Who Let the Pigs Out?

Yet another fight we thought we'd won 30 years ago that we're having to fight all over again.

The Rude Pundit has a timely reminder that Trayvon Martin's murder by a cop wannabe obscures the far more common murders by actual cops.

What also matters is that the Pasadena and, indeed, police all over the Los Angeles area have been involved in multiple incidents of shooting unarmed black males in the last couple of years. What matters is that, like the Sean Bell incident in New York City, which finally ended this week, over 5 years later, with the firing of the detectives involved, the use of deadly force by the police against black men is something this nation refuses to grapple with.

There's been local marches for justice for Kendrec McDade, but nothing like the saturation of action and coverage we've gotten in the Trayvon Martin case. And that's a shame, for many reasons, not the least of which is that the violence against young black males by the police, and not just armed neighborhood watch members, from stop-and-frisk to killing, deserves at least as much of our outrage and anger.

And that cops are getting out of control generally:

All in all, it's been a pretty shitty week for those of us who believe in things like rights and freedom. Not the bullshit chimera "Freedom" that nutzoid right-wingers sodomize like the last donkey in Alabama, but real and actual freedom. See, to the right, the government saying that a business needs to meet certain building codes and labor laws is an infringement on freedom. On the left, we say getting strip-searched by cops because you are wrongly accused of not paying your parking tickets is a bit more freedom-denying. But, really, what's the difference, huh?

Or perhaps we think that campus cops in a California college gettin' all up in student faces with the pepper spray once again breeches the whole freedom vs. tyranny line. This time around, the dastardly collegians at Santa Monica College were protesting a major hike in tuition, and, thus, because they didn't act like good, docile sheep, they had to get a face full of pain. Fuck, yeah.

Are we done now? Are we past our post-9/11 worship of police? Have we given them enough rights as we have destroyed our own? And, most importantly, is it okay to call them "pigs" again?