Monday, June 08, 2020

Police Terrorism: The Cruelty Isn’t An Accident. It’s The Point.



A 21-Tweet Thread About A Police Ride-Along

That thread goes on and on and on and on and on . . .

For the last two weeks, the world has seen countless videos of US police officers openly assaulting innocent people even despite the presence of thousands of cameras. the cops don't care about the cameras. Their brutal terrorism is second-nature and they know nothing will happen to them.

An identical mindset is found in the stories of these ride-alongs. The thread has numerous examples of openly-racist and sexist cops spending their entire shifts actively looking for situations where they can be violent with innocent people. They act like this even though they have outsiders (lawyers, medical people, dispatchers, etc.) in the car with them. They are not worried; they don't care. Again, they know there will be no consequences. In most cases, the outsiders were (rightly) terrified of being targeted by the same police if they said anything.

Sean Trainor writes: "The cruelty isn't an accident; it's the point." His observation is similar to one seen on some protesters' signs: "The system isn't broken. It was built that way." ... Both of those sayings remind me of what I would think when I'd hear people say how incompetent the US was (is) when it came to the Iraq invasion and other war zones. The US military and/or government is not incompetent. They simply have different goals from the ones you think they have. The US would not be in Iraq or Afghanistan for nearly 20 years if things were not going extremely well.


Police Are There To Enforce The Racial Order

Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, June 5, 2020:
If we're going to speak of rioting protesters, then we need to speak of rioting police as well. No, they aren't destroying property. But it is clear from news coverage, as well as countless videos taken by protesters and bystanders, that many officers are using often indiscriminate violence against people — against anyone, including the peaceful majority of demonstrators, who happens to be in the streets.

Rioting police have driven vehicles into crowds, reproducing the assault that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. They have surrounded a car, smashed the windows, tazed the occupants and dragged them out onto the ground. Clad in paramilitary gear, they have attacked elderly bystanders, pepper-sprayed cooperative protesters and shot "nonlethal" rounds directly at reporters, causing serious injuries. In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old man is in critical condition after being shot in the head with a "less-lethal" round. Across the country, rioting police are using tear gas in quantities that threaten the health and safety of demonstrators, especially in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic.

None of this quells disorder. Everything from the militaristic posture to the attacks themselves does more to inflame and agitate protesters than it does to calm the situation and bring order to the streets. In effect, rioting police have done as much to stoke unrest and destabilize the situation as those responsible for damaged buildings and burning cars. But where rioting protesters can be held to account for destruction and violence, rioting police have the imprimatur of the state.

What we've seen from rioting police, in other words, is an assertion of power and impunity. In the face of mass anger over police brutality, they've effectively said So what? In the face of demands for change and reform — in short, in the face of accountability to the public they're supposed to serve — they've bucked their more conciliatory colleagues with a firm No. In which case, if we want to understand the behavior of the past two weeks, we can't just treat it as an explosion of wanton violence; we have to treat it as an attack on civil society and democratic accountability, one rooted in a dispute over who has the right to hold the police to account. ...

Go back to the beginning of the 20th century, during America's first age of progressive reform, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad does in "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America," and you'll find activists describing how "policemen had abdicated their responsibility to dispense color-blind service and protection, resulting in an object lesson for youth: the indiscriminate mass arrests of blacks being attacked by white mobs."

The police were ubiquitous in the African-American neighborhoods of the urban North, but they weren't there to protect black residents as much as they were there to enforce the racial order, even if it led to actual disorder in the streets. For example, in the aftermath of the Philadelphia "race riot" of 1918, one black leader complained, "In nearly every part of this city peaceable and law-abiding Negroes of the home-owning type have been set upon by irresponsible hoodlums, their property damaged and destroyed, while the police seem powerless to protect."

If you are trying to understand the function of policing in American society, then even a cursory glance at the history of the institution would point you in the direction of social control. And blackness in particular, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh argues, was a state of being that required "permanent supervision and sometimes direct domination."

The simplest answer to the question "Why don't the American police forces act as if they are accountable to black Americans?" is that they were never intended to be.
Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)