Black Lives Matter: Why This Time Is Different

Did you happen to catch Rev. Al Sharpton's eulogy for George Floyd yesterday?  Very moving.

He said the time has come for change.  He said this time white protestors are marching in equal or larger numbers than black.  Protests are occurring in Germany and England and all over Europe.  Over the killing of an unarmed US black man.

I've been pondering that.  I think there are a couple of factors at work here, all related to the COVID pandemic.

One, people are staying home and have more time on their hands.

Second, people are outraged that the police have not adjusted their policing as every citizen has had to adjust everything in their own lives.  We expect leniency, concern, compassion as we have had to dig deep into our own psyches and provide ourselves.  We want the new reality to apply equally to all segments of society.

But primarily -- and over-ridingly -- people have reached COVID outrage overload.  We feel we cannot handle one more crisis.  We cannot deal with any more unpleasantness.  We are tapped out.  We are on the edge of snapping.

Will this tension carry over into long-lasting change?  Into demilitarization of the police, who have taken on surplus Iraq/Afghanistan armored personnel carriers, and taken siege training?  Will the police return to "community-based policing"?

It will depend, I think, on what happens between now and November 3.

Democrats have introduced legislation to ban chokeholds, keep a database of police with complaints against them, and bar certain types of 'no-knock' warrants.  The bill that would make lynching a federal crime is stalled by (Ayn) Rand Paul in the Senate.

Good starts.  Not much chance of passage or signage before January.

All this talk of "defunding" the police is misguided, in my view.  They still have a job to do, and if social unrest gets worse in the next 2 years as the economy continues to founder on the rocks, we're going to need 'em.

But the police need a culture shift.  It's not "us vs. them."  They are there to Protect and Serve their communities -- not "dominate the battlespace."  I suspect a lot of upper management will need to be replaced.

What "defund the police" means isn't that we don't need police. We do. But we need police to do police work. They don't need military weapons or the training to use them. And we don't need so many of them. What can be done, and probably should be done in quite a few places, is (basically) fire the entire police department and rebuild it with new training. That sounds impossible, but it has been done, with success, in some places in the past. The current trend of hiring military vets and equipping them, and expecting them to behave, as soldiers has to stop. A hard reboot may be the best way to achieve that, in many cases.

This is an answer from Mike Jones on Quora. (He is very good at explaining things, I follow him.)

Do people support defunding the police?

Mike Jones, Over 30 years in the technology industry.
Answered Fri

Quote :

I think we have too many police in the sense that “police” has become a monolithic tool that is being used for far too many things.

Police aren’t educators. They’re not trained in dealing with people with mental health issues. They shouldn’t be doing those jobs. “Resource officers” in schools is a “when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” answer to problems with schools. It’s been easier to say “put a police officer there” than to address the problems.

Realize that when people say “defunding the police”, they don’t mean “don’t have any police”. They mean “take a fair number of the jobs we’re using police to do and put other people with training in those jobs”. They mean “stop spending ridiculous amounts of money on purchasing, maintaining, and training people to use military equipment”. They mean “let’s think about other ways to do things we currently expect police to do.” Unfortunately none of those things translates to a slogan well, and the lever to cause them to happen is through budgets, hence “defund the police”.

For a “free country”, we are heavily overpoliced. And the distribution is very uneven. Policing as it exists in the US has largely been developed in a vacuum by political pressure from “law and order” politicians (who never seem to explain what that actually means, and often seem to be much more interested in ‘order’ than in ‘law’), police unions, and suppliers of police equipment. It’s time to involve more people in the discussion of what policing should be in a free country.

In addition, if you missed it, John Oliver last night was very apropos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4cea5oObY

Rachel Maddow had a guest on tonite, a reporter from Minneapolis I believe, to explain defunding the police.  You're right, it's basically reallocating resources from "law enforcement" to community resources like 9-1-1, mental health counselors, community activists, food banks, homeless advocates ... all the roles the police say they're not equipped to handle, but have been shackled with as all other agencies have seen their budgets evaporate.

I saw a protest sign tonight that said it all.  It said, "The police aren't broken.  They were DESIGNED this way."
https://www.examiner.org/when-protesters-cry-defund-the-police-what-does-it-mean/

Compton CA did it in 2000.  Camden NJ did it in 2012.  It CAN be done.

The police unions -- which aren't affiliated with AFL-CIO, and aren't really "unions" at all but are police self-preservation organizations -- are not just *part* of the problem, they're ALL of the problem.  The only way to break the union stranglehold on reform is to break up the police departments completely.  Fire ALL the officers, and rebuild a community-based protection force out of only the good officers on the old force.

I dunno.  Sounds kinda pie-in-the-sky to me.

Edit: Yeah, you're right.  Oliver nails it.

Here you go, this just astonishes me.  The police are clubbing people because of property damage, and then they themselves are doing the same thing.

Quote :

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety confirmed Monday that officers from two law enforcement agencies slashed dozens of vehicles’ tires as part of the response to protests in Minneapolis last weekend.

Not one car.  Not a couple of cars.  DOZENS!

People talk about a "mob mentality" when groups of like-minded people take to the streets.  I think it's clear here who the real destructive mob was in Minneapolis.

In Seattle the mayor, who is a very progressive lesbian, pulled back all the police from the protests last Thursday or Friday.

And guess what? All the violence and property damage stopped. Since then we've had 100% peaceful 100% safe protests every day, with people acting responsibly and with intelligence.

It's quite clear who was instigating the violence and siege mentality, who was goading the crowds into extremist reactions. It's quite clear that gassing, clubbing, and shooting peaceful protestors with rubber bullets was not "keeping the peace." Quite the opposite.

"Dominating the battlespace" is a bad, bad idea.

Huh.  Just after I wrote the above, DJT tweeted these ugly Anarchists must be stooped!

Guess now he's the posture police?

Our governor responded, "Stoop tweeting."

Faux News is reported that Seattle's streets are patrolled by armed guards who demand extortion money to let anyone in.

Which of course is 100% untrue.  Jesus, what'ya do when "news" sources make shit up like this???  Trump is talking about calling in the army(!)

A facebook post from Peter Dragovitch that I thought was brilliant.
_________________________

I am pretty sure that we are watching the police collectively having the experience of being pulled over for a crime that they didn't personally commit because they "fit the description" and are actively resisting, while the entire world is yelling "stop resisting!", and they really don't like it.

Here's a good article about the CHAZ here in Seattle:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/seattle-project-cop-free-world-200612213944832.html

Quote :

Malcolm would be a good candidate to lead the new area. He is well-spoken and has had his own experiences in prison and with homelessness. Black people in the US are disproportionately imprisoned and disproportionately homeless as a result of systemic racism.

But there are no leaders in the zone. Problems have been addressed as they come up, and regular "town hall" meetings are beginning to give structure and rules to living there.



Each night, 50 to 100 people remain in the zone, staying awake into the early hours to ensure people don't co-opt the space for their own benefit. They sleep in tents, their cars, or surrounding apartment buildings. One night, a group of people tried to break into the police precinct, but residents say they held them back.



Hundreds more wander the zone by day. A list of the residents' 31 demands for change in the justice system, health and human services, education and the economy are posted all over the area.


They include calls for police funds to be directed toward social services, rent control and degentrification, that hospitals employ Black doctors and nurses and that Black and Native American history be taught in schools.



"The goal of this zone is to set an example for the world, that we do not need the current police system to maintain order. We do not need a man with a gun to show up at our door every time we have a problem and call 911," said Mark Henry, who has been staying overnight in the zone to stop looters.

These are the people Trump (and Faux News) are calling anarchist thugs and looters.

I keep having visions of Kent State.

The top five stories on Democracy Now all feature Angela Davis.  I didn't realize she was still alive!

Faux News has apparently been running doctored photos in the coverage of Seattle.  Why aren't they shut down?

There was a photo on Facebook composed of two parts. On the left was a screenshot of Fox News listing what it said were the demands of the protesters in Seattle. On the right was a photograph of the sign on the fence in Seattle that listed the actual demands. There was no resemblance between the two lists.

Wow, the Seattle fake news even made the national press. We're famous!

Apparently there's a clash brewing between our mayor -- who as I mentioned is progressive, and supportive of the protestors -- and the head of our police union, who like Minneapolis's, is a reactionary bigot. He wants to "re-take" CHAZ, she wants to let 'em stay as long as they want (they're causing no harm).

We'll see who really runs the city.

I suspect the police think they do.

I suspect they're wrong.

In addition to making up stories and doctoring photos, Fox News just got played for being ignorant of pop culture.

Once a moron always a moron.

One difference this time, the long-standing police culture of ”bully-boy” right-wing violence and bigotry is finally being pulled back a bit to expose it to the public.

Quote :

The message board is a cesspool of disinformation, bigoted memes and far-right propaganda, and regularly lights up with racist comments after publicized incidents of police brutality against people of color. Lately, users have been targeting protesters participating in the nationwide Black Lives Matter marches sparked by Floyd’s killing.

Last night on the news, the reporter who's been covering CHAZ/CHOP indicated most people were clearing out, the occupation was over.  Since there are no "leaders" of this movement there was nobody he could interview about what was happening -- and some of the people camped in tents on the street indicated they had no intention of leaving -- but it appears the experiment in Seattle is over.

It was time.  They made their point, they got some publicity.  To "wait for change" as some protestors claimed would've made the encampment permanent.

There were two shootings over the weekend, from outsiders coming in to take advantage of the lack of police, and I guess a lot of people didn't feel safe anymore.

What demilitarizing the police looks like, eight years later.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-53083559/what-happened-when-a-city-disbanded-its-police-force

I prefer the term "demilitarizing the police," rather than "defunding the police," since this gets at the heart of what's being proposed.

The history of Black liberation in the United States is interesting. The true story was never told to us in school.

Wikipedia wrote:

When Republican President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at the end of the Civil War, Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee and former slave holder, became president. Johnson favored rapid measures to bring the South back into the Union, allowing the Southern states to determine the rights of former slaves. Lincoln's last speeches show that he leaned toward supporting the suffrage of all freedmen, whereas Johnson and the Democratic Party were strongly opposed to this.[3] Radical Republicans in Congress sought stronger, federal measures to upgrade the rights of African Americans, including the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, while curtailing the rights of former Confederates, such as through the provisions of the Wade–Davis Bill. Johnson, the most prominent Southerner to oppose the Confederacy, followed a lenient policy toward ex-Confederates.

Johnson's weak Reconstruction policies prevailed until the congressional elections of 1866, which followed outbreaks of violence against blacks in the former rebel states, including the Memphis riots of 1866 and the New Orleans massacre of 1866. The subsequent 1866 election gave Republicans a majority in Congress, enabling them to pass the 14th Amendment, federalizing equal rights for freedmen, and dissolving rebel state legislatures until new state constitutions were passed in the South. A Republican coalition came to power in nearly all of the Southern states and set out to transform the society by setting up a free labor economy, using the U.S. Army and the Freedmen's Bureau. The bureau protected the legal rights of freedmen, negotiated labor contracts, and set up schools and churches for them. Thousands of Northerners came to the South as missionaries, teachers, businessmen, and politicians. Hostile whites began referring to these politicians as "carpetbaggers."

In early 1866, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for his signature. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and freed slaves, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens with equality before the law. After Johnson vetoed the bills, Congress overrode his vetoes, making the Civil Rights Act the first major bill in the history of the United States to become law through an override of a presidential veto. The Radicals in the House of Representatives, frustrated by Johnson's opposition to congressional Reconstruction, filed impeachment charges. The action failed by one vote in the Senate. The new national Reconstruction laws, in particular laws requiring suffrage (the right to vote) for freedmen, incensed white supremacists in the South, giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan. During 1867–69, the Klan murdered Republicans and outspoken freedmen in the South, including Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds.