caitlinjohnstone | Wherever these videos emerge online you will inevitably see a deluge
of cop apologia (which I decided just now I’ll be calling copologia)
saying the footage is fake or the victim deserved it and the cop’s just
trying to get home to his family blah blah blah. There is not enough
gold in the earth’s crust to make the number of olympic medals these
people deserve for all the mental gymnastics they are performing to
excuse unprovoked, completely unnecessary acts of violence from public
employees whose job isn’t even statistically all that dangerous.
Most
of these copologists do not even know why they are falling all over
themselves to try and justify police brutality. It’s a conditioned
response, like turning your head when someone calls your name. They
don’t think about it, it’s just something they’ve been conditioned to do
by decades of media and cultural indoctrination into an empire whose survival depends on the existence of a violent and militarized police force. They hear Pavlov’s bell and start salivating, just as they’ve been programmed to.
The thing is, their creative energy is being spent entirely in vain. Police and their apologists have already lost the argument.
A
police force which cannot respond to protests about police brutality
without the internet being flooded with a steady stream of police
brutality footage is a police force in sore need of drastic overhaul. It
has already been proven that that is in fact the case. There’s no
taking it back. There’s no fixing it. It’s done. The debate is
officially over. Huge, sweeping changes must immediately be made, and
there’s no valid reason for the protests to stop until that has
occurred.
These videos have made it clear that the institution of policing in
America is completely sick from coast to coast, right down to its very
culture. The most obvious example I can point to is that watching just a
few minutes of the footage of police brutality
at these protests makes it undeniably apparent that a belief pervades
police culture that it is okay to physically assault someone who has
made you feel emotionally upset. Over and over and over again we see
police accosting civilians for saying impolite words to them or making
rude gestures, or not demonstrating an adequate level of subservience.
Over and over and over again we see an attack on a cop’s ego treated as
an attack on the cop himself.
This is absolutely ridiculous. These
are public servants. Imagine if teachers, mail carriers or DMV
employees were routinely assaulting anyone who spoke impolitely to them.
