Law Enforcement is the Problem
We keep applying the language and framework of accountability, diversity
and sensitivity to an issue of oppression. We are attempting to fly an
airplane with the keys to a motorcycle. Our tools are woefully
inadequate, and until we are ready to admit to ourselves that the police
are an inherently oppressive force, and then use the language of
anti-oppression and anti-racism in our analysis and solutions, it will
not end today, as Eric Garner had hoped. The dead bodies of black folks
will continue to line our streets and sidewalks, and they will be
treated no better than the roadkill with whom they occupy those spaces.
Charlie Pierce:
This flaunting of both departmental rules and federal law on the part of
local police departments is the clearest indication that they consider
themselves beyond the law they are sworn to enforce. And why shouldn't
they? The systems by which they are supposed to be held accountable are
intolerably weak, where they are not broken altogether. Where are the
stiff fines for the police chiefs who ignore the requirements of federal
law? What good are departmental sanctions when officers get filmed
blithely using techniques that those sanctions supposedly banned two
decades ago? It has become plain that, in far too many cases and in far
too many places, local police departments have made of themselves what
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 concerning the use of British troops to
enforce the law in the colonies -- "independent of and superior to the civil power."
Once there, these departments operate with impunity according to the
informal dynamics of American law and American justice that were born
when the country was. And, among other things, that means more Eric
Garners and Michael Browns and Tamir Rices, the latter a 12-year old
shot down by a cop in Cleveland who'd been hired anyway despite the fact
that responsibilities of being a cop in a suburb were too much for him. Makes me wanna holler, too.
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