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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
technologyreview | Once again, footage taken on a smartphone is catalyzing action to end
police brutality once and for all. But Frazier’s video also
demonstrates the challenge of turning momentum into lasting change. Six
years ago, the world watched as Eric Garner uttered the same words—“I
can’t breathe”—while NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo strangled him in a
chokehold. Four years ago, we watched again as Philando Castile, a
15-minute drive from Minneapolis, bled to death after being shot five
times by Officer Jeronimo Yanez at a traffic stop. Both incidents also
led to massprotests, and yet we’ve found ourselves here again.
So
how do we turn all this footage into something more permanent—not just
protests and outrage, but concrete policing reform? The answer involves
three phases: first, we must bear witness to these injustices; second,
we must legislate at the local, state, and federal levels to dismantle
systems that protect the police when they perpetrate such acts; and
finally, we should organize community-based “copwatching” programs to
hold local police departments accountable.
The good news is
there are already strong indications that phase one is making an impact.
“There have been so many different moments that should have been the
powder keg, but they just weren’t,” says Allissa V. Richardson, an
assistant journalism professor at the University of Southern California
who recently wrote a book about the role of smartphones in the movement to end police brutality. “I think that this is different.”
Smartphones are still the best tool for proving police brutality and
shifting public opinion. And early research from Richardson’s team has
noted several indicators that they have already done so.
By
tagging photos of protesters by race, for example, they have found that
the current demonstrations are far more diverse than previous police
brutality protests. This suggests that, as with historical examples,
other racial groups are now readily allying with black people. By
analyzing the news and social media with natural-language processing,
they have also found that discussion about whether the victim was a
respectable person or did anything to deserve violent treatment has been
less prevalent in the case of Floyd than others killed by police.
Richardson
has found this same shift to hold true in focus groups and interviews.
In the past, white people often expressed sentiments like “This person
was no angel,” she says, but the tone now is completely different. Even
though Floyd was arrested on charges of using a fake $20 bill, “they
say, ‘You know what? We are in the middle of a pandemic. I would
probably do the same thing,’” she says. Then they point to the long
string of killings that made it impossible for them to deny racism and
police brutality any longer: George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Philando
Castile, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner.
nonsite | But, when we step away from focus on racial
disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or
nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that
we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a
demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid
Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings
occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00
and that the median family income in neighborhoods
where police killed was $52,907.
….
What the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings
suggests is what might have been the focal point of critical discussion
of police violence all along, that it is the product of an approach to
policing that emerges from an imperative to contain
and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed
working class populations produced by revanchist capitalism.
There is no
need here to go into the evolution of this dangerous regime of
policing—from bogus “broken windows” and “zero tolerance”
theories of the sort that academics always seem to have at the ready to
rationalize intensified application of bourgeois class power, to
anti-terrorism hysteria and finally assertion of a common sense
understanding that any cop has unassailable authority
to override constitutional protections and to turn an expired
inspection sticker or a refusal to respond to an arbitrary order or
warrantless search into a capital offense. And the shrill insistence
that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are
victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of
empty slogans is—for all the militant posturing by McKesson, Garza,
Tometi, Cullors et al.—in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence
in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments.
I told you a little of this over a week ago. But further confirmation is coming to light.
TMU | When asked if Chauvin had a “problem with Black people,” Santamaria commented that she believes “he was afraid and intimidated.”
In the past, Santamaria has commented that Chauvin had a tendency to become unnecessarily aggressive during
nights when the club had a primarily Black clientele, especially in
terms of by dousing crowds with pepper spray and resorting to calling
police as backup in a move she described as “overkill.”
In video footage from May 25 that has been seen tens of millions of
times over the past two weeks, Chauvin can be seen choking Floyd with
his knee during an arrest attempt that ultimately led to his death.
The white now-former officer held his knee down on the 46-year-old
unarmed Black man’s neck for a total of 8 minutes and 46 seconds in
total, and two minutes and 53 seconds after Floyd lost consciousness,
according to a criminal complaint. Three officers also took part in the deadly events.
The three other former officers who have been charged with aiding and
abetting Chauvin during the second-degree killing of Floyd are J
Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and Tou Thao.
slate |Someone says he’s bleeding from his ear. Have you just watched an old man die? Is hedying?
For this subset of people, many of whom seem to be in the process of
radicalizing, any one of these dozens of videos can become the occasion
for a deep dive that unravels most of the assumptions that have shielded
police from widespread scrutiny. Take the Buffalo incident: The viewer
sees a tall, thin, older man walking toward a group of police officers.
He’s wearing a blue sweater. The cops are in short-sleeved shirts and
gloves. There are some forbiddingly decorative concrete spheres in the
scene, of the sort one might find outside a conference center; the
viewer will learn at some point that this is all happening in Buffalo,
New York, where, the day before, this very group of officers knelt with
protesters in a moving celebration of communal harmony.
The Buffalo Police Department Emergency Response Team—as you,
hypothetical white viewer, eventually learn they’re called—is carrying
batons and wearing helmets. The tall old man holds what looks like a
police helmet in his left hand. In his right he holds what looks like a
phone. As with so many of these videos, you can’t quite hear. This is
worrying: You believe in getting all the context. But the first lesson
of this mess is that context is a luxury. Like the protesters, like
minorities pulled over for a traffic stop, like police, even, the only
information you have is what’s in front of you. What you see is this:
The old man seems to address the officers briefly, reaching toward one
and tapping his arm with his phone. The officer who received the taps
reacts as if he’s been stung and shoves the old man hard. The old man
falls directly backward, out of the scene. There is an awful sound. The
camera pulls back. The man lies on the cement with a dark fluid pooling
under his head. His right hand, which is still holding the telephone,
gives up; you watch the phone fall as it goes limp.
Someone says, He’s bleeding from his ear.
Have you just watched an old man die? Is he dying? The officer (who
knows no more than you do) looks briefly concerned and walks on. Another
officer starts to bend toward the man; he is stopped by his colleagues.
They walk on. The man bleeds.
Context will come in time, and it will not make this better. You will
read that the Buffalo Police Department reported this incident as an
injury incurred when one person at the protest “tripped and fell.” Only
when the news team that captured this circulates the footage will the
public realize that the record has been falsified. Buffalo Police Cpt.
Jeff Rinaldo will say there was no deception at all, just an honest
mistake. “How the situation was being observed, it was being observed
from a camera that was mounted behind the line of officers,” he says.
“The initial information, it appears the subject had tripped and fallen
while the officers were advancing.” He will congratulate the police on
how quickly they corrected the record. “There is no attempt to mislead,”
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown will say of the police statement, echoing Rinaldo.
You want to believe there was no attempt to mislead. But
something is off. The “initial information” about the incident, you
realize, should obviously have come from Buffalo Police Cpt. Jeff
Rinaldo’s officers. Not some camera, no matter where it was. In calling
an obvious cover-up a mistake, both the mayor and the police captain are
acting as if it’s a given that not one of the 14 law enforcement
officers you saw in that video—who witnessed what happened—could be
counted upon, let alone expected, to tell the truth. Rinaldo
speaks in a language so wrenched by adherence to the passive voice that
it barely sounds like English: The situation was being observed … the initial information, it appears.
You’ve heard of the “blue wall of silence”—the anti-snitch code
whereby police protect each other from accountability to the public. But
maybe you thought it was more a Hollywood invention than a plague
sickening American towns. Evidence for it, and evidence for rampant
dishonesty by police unaccustomed to being doubted or questioned, is
mounting. You read, for example, that police reported that $2.4 million
in Rolexes were looted from a store in SoHo, even though the store spokesman said,
“no watches of any kind were stolen, as there weren’t any on display in
the store.” You start to wonder about other police reports on looting.
Maybe you’ll think back to last week, an age ago now, when protesters and journalists were beaten and tear-gassed
in Lafayette Park so Trump could pose in front of a church. The
following day, the U.S. Park Police strenuously denied using tear gas at
all. If you’re unusually attentive, you might also remember that Park
Police walked that denial back several days later, citing confusion over whether pepper balls counted as tear gas (they do).
Never mind: You’re trying to focus on this one case in Buffalo, and the
next steps matter: The Buffalo Police Department suspends two officers
without pay while an investigation is conducted. Most regard this as the
bare minimum since the principal offenders—who you now know are named
Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe—not only assaulted an old man but
might have lied to their superiors about it. Maybe you’re relieved
there’s a modicum of accountability. That relief quickly dissolves. It
emerges that Torgalski and McCabe’s colleagues find this minimal
consequence outrageous: The day after the two officers’ suspension, 57
members of the Buffalo Police Department’s Emergency Response Team
resign from the team (though not the police force—they remain employed
there) to support their two colleagues. They believe the men who shoved
an old man to the ground are being treated abusively. “Our position is
these officers … were simply doing their job. I don’t know how much
contact was made. He did slip in my estimation. He fell backwards,” said Buffalo Police Benevolent Association president John Evans. Before you can pause and really take this in—he did slip in my estimation—the Buffalo Police Union will post on its website, “These guys did nothing but do what they were ordered to do. This is disgusting !!!”
Maybe, as a hypothetical white American who’s always had good relations
with police, you are shocked to find the police union excusing obvious
misconduct as “just following orders” and doubling down on the lie that
the man slipped. You’ve heard that police lie, but it’s being driven
home to you differently now that your attention is focused. You’re
watching the lies happen in real time. You saw, with George Floyd’s
death, that Minneapolis police initially reported he “appeared to be
suffering medical distress”—a curious way of saying a man was
asphyxiated. The original statement
Minneapolis police spokesman John Elder chose to send reporters read
“Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” That’s all
we would have known about George Floyd’s death had it not been for the
brave teenager who recorded it in real time. The revelation isn’t that
the lies are new. It’s that they’re everywhere.
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