporters that his officers would open fire if looting broke out in the city’s predominantly black neighborhoods.
According to a contemporary news report, from December 28, 1967, when Headley announced that he was declaring war on “young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign,” he added, “we don’t mind being accused of police brutality.” The goal of his crackdown on Miami’s black community, Headley said, was to unleash “an epidemic of law and order.”
Headley repeated the looting and shooting threat the following year when protests in the Liberty City neighborhood devolved into riots during that summer’s Republican National Convention in Miami, which nominated Richard Nixon for the presidency.
As NPR reports, the pro-segregation presidential candidate George Wallace also used the looting and shooting phrase on the campaign trail in 1968.
The protests in Miami that summer were prompted, in part, by anger over Headley’s “stop and frisk” policy targeting black citizens and his preference for “shotguns and dogs” in the policing of a community demanding civil rights.
As Jonathan Myerson Katz noted, the protests turned violent when a white man drove through a black rally in a car with a “Wallace for President” bumper sticker on the evening of Aug. 7, 1968. The police opened fire with tear gas and bullets. Three people were killed by the police and a black reporter for The Washington Post, Hollie West, was arrested in Liberty City by officers who refused to acknowledge his press credentials.
Trump’s reference to Headley and/or Wallace was unlikely to have been accidental. In 2016, Trump told a New York Times reporter that his own acceptance speech was inspired by Nixon’s in 1968. “I think what Nixon understood is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first,” Trump said. “The 60s were bad, really bad. And it’s really bad now. Americans feel like it’s chaos again.”
“This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today,” the company said in a thread explaining its decision. “We’ve taken action in the interest of preventing others from being inspired to commit violent acts, but have kept the Tweet on Twitter because it is important that the public still be able to see the Tweet given its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance.”
In line with Twitter’s policy on tweets that it would have removed from the platform but for the public interest exception, the company added that “engagements with the Tweet will be limited. People will be able to Retweet with Comment, but will not be able to Like, Reply or Retweet it.”
The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, was asked to respond to the president’s tweet, and an earlier one calling him “very weak,” at a news conference early on Friday.
Frey shook his head in disbelief as the tweets were read to him.
Acyn Torabi@Acyn
Mayor Frey responds to the President’s tweets: Weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions. Weakness is pointing your finger at somebody else during a time of crisis. Donald Trump knows nothing about the strength of Minneapolis. We are strong as hell..
1,404
1:42 AM - May 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
598 people are talking about this
“Well, let me say this,” Frey responded. “Weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions. Weakness is pointing your finger at somebody else during a time of crisis. Donald Trump knows nothing about the strength of Minneapolis. We are strong as hell. Is this a difficult time period? Yes. But you better be damn sure that we’re going to get through this.”
Later on Friday, after the police officer seen on video killing Floyd, Derek Chauvin, was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter, the mayor described that “as an essential first step” in a tweet of his own.
Mayor Jacob Frey
✔@MayorFrey
The man who killed George Floyd has been charged with murder. This an essential first step on a much longer road toward justice and healing our city.
2,613
2:30 PM - May 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
982 people are talking about this
Trump, who had been expected to address the killing of Floyd, and his own provocative taunt, at a White House news conference, instead confined his remarks to inflaming tensions with China, by changing the terms of the U.S. relationship to Hong Kong and declaring a full withdrawal from the World Health Organization, before departing without taking a single question.
Acyn Torabi@Acyn
The President escapes his own press conference to evade questions on Minneapolis
488
2:05 PM - May 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
341 people are talking about this
His administration did, however, devote some time to trying to dodge the Twitter restriction, by using the White House Twitter feed to quote the president’s inflammatory rhetoric. That White House tweet was soon restricted too, with the same warning label.
Anger over Trump’s rhetoric spread widely on Friday. Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot called Trump’s comment “profoundly dangerous.”
arcusD 
@_MarcusD3_
Lori Lightfoot not holding back on Trump!
450
3:47 PM - May 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
193 people are talking about this
“His goal is to polarize, to destabilize local government and inflame racist urges,” she added. “And we cannot, absolutely not, let him prevail. And I will code what I really want to say to Donald Trump. It’s two words, it begins with ‘F’ and it ends with ‘you.’ I will not remain silent while this man cynically tries to turn this incredibly painful moment into one for his own political gain.”
Twitter’s decision to draw a line for Trump came just hours after he issued an executive order threatening to make it easier for users to file lawsuits against the company for perceived political bias. The order was a transparent act of retaliation against the company for having appended a fact-checking note to a tweet in which Trump made a range of false claims about plans for California to make it easier for registered voters to vote by mail during the ongoing pandemic.
Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told Adweek that the executive order itself violated the First Amendment because it was an act of government retaliation. “The order was born unconstitutional because it was issued in retaliation for Twitter’s fact-checking of President Trump’s tweets,” Jaffer said.
“The First Amendment protects Twitter’s right to respond to the president’s speech, including by attaching warnings to tweets that glorify violence,” Jaffer said in a statement sent to The Intercept. “Fundamentally this dispute is about whether Twitter has the right to disagree with, criticize, and respond to the president. Obviously, it does. It is remarkable and truly chilling that the president and his advisers seem to believe otherwise.”
Jaffer’s colleague Katie Fallow, a senior attorney at the First Amendment Institute, noted that unusual language that appeared to have been added to the order without much review, “make the retaliatory motive even clearer.”
Katie Fallow@KatieFallow
Exhibit one million in 1st Amendment claim of government retaliation. https://twitter.com/briankarem/status/1266123740640927749 …
Brian J. Karem
✔@BrianKarem
Here, buried in the Executive Order is the reason @realDonaldTrump flipped his wig: He’s upset Twitter fact checked him. It is always about him.
275
5:05 PM - May 28, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
84 people are talking about this
“Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias,” one part of the order reads. “As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet.”
What’s odd, as Fallow notes, is that the order references “another politician” without saying that the first politician it is concerned with here is Trump, although that is quite clear from the context. Another less than subtle hint is that the order throws in a gratuitous attack on the company’s failure to label tweets by Rep. Adam Schiff, who led the impeachment of Trump, in which he supposedly “mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets.”
Aída Chávez
https://theintercept.com/2020/06/01/louisville-police-left-the-body-of-david-mcatee-on-the-street-for-12-hours/
THE BODY OF David McAtee laid in the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, for over 12 hours on Monday. McAtee had been killed by law enforcement just after midnight on Sunday, May 31, amid days of protests over police violence nationwide. Noon the next day, protesters were gathered at the site. McAtee’s body was still there.
McAtee, the owner of a local barbecue business and a beloved community figure, was shot and killed after Louisville police and the National Guard opened fire on a crowd that had gathered at a parking lot on 26th and Broadway. As the owner of YaYa’s BBQ, McAtee was known to give police officers free meals. Bystanders and witnesses have said that the crowd was not protesting when the police arrived. Police claim that they were returning fire after the crowd began shooting.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear attributed the killing to the Louisville Metro Police Department and the National Guard. Police officers, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said, had not activated their body cameras in violation of policy. Police Chief Steve Conrad was fired as a result, but retains his pension. Acting Chief Robert Schroeder, at the press conference, seemed to walk back Beshear’s statement pending investigation. “We do not know who shot him,” he said, “we do not know if it was related to a separate incident, if it was due to the shots fired by our officers and the National Guardsmen soldiers who accompanied them.” The press conference did not address why McAtee’s body was left outside, and Louisville police did not respond to a request for comment.
Robert LeVertis Bell, a community activist who’s running for the Louisville Metro Council in the 4th District, was among the hundreds of protesters who had gathered at the scene early Monday afternoon. He said the crowd was made up mostly of members of the community, not experienced activists, who were angry and hurt. “We were already dealing with the death of Breonna Taylor,” he said, referring to the police shooting of a young black woman two months ago.
“Even if they had some sort of legitimate, procedural reason for [keeping the body at the scene] you’d think they would have in mind the trauma that they’re inflicting when they do that, especially having experienced that with the Mike Brown case in Ferguson,” Bell said. “That’s the first thing I thought, that this was terrorism… because it’s terrorizing, even if they don’t intentionally try to do it.”
Protests of police brutality around the country saw escalating violence over the weekend, with police driving vehicles into crowds and firing rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash grenades, in clashes that have gone viral on social media. Police have arrested more than 4,100 people over days of demonstrations, according to a tally from the Associated Press, and several protesters have been killed. On Saturday night in Omaha, Nebraska, Jake Gardner, a white bar owner, shot and killed James Scurlock, a 22-year-old black man, outside his establishment. On Monday, prosecutors said the man acted in self defense and would not be charged. Calvin L. Horton Jr. was shot and killed outside a pawnshop in Minneapolis. Chris Beaty, a former football player, and Dorian Murrell were also shot and killed in separate incidents in Indianapolis over the weekend, though it was not immediately clear who was responsible for either killing. A protester died in St. Louis after reportedly being dragged on the highway by a FedEx truck.
At the mayor’s press conference, Kentucky State Rep. Charles Booker, a Louisville native who is challenging Mitch McConnell for Senate in 2020, spoke for the community. “My voice is strained because I’ve been doing a lot of yelling and crying as well,” he said, and called for police officers involved in Taylor’s death to be relieved of their duties and for the investigations in Taylor’s death to be expedited. “To lose your job when someone has died at your hands is a small price to pay.”
Akela Lacy
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/28/pennsylvania-voter-rolls-purge-judicial-watch/
SIX STATES ARE facing federal lawsuits and threats of litigation from the ultra-conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch that could jeopardize the integrity of upcoming primary and general elections.
The suits claim that states are not properly maintaining voter rolls as required by federal law, and raise the specter of voter fraud, arguing that improper maintenance could leave the door open to “dirty elections.”
Judicial Watch, which focuses on the courts and is funded primarily by large grants from conservative foundations, is suing Pennsylvania’s chief election official, along with county legislators and election officials in three of the state’s six counties with the most registered voters. Pennsylvania was critical to Donald Trump’s win in 2016. He won by less than 1 percentage point, losing only 11 counties, including the three suburban Philadelphia counties being sued by Judicial Watch. It was the first time Pennsylvania went red since 1988. Democrats almost certainly need to win the state — where former Vice President Joe Biden was born, and where his campaign is headquartered — to take back the White House.
The group has filed similar suits in North Carolina and Maryland. The Pennsylvania lawsuit follows notices Judicial Watch sent to 19 counties in Pennsylvania, California, Virginia, Colorado, and Kentucky last December, threatening lawsuits unless they removed ineligible voters from rolls. One Pennsylvania county buckled under pressure and made changes to its voter rolls, while the three that are currently being sued did not. Counties in California and Kentucky, facing pressure from Judicial Watch, last year started the process to remove close to 2 million voters from their rolls.
“Nobody questions that states should keep voter rolls accurate and up to date,” said Adriel I. Cepeda Derieux, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project. “The problem is when overly aggressive procedures sweep too widely to catch eligible voters who should remain on the rolls. And those excessive practices have been again and again shown to disproportionately impact racial and language minority communities.”
Voters who are erroneously removed from the rolls would have to re-register ahead of upcoming elections, though it’s not certain they would be notified in time. Voters whose registrations are in question are usually notified by mail, though given the ongoing pandemic, many people are not currently at the addresses listed on their registrations or are not able to access mail due to illness or other extenuating circumstances.
Republicans have peddled the myth of rampant voter fraud in an effort to curtail voting rights and suppress votes to their advantage. They have upped the ante in recent weeks as a number of states battle over how to make voting accessible amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has postponed some elections. On May 21, Judicial Watch sued California following Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order to completely shift November elections to vote-by-mail; it would be the first state to do so as a result of the ongoing pandemic. The Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the California Republican Party filed suit against the order several days later. “Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in an April 28 press release on the Pennsylvania suit.
There is no evidence to bear out that claim. While there have been no recent major incidents of voter fraud, there was a case of electoral fraud committed by Republicans in North Carolina. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., bizarrely referenced that case when warning against potential voter fraud in other states. In that case, a political strategist working for a Republican congressional candidate was indicted on charges of orchestrating a scheme to collect and submit fraudulent absentee ballots in 2018 and 2016, including forging signatures and filling out incomplete ballots, and paying workers to collect them.
In response to increased legal activity surrounding claims of voter fraud, the Brennan Center for Justice released a report Wednesday debunking 10 myths related to the issue. The public policy group warns against using flawed lists of voter data to justify purges, citing cases in Virginia and Texas.
“This year, not surprisingly, we’ve seen a remarkable uptick in terms of litigation seeking both to remove voters from the rolls, and also to prevent certain groups of registered voters from being able to vote by mail in the primaries,” said John Powers, counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The group recently filed to intervene in the Judicial Watch suit in Pennsylvania. He noted that these types of lawsuits tend to be frivolous. “Plaintiffs raise concerns that their vote could be diluted due to voter fraud, and then they cite a couple of random examples from out of state, and often times from many years ago — decades ago — which are highly speculative.”
There are adequate protections in place to detect and prevent rare cases of voter fraud, Powers said. “The system works,” he said. In regard to expanded vote-by-mail, fears about the potential for remote voting fraud do not “justify imposing restrictions that are gonna disenfranchise or severely burden thousands of voters in the upcoming election cycle.”
IN PENNSYLVANIA’S MIDDLE District Court, Judicial Watch sued the Department of State, along with election officials in Bucks, Delaware, and Chester counties. The group argued that Pennsylvania has “abnormally low number of removals” under procedure mandated by the National Voter Registration Act, or NRVA, “to identify voters who have changed residence,” and cited low removal numbers as evidence that the state “is not removing inactive registrations as the law requires.” In other words, Judicial Watch is claiming that county officials are not properly maintaining voter rolls and implying without evidence that this leaves open the door to voter fraud.
The suit claims that there are up to 800,000 inactive voters in the three counties, meaning they are ineligible to vote. That would amount to more than 65 percent of all registered voters across the three counties. Judicial Watch claims that its analysis of voter registration data shows that the Pennsylvania counties “removed almost no names under NVRA procedures for identifying and updating the registrations of those who have moved.”
The right-wing group sent letters to Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, who was appointed last January by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, and county legislators and election officials in Bucks, Chester, and Delaware Counties, asking them to provide “all documents concerning any instance(s) of voter fraud.” The complaint asks the court to compel county election offices and officials to “comply with their voter list maintenance obligations,” as well as obligations regarding record production under the NRVA.
Boockvar, a named defendant in the lawsuit, recently said “we 100% dispute” the suit’s claims.
Discussing the Pennsylvania suit on a press call earlier this month, Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the purge would be “unlawful” and that Judicial Watch had based its litigation on “unverified, self-generated analysis that compares the voter registration data with outdated census data.”
“They cite some EAC statistics where they say the county’s only purged seventeen people, but that information is inaccurate,” said Powers, of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, referencing a 2019 U.S. Election Assistance Commission report on an election administration and voting survey administered in 2018. “Judicial Watch’s own pleadings include correspondence with the county officials where they say, ‘Hey, we’ve purged tens of thousands of people over this period,’” he said. “What additional purges does Judicial Watch want these counties to undertake? They never say clearly.”
The ACLU Voting Rights Project and the group’s Pennsylvania chapter, along with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, filed a motion to intervene in the suit on May 11 on behalf of Common Cause Pennsylvania and the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania. The groups want to get involved to help manage voter outreach and to ease the burden on state officials, who are trying to respond to the current public health crisis.
“These three counties account for eighteen percent of all reported Covid-19 cases and twenty-five percent of all virus-related deaths in the state of Pennsylvania,” Rosenberg said. Election officials are already facing increased burdens related to the coronavirus, he added, including forced closures of voter registration locations like Department of Motor Vehicles sites. “These competing concerns will obviously consume defendants’ resources and attention in ways that make it very likely that they may need the aid of organizations like ours, which are going to help defend against an unlawful purge of voters.”
Bucks, Chester and Delaware counties, which consistently vote Democratic, cover the Philadelphia suburbs to the north and southwest where Hillary Clinton got the bulk of her support in 2016. They went blue again in 2018. According to state voter registration data, the three counties account for the third, fourth, and fifth most registered voters in the state, and registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in all of them (though there are only roughly 600 more Democrats than Republicans in Chester County).
Earlier this year, under threat of a Judicial Watch lawsuit, Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County removed 69,000 names from its voter rolls. Last year, after the group threatened litigation in California and Kentucky, counties in California and Kentucky began the process of removing more than 1.8 million voters, including up to 1.5 million in Los Angeles County alone. Voters in those counties were sent notices that they would be removed from rolls if they did not vote in future elections or confirm their voting address.
In April, Judicial Watch filed a federal suit against two counties in North Carolina saying they had failed to clean voter roles and alleging that there were close to 1 million inactive voters statewide. The group also claimed that both counties have “had registration rates that were close to, at, or above 100% of its age-eligible citizenry.”
A federal judge in April ruled in Judicial Watch’s favor in a 2017 voter data suit filed in Maryland, ordering the state to produce a list of registered voters in Montgomery County, complete with birthdates. The judge wrote that the state’s defense, citing privacy concerns regarding disclosure of personal voter information, “are valid” but that because state law does not safeguard birth dates within the context of the case, disclosure is required by law. There are currently 674,752 registered voters in the county.
IN THE WAKE of coronavirus, states are largely moving to expand mail voting.“It’s a common sense step to protect the right to vote in the midst of the pandemic,” said Powers, of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.
But in response, there’s been an increase in litigation by right-wing groups seeking to restrict who can vote by absentee ballot. Powers listed ongoing cases in Nevada, Michigan, California, and Virginia dealing with the question of who can and can’t vote absentee, particularly under disability and illness exceptions related to the coronavirus. Plaintiffs in the Virginia case are suing against Virginia lawmakers’ vote-by-mail expansion to allow people with coronavirus-related illness to qualify under provisions for people with disabilities and related illnesses. On Wednesday, the Texas Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case brought by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sought a court order that lack of immunity to Covid-19 could not be considered a “disability” for purposes of voting by mail. The court held that a lack of immunity was not a disability, but said election officials should take voters’ requests for a mail ballot at face value.
“States — and now, because of this litigation, courts — are being forced to make careful determinations about the right to vote and how to protect the right to vote in the middle of a pandemic,” Powers said. “You have situations where, if you restrict who can vote absentee, voters are gonna be disenfranchised.”
President Donald Trump earlier this month threatened to withhold funding from Michigan and Nevada if they went forward with plans to expand mail-in voting. Trump on Tuesday posted a tweet falsely claiming that voting by mail would ensure widespread voter fraud. It was the first tweet Twitter has ever flagged as untrue.
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.
If you feel this column is important, please share it.
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
91.6K
7:13 PM - May 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
46.3K people are talking about this
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.
25.1K
9:48 PM - May 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
8,860 people are talking about this
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.
1,300
2:36 AM - May 31, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
696 people are talking about this
Timothy Burke
✔@bubbaprog
Salt Lake City cops shove down an elderly man with a cane for the crime of standing along the street:
113K
8:44 PM - May 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
61.7K people are talking about this
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
4,553
2:51 AM - May 31, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
2,358 people are talking about this
#blacklivesmatter@vikthewild
Dont let them tell you it was peaceful in Downtown Houston #BlackLivesMatter #GeorgeFloyd
34.1K
8:14 PM - May 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
16.9K people are talking about this
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
272K
9:37 PM - May 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
201K people are talking about this
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.
136K
8:23 PM - May 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
54.1K people are talking about this
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.
94K
11:05 PM - May 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
35.7K people are talking about this
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
48.8K
10:46 PM - May 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
18.9K people are talking about this
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
83.6K
8:04 PM - May 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
38.7K people are talking about this
Andrew Kimmel
✔@andrewkimmel
Minneapolis Police slashed every tire on my rental car, as well as every tire of every car in this parking lot.
37.2K
1:57 AM - May 31, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
21.4K people are talking about this
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
174K
12:38 PM - May 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
41.9K people are talking about this
Christopher Bishop@ChrisBishopL1C4
This just happened on live tv. Wow, what a douche bag.
404K
8:47 PM - May 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
128K people are talking about this
Brian Stelter
✔@brianstelter
Here's the full video of @CNN's crew being detained and arrested by the Minnesota State Patrol, live on @NewDay.
15.5K
5:39 AM - May 29, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
11.7K people are talking about this
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 …
18.6K
12:45 AM - May 31, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
10.5K people are talking about this
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
5,850
11:11 PM - May 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
4,549 people are talking about this
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
29.3K
9:28 PM - May 30, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
19.8K people are talking about this
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:
1,093
1:32 AM - May 31, 2020 · Minneapolis, MN
Twitter Ads info and privacy
964 people are talking about this
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.
