This is the militarization needed by tin-pot dictators with massive insecurity complexes, not policing by a democratically-elected administration ... Oh, wait.
One
of the scariest parts about this horrible administration is how law
enforcement at all levels, from local cops to the fascists who work for
ICE to the Border Patrol union, are chomping at the bit to do whatever
Trump wants. We’ve seen this most aggressively from ICE of course, but
our law enforcement loves a fascist president and will do everything
they can to ensure more of them.
Sarah Jaffe has a good piece detailing this.
This
is no longer an issue of one election; Trump may not have kept many of
his promises, but he is keeping the ones he made to the police officers
who supported him. And it’s also not just about Trump; around the
country, police work hand-in-hand with far-right politicians
orchestrating crackdowns on immigrants, harsher penalties for crimes,
and so-called “blue lives matter” bills that make crimes against police
equivalent to crimes against marginalized and oppressed groups. In
California, for example, the California State Sheriffs’ Association is
working hard to bury a “sanctuary state” proposal, and one sheriff even
publicly floated the idea of her county simply ignoring the law if it
were to pass.
While the occasional story of
an officer with neo-Nazi tattoos or apparent ties to white supremacist
websites does surface from time to time, this is not a matter of
individual officers going rogue. It is a belief system produced through
the decades of American policing, a history that includes police
collusion with white supremacist vigilantes in the South and elsewhere,
as Vitale points out. There is also police overlap with militia groups
like the Oath Keepers—in 2015, reporting for my book, I spoke with Sam
Andrews, a former Oath Keeper who had left the organization over its
refusal to endorse an open-carry march he held with black residents of
Ferguson and the greater St. Louis area. For the police in the
organization, he said, such a thing was a bridge too far.
These
days, open collusion with white supremacist groups might be less
common, but an offensive post made to the Instagram account of the
Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of Newburgh, New York, this August
struck a nerve because it seemed to echo the policy on the ground in
Charlottesville.
The image, rapidly denounced by the PBA and the police
department, showed a Confederate flag juxtaposed with a photo of young
black men with sagging pants, with the words “This does not offend me”
emblazoned over the flag and “This bullshit does” over the photo. It was
a sign, once again, of just who “us” and “them” is.
And
so, in the age of Trump, police and the institutions that represent
them continue to double down on their siege mentality. As protesters
confront white supremacists in city after city—as I write this,
Berkeley’s streets are full of red flags and tear gas—police still seem
to see protesters, particularly protesters of the political left, as a
sign of disorder. The movement for black lives, along with its demands
for accountability or even abolition of the police, is felt to be a
particular threat to police officers, and Trump has done his best to
encourage this feeling. With his approval ratings at an all-time low and
officials departing his administration like proverbial rats from a
sinking ship, Trump has sent a signal to what Marcy Wheeler has noted is
the “respectable” part of his base—the police—that anything goes. This
should concern us.
This is also
incredibly dangerous. If the worst nightmares of Trump severely eroding
democracy do come to fruition, law enforcement will be at the center of
it. And yet even today,
law enforcement are almost immune to real criticism in the public
sphere. Yes, we all need law enforcement from time to time. What we
don’t need is a Providence police officer coming to my house after it
gets robbed and telling me to my face that if voters don’t put Buddy
Cianci in the mayor’s office next month, the animals are going to take
over the city. We can have policing without fascism, beatings of
protestors, and mass deportations of peaceful people. But we may not get
that with the police as presently constructed. There also needs to be a
lot more deep diving into the salting of police forces with white
supremacists, which is something I hear a lot of rumors about but
haven’t seen anything real solid.
And
we conclude, as is our wont, in the Great State Of Oklahoma, where Blog
Official Copper Dowser Friedman Of The Plains brings us yet another
tragedy that has befallen our brave men in blue. From
The Daily Beast:
He
was pronounced dead at the scene. The 35-year-old was on his front
porch holding a two-foot-long pipe when police arrived in the area to
investigate a hit-and-run accident. Police ordered Sanchez to drop the
pipe, but he could not hear them. He walked toward the officer and waved
the pipe in his right hand, officials said. Neighbors nearby saw the
situation unfolding and ran toward officers, screaming. “Don’t kill him!
He’s deaf,” a 12-year-old girl yelled. “Don’t do it!” Six other
neighbors joined in before another officer arrived and shot him.
He
should have complied. Being deaf is no excuse for not obeying orders
that you can’t hear. Also, he could’ve laid waste to six young,
well-trained police officers with that pipe of his. Did I cover
everything?
If you want me to feel like the police aren’t my enemy STOP SENDING THEM TO GAS ME FOR DOING MY FUCKING JOB AS A JOURNALIST.
If you don’t want people to get het up about how many black people you’ve killed, STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE.
Meanwhil, the FBI is
pulling out all the stops to arrest activists, not the criminals the activists exposed.
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