ZBellion: In 2018 The Pentagon Planned A Scenario To "Fight The Future"

theintercept |  In the face of protests composed largely of young people, the presence of America’s military on the streets of major cities has been a controversial development. But this isn’t the first time that Generation Z — those born after 1996 — has popped up on the Pentagon’s radar.

Documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a Pentagon war game, called the 2018 Joint Land, Air and Sea Strategic Special Program, or JLASS, offered a scenario in which members of Generation Z, driven by malaise and discontent, launch a “Zbellion” in America in the mid-2020s.

The Zbellion plot was a small part of JLASS 2018, which also featured scenarios involving Islamist militants in Africa, anti-capitalist extremists, and ISIS successors. The war game was conducted by students and faculty from the U.S. military’s war colleges, the training grounds for prospective generals and admirals. While it is explicitly not a national intelligence estimate, the war game, which covers the future through early 2028, is “intended to reflect a plausible depiction of major trends and influences in the world regions,” according to the more than 200 pages of documents.

According to the scenario, many members of Gen Z — psychologically scarred in their youth by 9/11 and the Great Recession, crushed by college debt, and disenchanted with their employment options — have given up on their hopes for a good life and believe the system is rigged against them. Here’s how the origins of the uprising are described:

Both the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Great Recession greatly influenced the attitudes of this generation in the United states, and resulted in a feeling of unsettlement and insecurity among Gen Z. Although Millennials experienced these events during their coming of age, Gen Z lived through them as part of their childhood, affecting their realism and world view … many found themselves stuck with excessive college debt when they discovered employment options did not meet their expectations. Gen Z are often described as seeking independence and opportunity but are also among the least likely to believe there is such a thing as the “American Dream,” and that the “system is rigged” against them. Frequently seeing themselves as agents for social change, they crave fulfillment and excitement in their job to help “move the world forward.” Despite the technological proficiency they possess, Gen Z actually prefer person-to-person contact as opposed to online interaction. They describe themselves as being involved in their virtual and physical communities, and as having rejected excessive consumerism.

In early 2025, a cadre of these disaffected Zoomers launch a protest movement. Beginning in “parks, rallies, protests, and coffee shops” — first in Seattle; then New York City; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Las Vegas; and Austin — a group known as Zbellion begins a “global cyber campaign to expose injustice and corruption and to support causes it deem[s] beneficial.”

5th Most Dangerous Kansas City Wastes As Much Per Capita On Policing As Chicago

You will find more infographics at Statista

kansascity |  The four largest cities in the metro area will spend over $400 million on law enforcement this year. That doesn’t count the millions spent on courts, prosecutors and jails. Just the men and women in blue.

Naturally, Kansas City, Missouri, spends the most, having the largest population and the most law enforcement needs. No single division within city government gets more financial support than the police department.

The KCPD is budgeted to get $273 million this fiscal year, which amounts to 16 percent of the city’s $1.7 billion budget. That works out to about $554 for each of the estimated 492,000 people who were living within the city limits at last count.

That’s more than twice the per capita amount that suburban Overland Park spends on its police department and four times more than the citizens of Omaha, Nebraska, pay for police protection in a city whose population is only slightly less than Kansas City’s.

As with any police department or private business, for that matter, most of the KCPD’s budget goes to pay the salaries and benefits of its personnel, roughly 1,400 sworn officers and 600 civilian workers.

The fire department is second with 1,300 employees, followed by the water department.

Just under a quarter of the police budget goes toward paying the health insurance and pension obligations the city owes to employees and retirees.

From a program standpoint, about $100 million supports the patrol bureau, which includes all those cops you see driving down the streets responding to calls for service and enforcing traffic laws.

About $41 million underwrites investigations, of which just under a third is aimed at vice and narcotics crimes, another third to investigate violent crimes and the rest to cover other investigations and underwrite the cost of the crime lab.

Large amounts of the budget go for support services, like vehicle maintenance and the computer network.

Yet even with a quarter-billion-dollar-plus budget, the police department could always use more to keep up with all the demands placed upon it, said Nathan Garrett, one of the four members of the five-member board of police commissioners appointed by the governor that sets department policy. By state statute, the mayor of Kansas City has the fifth vote.

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/article243490386.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/article243490386.html#storylink=cpy

"I Voted For Barack Obama Twice And Still Got Teargassed!!!"

WaPo | Even amid the coronavirus pandemic and orders that kept millions at home for weeks, police shot and killed 463 people through the first week of June — 49 more than the same period in 2019. In May, police shot and killed 110 people, the most in any one month since The Post began tracking such incidents.

The year-over-year consistency has confounded those who have spent decades studying the issue.

“It is difficult to explain why we haven’t seen significant fluctuations in the shooting from year to year,” former Charlotte police chief Darrel Stephens said. “There’s been significant investments that have been made in de-escalation training. There’s been a lot of work.”

The overwhelming majority of people killed are armed. Nearly half of all people fatally shot by police are white. Most of these shootings draw little or no attention beyond a news story.

Some become flash points in the country’s ongoing reckoning about race and police. The ones prompting the loudest outcries often involve people who are black, unarmed, or both, shootings that have led to the harshest scrutiny of police.

Since The Post began tracking the shootings, black people have been shot and killed by police at disproportionate rates — both in terms of overall shootings and the shootings of unarmed Americans. The number of black and unarmed people fatally shot by police has declined since 2015, but whether armed or not, black people are still shot and killed at a disproportionately higher rate than white people.

The 1994 Biden Crime Bill Flooded Cities With Militarized Policing

truthout |  The unending killing of Black people at the hands of police forces, and the sustained, relentless and highly visible police violence inflicted on protesters represent a grave and immediate national crisis. 

The Justice in Policing Act put forth by House Democrats attempts to address this moment, but falls frighteningly short. We will not see any end to this crisis until the federal government reckons with one of its most important roles in fueling police violence: money. 

There are aspects of the Justice in Policing Act, including ending qualified immunity and establishing a federal registry of police misconduct, that are not harmful. But the myriad ways in which it provides additional funds and legitimacy towards the current system of policing — whether through trainings, standards, data collection or accreditation programs — is neither responsive to the demands of the millions of people taking to the streets in protest, nor to the simple reality of what federal interventions would be most impactful — and most needed. 

To begin, Congress must grapple with an uncomfortable truth: By sending billions of federal dollars to local policing over the last 25 years, it has helped precipitate the policing crisis that we find ourselves in today. 

In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which established the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Program. The program was designed to incentivize state and local law enforcement agencies to purchase new equipment, develop and distribute new technologies, and ultimately increase the number of officers deployed throughout the United States. After an initial appropriation of $8.8 billion between 1995 and 2000, the COPS Program has granted over $14 billion to state and local governments since its establishment.

The program was successful in its mission — especially in flooding communities with policing.

Negroes Don't Take Blackness As Seriously As Cops Take "Cop-ness"

Otherwise we might allocate 6% off the top to fund and sustain an effective fraternal order of blackness with professionial lobbyists, attorneys, and public relations officers free to pursue a doggedly and determinedly pro-black agenda. 

fivethirtyeight |  The overwhelming majority of black Americans view their racial identity as a core part of their overall identity, and this black identity and kinship with other black people has likely been heightened by Floyd’s killing and the resulting debate over the status of black people in the United States.

About 52 percent of non-Hispanic black Americans said they viewed being black as “extremely important” to how they thought about themselves, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted last year. Another 22 percent said it was “very important.” These numbers were considerably lower for non-Hispanic Asian, non-Hispanic white and Hispanic Americans. (More on the story with Asian and Hispanic Americans in a bit — it’s complicated.)¹

Pew polling from 2016 and 2017 also showed that black people were significantly more likely than other demographic groups² to say that their race was central to their identities.

Similarly, Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape polling from last December found that 75 percent of black Americans said their ethnicity and race was “very important to their identity,” significantly higher than the share of Hispanic Americans (58 percent), Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (40 percent) and white Americans (30 percent) who said the same. Another 15 percent of black Americans said that their race was “somewhat important.”³

This heightened sense of black identity does not appear to be a particularly recent phenomenon — or one that was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, which began to emerge in 2013. In 2012, about 70 percent of black Americans said that being black was either extremely or very important to their identity, about the same proportion as in 2016, according to surveys conducted as part of the American National Election Studies. In both years, black Americans expressed much greater ties to their identity than white or Hispanic Americans did.⁴

Mayor Quinton: Performing "Blackness" While Pandering To The Police

tonyskansascity |  It's time for Mayor Quinton Lucas to pick a side.

There's no way to politic out a difficult decision that threatens to change the course of Kansas City's future irrevocably.

And so, the community needs an answer from Mayor Quinton Lucas. Police also deserve to know where they stand with City Hall

Thankfully, one of the smartest TKC readers made the issue crystal clear and wrote about the mixed messages in no uncertain terms . . . Checkit:

"Mayor Lucas needs to be called out for being weak-kneed and two-faced. Posturing with BLM protesters while pandering to KCPD."

Remember . . .

The Mayor signed on to #BlackLivesMatter demands during a protest on City Hall steps. Local control of KCPD was #1 on that list.

However . . .

This week Mayor Lucas drew ire from supporters for a thank you note to the KCPD which was so cringe-y that Council Lady Katheryn Shields skipped it and earned more political credibility from both police and residents for at least being honest with her reasoning and avoiding the empty publicity stunt.

Accordingly . . .

THE COMMUNITY AND POLICE DESERVE A CLEAR ANSWER FROM MAYOR LUCAS ABOUT LOCAL CONTROL OF KCPD!!!

His non-binding agreement with BLM doesn't ring true if it's followed up by a confessional love letter addressed to police.

Even worse, our local media FAIL to question the mayor on his duplicity and would, seemingly, rather play sycophant or simply lack perspective on this importance of this issue.

Mayor Lucas has needlessly created confusion on "local control" wherein the two sides are clearly defined. There is no middle-ground in this discussion. The future of police in Kansas City and across the nation are now at a critical crossroads and the question of governance is at the crux of the dilemma. The longer the Mayor waits to make his position clear, the less his words matter. As Kansas City suffers historic unrest and record-breaking deadly crime, demands for police accountability start with Mayor Lucas.

Karen Lives Matter

flatlandkc |  They started popping up in Kansas City neighborhoods in late April — homemade barriers, some quite creative, informing motorists a block is closed to traffic except for residents and deliveries. 

Call it a pandemic experiment. As schools, workplaces and even some public spaces like playgrounds closed, Kansas City rolled out a program called Neighborhood Open Streets. With minimal hassle, residents can apply for a city permit to close their blocks to through traffic.

Depending on who you’re talking to, Neighborhood Open Streets is either a) an inspired step toward a safer, happier community; or b) a colossal nuisance.

In general, people who live on the closed blocks tend to favor the safety and community argument. Motorists forced to detour around them seethe over the inconvenience.

“I’m all for it,” said Diana Halverson, whose block on 70th Street off of Ward Parkway got a permit. 

Halverson’s block has been seeing a lot of traffic in recent months because of construction projects on Gregory Boulevard, two blocks to the south. So when a neighbor proposed applying for a closure permit, she heartily agreed. 

“Got it in one day,” she said.

Unlike the process for a block party permit, which requires signatures from a majority of residents to close the street for a few hours, applicants for a Neighborhood Open Streets permit need only fill out a form and submit evidence — like a text or email — that they informed their neighbors of their intent.

“We had a strict social distancing order in place,” said Maggie Green, information officer for Kansas City’s Public Works Department. “The last thing we wanted to do was encourage people to knock on doors.”

So far, the department has issued permits for 37 blocks, Green said. The majority are in the 4th and 6th City Council districts, and the program is especially popular in the southwest corridor.

Media Snowflakes Prosecuting Thought Crimes

taibbi.substack |  Probably the most disturbing story involved Intercept writer Lee Fang, one of a fast-shrinking number of young reporters actually skilled in investigative journalism. Fang’s work in the area of campaign finance especially has led to concrete impact, including a record fine to a conservative Super PAC: few young reporters have done more to combat corruption.

Yet Fang found himself denounced online as a racist, then hauled before H.R. His crime? During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:

I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.

Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang’s, Akela Lacy, wrote, “Tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to. This isn’t about me and him, it’s about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired.” She followed with, “Stop being racist Lee.”

The tweet received tens of thousands of likes and responses along the lines of, “Lee Fang has been like this for years, but the current moment only makes his anti-Blackness more glaring,” and “Lee Fang spouting racist bullshit it must be a day ending in day.” A significant number of Fang’s co-workers, nearly all white, as well as reporters from other major news organizations like the New York Times and MSNBC and political activists (one former Elizabeth Warren staffer tweeted, “Get him!”), issued likes and messages of support for the notion that Fang was a racist. Though he had support within the organization, no one among his co-workers was willing to say anything in his defense publicly. 

Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all directions. He’s written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and “obviously on the right,” and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he described as “jarring,” “deeply isolating,” and “unique in my professional experience.” 

To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for “insensitivity to the lived experience of others.” According to one friend of his, it’s been communicated to Fang that his continued employment at The Intercept is contingent upon avoiding comments that may upset colleagues. Lacy to her credit publicly thanked Fang for his statement and expressed willingness to have a conversation; unfortunately, the throng of Intercept co-workers who piled on her initial accusation did not join her in this.

Police Unions Exemplify The Nostrum About Fish Rotting From The Head

counterpunch |  Floyd’s alleged murder by a white Minneapolis police officer turned the city into the center of the “defund the police,” with nine of its councilmembers supporting this proposal.  Floyd’s death is about the hypocrisy on race in America, even with Democrats. But equally fascinating is how a Democratic Party city is going after the police union whom it blames for a history of officer shootings and use of excessive force against African-Americans.  Minneapolis’ police chief announced he would no longer negotiate with the union.  Minnesota’s Democratic Governor also locates much of the blame with the union.  Former Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybek sees the union as an obstacle to reform, and even other labor unions, such as the AFL-CIO are calling for the current head of the police union to resign.   In Minneapolis and across the country police unions are seen by members of the civil rights community as hostile to civil rights reform.

George Floyd’s death is perhaps the final fracturing of the Democratic Party,  labor, and the civil rights supporters.    Maybe this split needed to happen.  But as it does it bodes a dramatic turn in  party politics that complicates the electoral map for Democrats and progressive politics going forward.  Smart politicians, such as Donald Trump, see this opportunity and will surely exploit it in the 2020 election.

Police Simple Hard Men Hurt People Because They Want To

medium |  In an ironic — and entirely predictable — twist, police officers in city after city responded to the demonstrations against their brutality with yet more violence.

Cop cars in Brooklyn mowed down crowds of protestors. The National Guard in Minneapolis shot paint canisters at residents standing on their own porches. A Pennsylvania officer was filmed kicking a teenager who was already sitting on the ground, her hands covering her face. An officer in Utah knocked over an elderly man walking with a cane. And across the country, officers shot journalists with rubber bullets (once on live TV), arrested reporters, and pepper-sprayed members of the press, even as they clearly identified themselves as working journalists.

With each new video shared on social media, it became increasingly clear that police officers were the ones escalating the violence. Their attacks on civilians were not made in self-defense or because they were needed to maintain order — police hurt people because they wanted to.

In response, conservatives bemoaned property destruction and theft — the president even tweeted that “looters” should be shot — as if broken windows or stolen clothing could compare to the thousands of lives lost to police violence. This focus is not accidental: By painting mostly peaceful protestors as criminals, those on the right hope it will provide cover for — and distract from — the unchecked thuggery of police officers across the U.S.

But there is no “both sides” argument to be made here. Police officers, armed and armored, act with the power of the state behind them. Protestors have no such power. Cops are tasked with protecting the community and de-escalating tensions. Protesters have no such responsibility. To act as if this is a fight between equals is ridiculous.

Why Are The Simple Hard Men Police Always Fronted By Loudmouthed Punks?

jimmycsays |  Is Quinton Lucas up to this challenge? Does he have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the two most important unions that supported him? In his letter to police officers, is he sticking a finger up to see how the wind is blowing, or is he laying the groundwork for the most important initiative he could take as long as he is mayor?

Those are open and nagging questions. I think he is certainly the best person to have in the mayor’s office now, with race relations and racial injustice at the hands of law enforcement having thrust itself head, shoulders and chest above all other issues.

Yet Lucas has a lot to prove, and not just to me.

Another skeptic is my friend Clinton Adams Jr., perhaps the shrewdest and most unblinking City Hall analyst around.

In a series of text exchanges yesterday, Adams called Lucas “feckless” and “duplicitous” and said that while he was “a better option than Jolie (Justus), he’s no Kay Barnes or Emanuel Cleaver.”

Adams, former attorney for Freedom Inc., went on to say…

Some people find the pandering to police offensive. He’s waffling on local control. The F.O.P. supported him because privately he is opposed or will not fight for it…He can’t be in both camps. Rank and file officers (who comprise the largest of two police unions) are the ones who abuse and brutalize; who harass and stop for driving while black; who use excessive force. It’s generally not commanders.

Now, there’s a tough and clear-eyed assessment; there’s a challenge laid down.
On June 2, in the wake of Lucas’ role as a peacemaker in the protests, a Kansas City Star editorial was headlined, “KC Mayor Quinton Lucas has met this moment. Will Police Chief Rick Smith join him there?”

I think a bigger question by far is, “Does Quinton Lucas have the heart to lead an all-out battle against the General Assembly and the governor over control the Kansas City Police Department?”

This is his best opportunity to take a stand on behalf of the public at the risk of losing the support of the F.O.P. and maybe Local 42. He’s less than a year into his first term. If he fails, all could be forgiven by 2023. If he wins, he never loses an election in Kansas City or Jackson County, and he could even go on to compete for a statewide office.

LAPD Sent 400 Slave Catchers To Keep Officer Chris Dorner From Talking

Heavy |  Comedian Dave Chappelle released a new Netflix segment on Thursday, 8:46, in which he spoke about the death of George Floyd in police custody, Candace Owens, Black Lives Matter protests, CNN’s Don Lemon, and former Los Angeles Police Department officer Christopher Jordan Dorner, a wanted man who took his own life in 2013 following one of the largest manhunts in the area’s history.

During the half-hour special, Chappelle connects the Minneapolis police officers who stood by and watched while Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds until Floyd died, with the cop-killing spree Dorner embarked on following his dismissal from the LAPD after he complained about a fellow officer kicking a handcuffed mentally ill suspect in the head.

 Dorner sat before a Board of Rights hearing in December 2008 and was accused of making the story up about his fellow officer’s actions. Starting on February 3, 2013, he engaged in a series of targeted shootings in Orange County, Los Angeles County and Riverside County, California.

Dorner, who previously served in the Navy, killed four people in 10 days to avenge what he described in his lengthy manifesto as wrongful termination from the LAPD. Following an intense manhunt, Dorner died of a self-inflicted gun wound in Big Bear, California, on February 12, 2013.

If You Touch An NYPD Simple Hard Man - WE WILL SUE YOU!!!

foxnews |  The focus of so much of the recent George Floyd protests has been on police violence against demonstrators and others, but in New York City, the union that represents NYPD detectives is turning the tables.

"If you assault a New York City Detective and there are no consequences from the criminal justice system, we have to have other means to protect our detectives," said Paul DiGiacomo, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association, which has represented some 19,000 current and former detectives. He vowed to sue any protestor, rioter or looter who attacked its members.

"It's heart-wrenching because they are out there doing a job under very difficult circumstances, trying to protect the innocent people that are protesting while the criminal element is within that group, assaulting, looting and victimizing not only police officers and detectives out there, but also the people of the city."

The first lawsuit has been filed against a looting suspect accused of stealing items from a pharmacy in Manhattan and who allegedly attacked Detective Joseph Nicolosi. The detective claimed he was injured in the struggle when the 19-year-old suspect resisted arrest.

 "They've had urine thrown at them, rocks thrown at them, shot at, assaulted. I don't know how much more they could take a day of putting up with a lot out there. And, you know, they are the finest in the world and they are doing a fabulous job, but they are being demonized by the elected officials," DiGiacomo said.

Overpaid Chicago "Simple Hard Men" Giving Zero Phugs About The Riot Or The Congressman

chicagotribune | Mayor Lori Lightfoot and U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush on Thursday condemned images they said depicted Chicago police officers making popcorn, drinking coffee and sleeping on a couch in the congressman’s campaign office while nearby businesses were being looted amid unrest nearly two weeks ago.

The revelation came at an unusual City Hall news conference where the former political enemies stood united, with Rush praising Lightfoot’s leadership and the mayor apologizing to the veteran congressman on behalf of the city.

“That’s a personal embarrassment to me,” Lightfoot said of the scene that played out inside Rush’s Fuller Park political office. “I’m sorry that you and your staff even had to deal with this incredible indignity."

Police brass also ripped the officers’ conduct as “absolutely indefensible,” saying that at the same time the officers were inside Rush’s office, others were standing shoulder to shoulder with colleagues being pelted with rocks.

While the Police Department says it is still piecing together a timeline and trying to identify the officers, Lightfoot pledged to hold them accountable for their actions.

 

“Not one of these officers will be allowed to hide behind the badge and go on and act like nothing ever happened,” she said.

And I Was Complaining About Helplessly Watching 8:46...,

Unconstitutional Livestock Management Is American Policing's Raison d'Etre

NPR |  Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the origins of American policing and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.

---

If you would like to read more about the topic:

• The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
• The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
• Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond by Marc Lamont Hill

Where Do Local PoPo Get The Nerve To Unconstitutionally Surveil Black Folks?!?!?

niemanlab |  On Aug. 20, 2018, the first day of a federal police surveillance trial, I discovered that the Memphis Police Department was spying on me.

The ACLU of Tennessee had sued the MPD, alleging that the department was in violation of a 1978 consent decree barring surveillance of residents for political purposes.

I’m pretty sure I wore my pink gingham jacket — it’s my summer go-to when I want to look professional. I know I sat on the right side of the courtroom, not far from a former colleague at The Commercial Appeal. I’d long suspected that I was on law enforcement’s radar, simply because my work tends to center on the most marginalized communities, not institutions with the most power.

One of the first witnesses called to the stand: Sgt. Timothy Reynolds, who is white. To get intel on activists and organizers, including those in the Black Lives Matter movement, he’d posed on Facebook as a “man of color,” befriending people and trying to infiltrate closed circles.

Projected onto a giant screen in the courtroom was a screenshot of people Reynolds followed on Facebook.

My head was bent as I wrote in my reporter’s notebook. “What does this entry indicate?” ACLU attorney Amanda Strickland Floyd asked.

“I was following Wendi Thomas,” Reynolds replied. “Wendi C. Thomas.”

I sat up.

“And who is Wendi Thomas?” Floyd asked.

She, he replied, used to write for The Commercial Appeal. In 2014, I left the paper after being a columnist for 11 years.

It’s been more than a year since a judge ruled against the city, and I’ve never gotten a clear answer on why the MPD was monitoring me. Law enforcement also was keeping tabs on three other journalists whose names came out during the trial. Reynolds testified he used the fake account to monitor protest activity and follow current events connected to Black Lives Matter.

My sin, as best I can figure, was having good sources who were local organizers and activists, including some of the original plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit against the city.

In the days since cellphone video captured white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin squeezing the life out of George Floyd, a black man, residents in dozens of cities across the country have exercised their First Amendment rights to protest police brutality.

Here in Memphis, where two-thirds of the population is black and 1 in 4 lives below the poverty line, demonstrators have chanted, “No justice, no peace, no racist police!”

The most recent protests were sparked by the killings of Floyd and of Breonna Taylor, a black woman gunned down in her home by Louisville, Kentucky, police in March. But in Memphis, like elsewhere, the seeds of distrust between activists and police were planted decades ago. And law enforcement has nurtured these seeds ever since.

Bet Not Axe No Kwestins About George Floyd And Derek Chauvin's Priors...,

theamericanconservative |  The most effective kind of propaganda is by omission. Walter Duranty didn’t cook up accounts from smiling Ukrainian farmers, he simply said there was no evidence for a famine, much like the media tells us today that there is no evidence antifa has a role in the current protest-adjacent violence. It is much harder to do this today than it was back then—there are photographs and video that show they have been—which is the proximate cause for greater media concern about conspiracy theories and disinformation.

For all the hyperventilating over the admittedly creepy 2008 article about “cognitive infiltration,” by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, it was a serious attempt to deal with the problem of an informational center being lost in American public life, at a time when the problem was not nearly as bad as it is today. It proposed a number of strategies to reduce the credibility of conspiracy theorists, including seeding them with false information. Whether such strategies have been employed, perhaps with QAnon, which has a remarkable ability to absorb all other conspiracy theories that came before it, is up to the reader’s speculation.

So it is today with George Floyd as well. It seems like there are perfectly reasonable questions to be asked about the acquaintance between him and Derek Chauvin, and the fact that the rather shady bar they both worked at conveniently burned down. But by now most of the media is now highly invested in not seeing anything other than a statistic, another incident in a long history of police brutality, and the search for facts has been replaced by narratives. This is a shame, because it is perfectly possible to think that police have a history of poor treatment toward black people and there might be corruption involved in the George Floyd case, which is something Ben Crump, the lawyer for Floyd’s family, seems to suggest in his interview on Face the Nation this weekend.

An Unflinching Review Of The History Of Policing In America

plsonline.eku.edu |  In 1838, the city of Boston established the first American police force, followed by New York City in 1845, Albany, NY and Chicago in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853, Philadelphia in 1855, and Newark, NJ and Baltimore in 1857 (Harring 1983, Lundman 1980; Lynch 1984). By the 1880s all major U.S. cities had municipal police forces in place.

These "modern police" organizations shared similar characteristics: (1) they were publicly supported and bureaucratic in form; (2) police officers were full-time employees, not community volunteers or case-by-case fee retainers; (3) departments had permanent and fixed rules and procedures, and employment as a police officers was continuous; (4) police departments were accountable to a central governmental authority (Lundman 1980).

In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the "Slave Patrol" (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules. Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing "Jim Crow" segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system.

The key question, of course, is what was it about the United States in the 1830s that necessitated the development of local, centralized, bureaucratic police forces? One answer is that cities were growing. The United States was no longer a collection of small cities and rural hamlets. Urbanization was occurring at an ever-quickening pace and old informal watch and constable system was no longer adequate to control disorder. Anecdotal accounts suggest increasing crime and vice in urban centers. Mob violence, particularly violence directed at immigrants and African Americans by white youths, occurred with some frequency. Public disorder, mostly public drunkenness and sometimes prostitution, was more visible and less easily controlled in growing urban centers than it had been rural villages (Walker 1996). But evidence of an actual crime wave is lacking. So, if the modern American police force was not a direct response to crime, then what was it a response to?

More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to "disorder." What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime-specific in form to fulfill these needs. The emerging commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they referred to as the "collective good" (Spitzer and Scull 1977). These mercantile interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state.

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Mayor Quinton Lucas Letter To KCPD: "Ass-Up Face-Down Is What I Do....,"

kansascity |  A week after hundreds of people gathered on the Country Club Plaza to protest racism and police brutality, Mayor Quinton Lucas sent a letter to Kansas City police thanking them for their work during the demonstrations.

The letter, dated June 10 with an official letterhead, says some members of the public laid at the officers’ feet centuries-old race problems, and says it was “unreasonable” to assign blame to rank-and-file officers. It notes the long hours, “harsh insults” and injuries experienced by police. 

Some community leaders on Thursday questioned the mayor’s focus on the suffering of the police, noting that Kansas City officers had used pepper spray and tear gas on protesters, sometimes in ways that sparked sharp outcry from members of the public. 

One Kansas City man has said a rubber bullet fired by police may cause him to lose an eye. Another had his leg violently smashed by a police tear gas canister. Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said her office is reviewing video of Kansas City officers who pepper-sprayed a pair of protesters, arresting one after he yelled at police.

On Thursday, Lucas said he recognized the concerns protesters raised but he wrote the letter to acknowledge the many patrol officers, detectives and others for the work they perform each day to protect the city. 

He noted a female homicide detective he saw examining evidence and speaking to witnesses following a shooting that left one dead and four injured near his home at 18th and Vine streets. 

“I sent it (the letter) because this is what I’m thinking,” he said. “It is what I do with anything else and some people will not like and some people will.”

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article243456141.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article243456141.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article243456141.html#storylink=cpy