A Flock of Protests

This isn't just happening in Florida, but I figure I should start in my home state (via David Ingram with NBC News):

Florida’s state transportation office on Monday revoked the ability of local police to put license plate readers on state highways, as a nationwide backlash continued to gain steam against Flock Safety and other makers of surveillance cameras.

Will Watts, the chief operating officer of the Florida Department of Transportation, informed local law enforcement agencies in a one-page memo that the department was revoking all previously issued approvals for license plate readers (LPRs) in state “rights-of-way,” or the strip of land that’s next to or part of a state road.

Watts cited a “recent exponential increase” in deployments of law enforcement cameras, as well as “concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes” that he said merit immediate action “to preserve Floridians’ sovereignty and quality of life.”

If you've paid attention along the sides of the highways, you might notice these thin black poles on portable mounts with cameras atop them. Unlike the CCTV cameras you'd see at traffic intersections - or the street corners of urban communities - these are cheap, easy to place, and even easier to abuse by law enforcement bullies stalking their exes or other women that caught their eye. Ingram's report provides an example of "a Kentucky police officer was arrested after authorities said he used the Flock system more than 2,000 times to track his ex-girlfriend."

They're investigating cops in Chicago who abused the data for their personal use. A cop in Texas got fired for using Flock to track his ex-wife. A cop is charged in Louisville KY for using Flock to stalk a woman for months.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes is in full effect here, kids.

As Ingram notes, the use and abuse of this new technology - tied into AI, and reaching further into personal privacy data than any previous tech our law enforcement ever wielded - has caught the attention and anger of thousands of fellow Americans:

NBC News has identified 50 areas across the country where Flock cameras have been damaged, spray-painted, smashed or cut down in acts of vandalism since 2024, while some drivers have sued Flock and organized themselves into a proposed class action.

Tim Swarens over at USA Today delves more into the legal concerns:

Unlike old-fashioned surveillance cameras, information gleaned from images captured by Flock cameras – including time, date and place – is stored as searchable text in databases. Law enforcement agencies can then mine the data without a warrant. 

The American Civil Liberties Union says the cameras can even record the bumper stickers slapped on the back of your car. Think about the First Amendment implications of that uninvited interaction with government snoops.

Invasion of privacy concerns have ostensibly motivated vandals across the country to sabotage the cameras. And while I don’t condone breaking the law, I do understand the opposition to unwelcome government surveillance...

Proponents of the cameras say they help police capture dangerous fugitives, stop car thefts and reduce other crimes.

But there is a necessary tension between public safety and our constitutional rights, including the right to privacy. We restrict law enforcement agencies’ power for good reason... 

News stories have cropped up across the country about misuse of the cameras. In 2025, police in Lenexa, Kansas, were accused of using the city’s license plate readers to track the movements of a man who wrote a guest column for the Kansas City Star criticizing the police department...

In February, police in Sherwood, Arkansas pulled over a couple after a Flock camera erroneously identified their vehicle as stolen. The couple was held at gunpoint, with their infant in the vehicle, before officers realized their error...

As much as the technology is cutting edge, the AI used by these cameras is still raw - AI is meant to learn - and prone to mistakes/errors/outright fabrications. We're running the risk of cops reacting to the wrong crimes and towards innocent people. We've had the risk of these same cops abusing their authority to harass and bully others, but now with these cameras and AI they can behave even worse.

I don't condom damaging or destroying any Flock cameras you see out there. But if you ever come across one, take the time to slow down well enough that you can flip the bird at the SOBs as you drive by.

Into the Tear Gas

On the streets of Minneapolis where the federal agents are violent and the local citizenry are pissed:

There was a photograph of that man as well.

 

Photo by Theia Chatelle 

Local hero.

The Execution of Tyre Nichols

I doubt you can call me as a juror on this case. I've already made up my mind about what those five officers did to an unarmed Black man in Memphis Tennessee (via Jonathan Franklin and Emma Bowman at NPR):

Police said on Jan. 8 that Nichols was taken into custody after a traffic stop that involved two confrontations with officers. During the initial confrontation, Nichols fled the scene of the traffic stop, police said.

Following the arrest, Nichols then complained of shortness of breath, according to authorities, and was taken to the hospital in critical condition, where he died on Jan. 10.

His family has said the police beat him so severely that he was unrecognizable.

There was video, some of it from the body cams, one from a nearby street camera that the officers had to know was recording them (and they still didn't care):

In the videos, officers are seen dragging Nichols from his car and shouting profanities throughout the confrontation. An officer tries to deploy a Taser at Nichols and then begins to chase him on foot. "I'm just trying to go home," Nichols is heard saying. Later, officers are seen repeatedly kicking, punching and using a baton to strike Nichols as he lies on the ground. At one point he's heard yelling "Mom." Lawyers for the Nichols family says this encounter happened within 100 yards of the family's home.

The video is hard to watch. If you do, you'll notice the cops took turns beating Nichols.

...

Five cops, beating one unarmed man. If you've ever been bullied in school, you'll understand how overwhelming and terrifying that can be, getting ganged up like that.

Oh, he shouldn't have run, the defenders will opine. That just made the cops angry.

Bastards, listen up. Everybody runs when confronted with the possibility of death. Nichols must have sensed something was wrong, something was going on with these "officers of the law" that was going to end up with him bloodied and broken.

It was the cops who were over the line, not Nichols. And Nichols is the one who ended up beaten to death.

There are serious problems with law enforcement in our country. Our police aren't being trained to protect and serve, they're being trained to bully and intimidate. Our police aren't being trained to defuse situations, they're being trained to escalate to violence. Our police are getting hammered with the message that there's a war on the streets, that they're soldiers in an Us vs. Them struggle not only with gangs but with everyday citizens who can turn violent in a heartbeat. 

Everyone - who are poor minorities - are a threat to them now. It makes everyone - those poor minorities - a target.

And it doesn't matter to these police officers if they target unarmed Black men at night or broad daylight, they don't believe they'll get into trouble even as they administer beatdowns in front of street cameras or eyewitnesses. 

Our nation's law enforcement have learned nothing from Rodney King, from the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, from the execution of George Floyd, from the reckless murder of Breonna Taylor, none of that.

Unarmed Blacks are going to keep getting killed by systemic failure in our legal system - one driven by fear and racism and arrogance - on the part of law enforcement that ought to work to keep us all safe, instead of appointing themselves executioners.

Uvalde Followup: The Sound of Shameless Cowards (w/ Update)

The ongoing terror and ongoing shame in our nation regarding the plague of mass shootings and widespread sorrow of gun violence just keeps getting worse.

Back in late May, the community of Uvalde Texas suffered the unimaginable loss of 19 children and 2 teachers killed by a gun-wielding angry guy. Ever since then, there had been questions about how the school security and later how the local police mishandled the situation. For months, stories kept dribbling out about how the police waited for minutes during the most critical moments; how the police detained mothers who heard the screams and wanted to rush in to save their babies; how the local police chief failed to understand the severity of the situation to the point of criminal negligence; and even how one of the cops at the scene had to be restrained because he was getting text messages from his dying wife who was one of the teachers killed.

Well, this past week, a video recording from security cameras inside the school leaked out. And while the mayor began screaming about going after the leaker(s), everyone else was horrified by the visual evidence that police did nothing (via Justin Peters at Slate (paywall)):

Though the video does not include any gory footage, and though we do not see inside the classrooms in which Ramos shot and killed 21 people, it is nevertheless hard to watch. (You can hear a lot of gunshots in the video; an “editor’s note” appears periodically informing viewers that “The sound of children screaming has been removed.”) Almost exactly three minutes after Ramos enters the school, three police officers enter and head down the hallway toward him. A minute later, after receiving fire, they retreat. More and more police officers show up. For over 40 minutes, as the video makes irrefutably clear, they more or less just stand there...

The one thing every viewer and pundit focused on when the video got out: The inhuman line "The sound of children screaming has been removed." Stephen King could never write a line more horrifying than that.

On Wednesday in Slate, my colleague Rebecca Onion nicely captured the excruciating experience of watching over an hour’s worth of footage of officers sanitizing their hands, checking their phones, standing around, and doing pretty much everything but intervening to stop the shooter...

It’s one thing to read about the police inaction at Robb Elementary; it’s another, much more viscerally maddening thing to see it with your own eyes. The written accounts that I’ve read of the police response have contained excuses and rationales and official statements; they’ve left room for doubt over what happened and why, and for the prospect that the police on the scene actually acted heroically after all. But the video has no bandwidth for  such shades of gray. It is an indelible partial record of what happened that afternoon. It sticks in a way that the stories I’ve read did not...

And when the video leaked, what was the official response from Uvalde officials like the city mayor?

On Tuesday, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin announced that the news outlets were “chicken” for publishing the video before the victims’ families had had a chance to see it...

The mayor’s response, in which he appealed to emotion in order to criticize the media for doing their jobs, is worth analyzing. On its face it sounds reasonable, even humane. The victims’ families have indeed been through enough, and it’s natural to want to spare them additional gratuitous trauma. But this plea to consider the families’ emotional welfare reads as smarmy and self-serving when uttered by the mayor of a town whose first responders failed the students and teachers of Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting, and whose authorities have been trying to duck responsibility for their own behavior ever since then...

More than an hour elapsed between when the first police officers arrived on the scene at Robb Elementary and when the police finally confronted and killed Ramos. This gap was not initially public knowledge, and in the aftermath of the shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw announced that “the bottom line is that law enforcement was there, they did engage immediately, they did contain him in the classroom.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, praised the police on the scene for showing “amazing courage by running toward gunfire..

The video proves that Abbott's praise is absolute bullshit. Even when the cops had body armor, helmets, even those bulletproof shields clearly visible on camera, they waited like chickens for the gunman to finish his bloody agenda.

Every goddamned Uvalde and Texas law officer who failed to act on that day, and every goddamned Uvalde and Texas elected official all the way up to the goddamned Governor who tried to cover up this shame, should have the phrase "The sound of children screaming" tattooed to their foreheads for the rest of their gutless miserable lives.

This is, by the by, absolute proof that the Far Right wingnut fantasy of "Good guys with guns" is a goddamned lie. We had a platoon, nay an entire police force of "good guys with guns" and even they were too terrified to go after a lone gun nut who just happened to carry assault weapons with enough firepower to scare them.

The widespread availability of military-grade assault rifles - thanks to the blind and inhuman misreading of the goddamned Second Amendment by conservative wingnut justices and politicians - is a serious problem for law enforcement across the United States. You wanna know the excuse for why every police department is stocked with riot gear and firepower that even our own military thinks is excessive? The excuse is that the cops want to be "prepared" to face off against any large-scale riot where the rioters may have these AR-15s and similar semi-auto (and illegally converted full auto) firearms.

But even that excuse is a lie. Watch how the cops behaved at Uvalde - when there was just one gunman - and how they cowered behind their shields for a full hour. Then watch how these cops behaved at Black Lives Matters protests: Where most of the protestors were waving signs and carrying water bottles, and where the cops responded with rubber (and real) bullets, smashing in heads with batons and the butt of their own rifles because the cops fucking knew they held all the firepower on those streets.

If our nation's law enforcement were truly honestly serious about protecting themselves in dangerous situations, if they truly wanted to live with the belief that they should "go home to their families at the end of every shift," you'd think every sheriff's department and police union out there would be fighting tooth-and-nail to pass assault weapon bans to make their lives easier. 

But they don't. You barely hear a peep from police unions when it comes to debate for assault weapon bans or any other gun safety option.

Part of cop rationale is that they want that excuse of mad gunmen running around so they can play soldier with overpowered gear of their own. Part of it is that the cops are on the same page with the National Rifle Body Count Association when it comes to ensuring the goddamned White Nationalist Christianist "Rapture Is Coming" Gun-Worshipping wingnuts are locked and loaded for the Second Civil War vs. bleeding heart liberals.

The anxiety cops have with every traffic stop could easily go away when the open-carry prevalence of guns go away. But no: they would rather live with the fear, all because it lets them impose their fear and firepower on the ethnic minorities they deem to punish and harass.

In the meantime, the shameless cowards in Texas will keep bleating the same excuses and the same lies until they are held accountable. Until each and every cop who failed in their duty, each and every official who failed to be honest and upfront, each and every demagoguing politician who blustered and lied are either in jail or out of office.

The sound of children screaming should haunt them forever.

Update 7/18: Am waking up this morning to reports that there were 376 officers that eventually showed up at Uvalde. All those cops, and they STILL could not work up the nerve to apprehend a single gunman. All because the gunman had AR-15 murdersticks with him. /rage 

IT'S THE GUNS

IT'S THE GUNS

IT'S THE GODDAMNED GUNS.

Get rid of the assault rifles and maybe just maybe the cops will stop being cowards and bullies.

Telling Me I Got to Beware

What a field day for the Heat/
A thousand people in the street/
Singing songs and a-carryin' signs/
Mostly say "Hooray for our side"...

-- Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"

Let me throw up a couple of links here, first from Evan Donovan with WFLA back in April:

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 1 at a 10 a.m. press conference with Florida lawmakers and law enforcement officials at the Polk County Sheriff’s Office’s headquarters in Winter Haven. He did not take questions after the signing.

The law went into effect immediately.

The legislation, nicknamed the “anti-riot bill,” was first filed in the Florida House of Representatives in early January, and passed the Senate on Thursday evening.

The bill, which covers 61 pages, makes several changes to Florida criminal and administrative law, and will:

Make it more difficult for cities and counties to reduce funding for law enforcement, allowing local elected officials to challenge those budget decisions, and giving the state power to approve or amend the local budget

Allow those local governments to be sued if they fail to stop a riot

Define “riot” as a violent public disturbance involving 3 or more people acting with common intent resulting in injury to others, damage to property, or the imminent danger of injury or damage

Enhance penalties for people who commit crimes during a riot

Create a new second-degree felony called an “aggravated riot,” which occurs when the riot has more than 25 participants, causes great bodily harm or more than $5,000 in property damage, uses or threatens to use a deadly weapon, or blocks roadways by force or threat of force...

If you don't see the horror of any of that, try to imagine for example hanging out in a group of three people walking down the street minding your own business until a cop car pulls up and the officers accuse your little group of "acting with imminent intent to cause injury or damage." It'd be your word against the cops, which is too bad for you because you're getting tasered, handcuffed, jailed, and/or shot for it.

Imagine you're a city manager who suddenly has to deal with a street protest because a local cop shot an unarmed Black kid. Now you fear your city getting sued by your business owners even if a window gets busted, so you're pushing your law enforcement to crack down harder than ever to show you've done your job. There's no carrot here, only the stick swung by state Republicans to make sure no city takes the "soft power" approach of resolving a protest.

This isn't even the worst of it. Here's additional details from Steven LeMongello and Gray Rohrer with the Orlando Sentinel:

But opponents say it would make it easier for law enforcement to charge organizers and anyone involved in a protest, even if they had not engaged in any violence.

“The problem with this bill is that the language is so overbroad and vague ... that it captures anybody who is peacefully protesting at a protest that turns violent through no fault of their own,” said Kara Gross, the legislative director at ACLU Florida. “Those individuals who do not engage in any violent conduct under this bill can be arrested and charged with a third-degree felony and face up to five years in prison and loss of voting rights. The whole point of this is to instill fear in Floridians...”

The law, which goes into effect immediately, grants civil legal immunity to people who drive through protesters blocking a road, which Democrats argued might have protected the white nationalist who ran over and killed counter-protester Heather Heyer during the Charlottesville tumult in 2017. It also makes blocking a highway a felony offense...

Hitting protesters with cars is a common tactic for the White Power wingnuts who show up to counter-protest and get their scalps. Florida just gave them all a goddamn hunting license.

So not only are DeSantis and Florida Republicans making it easier to arrest any group of minorities under any circumstances even when there's no riot actually happening, the sadists are going to make it easier for trump-worshipping wingnuts to commit Vehicular Manslaughter if they "fear" three people walking across the street intersection are rioting. This is akin to Stand Your Ground, which is still a terrible law. Only now you can use your goddamned coal roller truck to do so.

/headdesk

None of this is about the safety of the general public. ALL of this is geared towards stomping on the powerless who have only public protests as a means to address problems and demands that our governments do something to fix things.

This is a straight-up attack on the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

DeSantis claims this is about shutting down violent riots. It's not. This is about turning every protest especially the peaceful ones into a riot so he and his law enforcement buddies can throw everybody into jail.

Republicans don't want to hear from you if you got a problem. Florida Republicans don't think any protest is a peaceful assembly (unless it's their own side staging an insurrection in trump's unholy name). These godless wingnuts want to shut down the freedom of speech of those who have every reason to speak out against injustice.

There is nothing legal in these anti-riot laws. Because these laws turn everything into a riot in the Police State's point of view.

Gods help us.

Thoughts On The Guilty Verdict And A Moment of Justice (w/ Update)

The news broke this afternoon: Derek Chauvin found guilty on all three counts in the murder of George Floyd (via Laurel Wamsley at NPR.org):

The jury has found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on all the counts he faced over the death of George Floyd. The trial has been one of the most closely watched cases in recent memory, setting off a national reckoning on police violence and systemic racism even before the trial commenced.

There's been a national reckoning on police violence and system racism since the 1960s, but let's discuss that later on.

Chauvin, 45, has been found guilty of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

With only his eyes visible as the rest of his face was hidden behind a surgical mask, Chauvin watched as the verdict was returned. Judge Peter Cahill thanked the jury members for their "heavy-duty jury service." Chauvin was remanded into custody as the jury was dismissed, and Cahill said sentencing is expected in eight weeks...

Floyd's death on Memorial Day 2020 sparked protests in Minneapolis, across the United States and around the world. It prompted calls for police reform and soul-searching on issues of racial injustice.

Floyd was a 46-year-old Black man from Houston who had moved to Minnesota three years earlier. He was a father and brother who idolized his mother, loved making music and had been a star athlete as a young man.

Floyd died after Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds as Floyd lay facedown, hands cuffed behind his back...

This was the great sticking point, the part of the story where the argument between "Black Lives Matter" vs. the "Blue Lives Matter" of law enforcement goes dark. We've had previous documented instances of police brutality towards Blacks - not just the violent responses in Birmingham 1963 and the rest of the Civil Rights protests, but also Rodney King to Amadou Diallo to Michael Brown to Tamir Rice to Sandra Bland to Breonna Taylor and to Daunte Wright just a bloody week ago - and in all of those instances were acts of bullying and brutality that ought to make people sick to their stomachs.

But what Chauvin did to Floyd crossed the line into pure sadism. Even with Floyd handcuffed and in custody, something in Chauvin's brain triggered his urge to kneel on another human's neck with enough force to choke Floyd to death.

Please note what the experts said: Floyd was dead within five minutes. Chauvin kept pressing on his neck for another four minutes to make sure of it.

And even with all the expert testimony, all of the eyewitnesses on the stand tearfully shaken by what they saw during Floyd's death, all the prosecution's presentation that what Chauvin did was NOT by the book for law enforcement, with everything I would argue proved Chauvin committed murder... there was still this fear that enough members of the jury would ignore all that.

Even with Chauvin's defense lawyer putting up what observers noted as a weak defense of his client, there was this understanding outside of that courtroom that it didn't matter how strong a defense he could pass (there really wasn't: there was no goddamned excuse to crush a man's neck like that, ever) only as long as the defense could get one person on that jury to buy "reasonable doubt." We've seen this movie before: What looked to be a clear-cut case of police brutality on Rodney King ended up with the jury siding with the cops, what looked to be a clear-cut case of excessive force (41 shots!) on Diallo ended up with that jury siding with the cops. And far too many cases where local prosecutors refused to go to trial because "they lacked evidence" (what they lacked was the willingness to cross the local police departments those prosecutors have to work with every day).

There was - and still is - this fear that juries will err on the side of reasonable doubt in favor of police because of the built-in "respect" for law enforcement our society relies on for "peace and order." Even at the expense of dead unarmed minorities. That was the dread until the verdict was finally reached and some slight acceptance of justice delivered could be felt.

And even now, even with this verdict as a form of accountability - that there is a line of excessive force that the public cannot tolerate from our police - there is still the reality that this is just one brief drop of justice in an ocean crashing with police misconduct in the United States, something that does not look like it will start behaving itself any time soon.

In the time after Floyd's murder, with that on the national consciousness, time and again cops have been caught on camera committing brutal acts against unarmed Blacks for the slightest - oft-times unjustified - excuses. It's been getting to where even White folks are thinking "what the hell are cops doing pulling over unarmed Blacks for traffic stops all the time?" (hint: We learned about all this back in 2014 when Michael Brown's death led to an investigation of Ferguson's police force, and that the police harassment of Blacks is an ongoing extortion racket.)

How many of you think that with this Guilty verdict on Chauvin, how many cops will sit back and think "whoa, we need to cut back on the bullying and brutality"? How many cops do you imagine will think instead "next time if that happens to me, make sure there's no cameras present"?

What happened today is a moment of personal justice for George Floyd's family and loved ones.

What happens tomorrow is the rest of us still working towards holding our police - city cops, county sheriffs, state patrols, hell even the FBI - accountable to ensure no more unarmed people - no more minorities, no more women, no more kids - get killed by the hands of those who are supposed to serve and protect US.

(Update 4/21): As Denny noted in the Comments already, there's been another police shooting this time in Columbus, Ohio. The cops were called to a family altercation where a 15-year-old girl Ma'Khia Bryant was defending herself with a knife, she was the one who had called the police for help... and when one of the cops got inside he promptly put four bullets into her. Jesus Christ. With all that was going on with the Chauvin trial at that moment, the cops still couldn't be bothered to keep their trigger fingers away from their guns or try to de-escalate a situation. They just went in, shooting first and refusing to ask questions at all. The law enforcement in our country doesn't want to learn from their mistakes. The cops don't want to accept the possibility THEY are in the wrong here.

JUST STOP FUCKING SHOOTING PEOPLE, COPS. CAN YOU COMPREHEND THAT ONE LITTLE THING.

YOU ARE NOT EXECUTIONERS.

JUST STOP FUCKING SHOOTING PEOPLE.

JUST STOP FUCKING SHOOTING PEOPLE.

JUST STOP IT. YOU ARE NOT PROTECTING US WHEN YOU KILL US.

They're Supposed To Be Trained Better Than This

There's been another cop shooting an unarmed Black man again, and this time the excuse is "It was an accident, we swear."

During a supposed routine traffic stop - because the cops spotted an expired license tag and air fresheners in the wrong spot (??) - in Brooklyn Center Minnesota, the entire thing escalated into an attempt to handcuff Daunte Wright for a misdemeanor warrant (!) for failing to appear in court on an earlier charge, and then escalated from there into this (the video - available at this Balloon Juice article - can be shocking to many, so be forewarned) according to this article by Becky Sullivan at NPR.org:

At a press conference Monday, Brooklyn Center police Chief Tim Gannon played body camera footage of the shooting, saying its circumstances demanded transparency.

"It is my belief that the officer had the intention to deploy their Taser but instead shot Mr. Wright with a single bullet," Gannon said. "This appears to me, from what I've viewed and the officer's reaction and distress immediately after, that this was an accidental discharge that resulted in the tragic death of Mr. Wright."

The cop - supposedly trained for months on the weapons at hand - could not tell the difference between an 8 ounce Taser and a 31 ounce firearm. Also, they're supposed to be trained to know which hip to pull their Taser from.

This is either a massive failure to train and re-train adequately for a high-risk job, or this is an excuse for yet another cop who had no problem putting bullets into yet another unarmed Black person.

/headdesk

And I get to accuse the cops here about the possibility of racism being the motivation here, because as this shooting took place not more than 10 miles from this incident they are wrapping up the murder trial of Derek Chauvin for his crushing of George Floyd's neck during "a routine stop" for a counterfeit Twenty.

How many "routine traffic stops" end up with the Black person who's being stopped also ending up dead on the street like Maurice Gordon or dead in a jail cell like Sandra Bland?

Someone on Twitter recently noticed as a White person that she was never asked to exit her vehicle when the cops pulled her over for traffic violations. I admit I have been pulled over myself - three times for speeding, once for an expired tag like Wright, once for failure to fully stop at a Stop sign (which I did, and the cop was an asshole clearly working a ticket quota), and also caught at a traffic checkpoint in my neighborhood where the cop told me one of my headlights was out (but he let me go because he noticed my driver's ID listed my address literally a block away). I have NEVER been asked to step out of the car when pulled over, and it's making me suspicious as a White Guy why cops seem to keep ordering Blacks to get out of their cars before everything goes to Hell.

Why the hell did they have to arrest Wright for MISDEMEANORS, when they could have simply written another ticket for the expired tag and reminded him he needed to answer his court summons on the earlier pending misdemeanor. He wasn't a rampaging criminal mastermind, he was a 20-year-old who didn't have half his shit figured out and now won't get the chance to.

I may not be a law officer, and not a lawyer, but I have had enough experiences at my end of things dealing with cops that the best way to keep things cool is to keep the driver in the car and just let some shit go until you know for a fact you got a felony on your hands and you have to make a serious arrest. And even then, there ought to be ways to de-escalate the situation so that NO ONE GETS SHOT.

Let me refer back to that Balloon Juice article by Adam L. Silverman, who points out the clear problem we have in the United States:

Daunte Wright was pulled over for expired tags, which is a running problem in Minnesota because of pandemic related delays in processing renewals. Expired tags are a misdemeanor offense. When they ran him in the computer, they got a return that he had a warrant for failing to appear after being sent a summons for a court appearance on a different misdemeanor. Neither of these things would seem to necessitate any form of escalation. Wright is not heard threatening the cops. He’s not moving towards them when he pulls away from being cuffed after the female officer intervenes while one of the two male officers is trying to cuff him. I’m not even sure why she would escalate to the Taser.

I’m going to make a semi-informed guesstimate, however. I would put money on the fact that this officer has attended a continuing education class with Bill Lewinski and the absolutely bullshit training from his Force Science Institute, which teaches law enforcement to immediately escalate to the highest level of force lest they be killed by any interaction with the citizenry. Lewinsky created his own course of study and “field” within psychology when he did his doctorate and Canadian courts won’t allow him to provide expert testimony anymore because he is a “self proclaimed authority” on law enforcement use of force. Lewinski’s “police psychology” and his expert witness testimony justify every police shooting on the basis that police cannot wait to employ force lest they be harmed or killed. And if she didn’t take one of Lewinski’s continuing education course, then she had one on “killology”, which is equally garbage. Or one of the other similar courses that have turned too many law enforcement officers into “shoot first and don’t answer questions later” responders.

I write this as someone who has taught hundreds of law enforcement officers as a former criminology professor, as well as conducted continuing education for Federal and state law enforcement on how to conduct Engagement to deescalate situations in order to be more effective. And as someone who is a member of the Nassau County, NY Detectives Association. Until or unless law enforcement training – both the initial entry education and especially the continuing education – is revised to remove the bullshit junk science that justifies immediate escalations of force, this is going to continue...

Our cops are supposed to serve the public trust and uphold the law. Cops are NOT supposed to be executioners. We need to rethink our police excessive use of force, because all it's doing is getting unarmed minorities killed at an alarming rate and making our police forces look like either fools or racist assholes. >:(

As Chaos Reigns, More Blood In The Streets

There is chaos across the globe. Not just with the Pandemic, not just with nations wrapped in a decade's worth of civil wars, not just with the caging and pain of minority groups in both China and the United States...

There's a Category 4 Hurricane about to hit the coast of Louisiana, we're about to get another replay of 2005's Katrina, and it's not even in the top five stories tonight.

This weekend saw yet another Cop-on-Black shooting, this time in Kenosha Wisconsin, prompting a fresh round of protests because the cops are still abusing their power and still piling up a body count of unarmed victims.

Only this time, the cops in Kenosha allowed a number of Far Right white supremacists with their own firearms to show up and confront the Black Lives Matter protesters, and things got bloody. Via Adam Mahoney, Julia Wong, and Victoria Bekiempis in the Guardian:

Hours before a 17-year-old white man allegedly killed two people and injured a third at protests over a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a local militia group posted a call on Facebook: “Any patriots willing to take up arms and defend our city tonight from evil thugs?”

It’s not yet clear if Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois teenager arrested on suspicion of murder after last night’s shootings in Kenosha, was among the people who responded to the call the militia group had posted, which was later featured on the conspiracy theory site InfoWars.

A Facebook account listed under Rittenhouse’s name included images of the young white man posting with a military-style rifle, as well as multiple posts expressing support for law enforcement.

It's been confirmed for years - Adam L. Silverman over at Balloon Juice has been writing about the Right-Wing terrorism that's been building in this nation since 2016 - that the Far Right militias have been spoiling for a fight, convinced they're at war with the librul commies and dark-skinned Others (encompassing Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, even Hindus and Greeks). The recent rash of law enforcement killings of unarmed Blacks has been their clarion call, and they've been rushing out to each protest eager to show off their AR-15 murdersticks.

Well, in Kenosha not only did the gun-toting wingnuts find protesters to threaten, they found a police force willing to look the other way regarding their efforts to destabilize peaceful protests... and worse. Back to the Guardian article:

Before the shooting, the presence of armed white men at the Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha on Tuesday night prompted criticism from protesters – and some support from law enforcement.

In a widely circulating video from Tuesday night, Kenosha police can be heard thanking and tossing bottled water from an armored vehicle to what appear to be armed civilians walking the streets.

“We appreciate you being here,” an officer is heard saying over a loudspeaker.

But David Best, the county sheriff, told media outlets after the shooting that people patrolling the streets in Kenosha were a “like a vigilante group”, and said that the shooting was evidence of why suggestions to deputize citizens to help law enforcement contain the unrest in the city had been a bad idea.

YA THINK?!

It's like the local law enforcement still hasn't grasped the idea that the best way to keep protests peaceful is to reduce the presence of weapons and means of vandalism, rather than encouraging trigger-happy extremists who WANT to start a fight and earn their blood-stripes.

This incident is more evidence that our police forces across the United States are in bed with - or at least comfortable hanging out with - a Far Right group composed of racists and neo-Nazis who want to increase violence (even against the cops who are all so chummy with them).

The wingnuts are presenting every sign of wanting to go to literal civil war with everyone they hate in America. Even the guys in Homeland Security on trump's payroll tried to warn him and the Republican leadership. Here's how Betsy Swan at Politico reported it:

For Neumann, her nightmare scenario of globalized white supremacist terrorism was coming to life. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was doing far too little about its own homegrown extremists — often "lone wolves" radicalized online by white supremacist websites and fueled by hostility toward immigrants and minorities. But White House officials didn’t want to talk about the rising domestic extremist threat or even use the phrase “domestic terrorism.” The administration’s relentless, single-minded focus on immigration enforcement — coupled with nonstop turnover on the National Security Council — constantly pulled senior DHS leadership away from everything else. And her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, was part of the problem...

Trump often expressed irritation when he saw the DHS secretary anywhere other than the border. Miles Taylor, who was Nielsen’s chief of staff, told POLITICO Trump used to lambaste her if she didn’t physically spend enough of her time there...

Early in Nielsen’s tenure as secretary, she and Taylor discussed the domestic terror threat at length. In the months before her confirmation, a far-right extremist named Jeremy Christian had murdered two men on a train after harassing two Black teenage girls. One of the girls wore a hijab, according to news reports, and Christian yelled “fuck Muslims” at them. Just days after Nielsen was confirmed, a man with a swastika marking on his leg murdered two students at a high school in New Mexico before killing himself.

“I said, ‘Look this is a pretty big deal right now, it’s getting serious, a lot of it’s racially motivated,’” Taylor recalled telling Nielsen. “‘I don’t think we are well positioned against it. We’ve got to do more, but it’s really got to start with the president.’”

At the time, then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster was overseeing the drafting of a new national counterterrorism strategy. The document would lay out priorities for using resources from across the U.S. government to combat terrorism.

Taylor wrote a “dream draft” emphasizing everything DHS would want from the strategy document — including a focus on domestic terrorist threats, along with threats from radical Islamist terrorism and other foreign actors. Four months after Nielsen started as DHS secretary, Trump replaced McMaster with John Bolton. The process of drafting the counterterrorism strategy continued under Bolton’s leadership.

“What ended up getting significantly dropped was all the stuff we talked about on domestic terrorism,” Taylor said. “We got a draft back from John Bolton that barely referenced domestic terrorism...”

Part of this is the Republicans' obsession against immigration - which is racially-tinged to begin with - blinding them to the problems of domestic violence, and a lot of this is the Republicans' refusal to clean their own house of Far Right extremism they rely on to keep their voting base happy. There is no other way to explain this inaction.

And it's this inaction that keeps ending up with more American blood spilling into our American streets. The wingnut in Kenosha left behind two dead and one severely wounded, and more than just that community torn apart by the escalation of hostilities.

This is not going to end well, not even if Biden wins this November.

And yet, we dare not let the gun-toting militia extremists win. Damn them. We have better things to live for than their goddamned rage and fear.

The Nation Plans Accordingly...

I hear always the admonishment of my friends:

"Bolt her in, constrain her!"
But who will guard the guardians? 
The wife plans accordingly and begins with them.

-- Juvenal, Satire VI

I've been struggling the past few days to get into words what it is I want to say about the current protests and community uprisings against police brutality, tying it in with the remembrances of Tank Man and the need for protesting injustice under all circumstances.

In the meantime, this article - written by an ex-cop under the pseudonym A.Cab (the newest acronym for All Cops Are Bastards) about the systemic bias, rage, racism, sexism, and bullying in law enforcement - on Medium has turned into the must-read thing of the moment: 

This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.

But enough is enough...

If you’re tempted to feel sympathy for me, don’t. I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations.

We used to have informal contests for who could cite or arrest someone for the weirdest law. DUI on a bicycle, non-regulation number of brooms on your tow truck (27700(a)(1) of the California Vehicle Code)… shit like that. For me, police work was a logic puzzle for arresting people, regardless of their actual threat to the community. As ashamed as I am to admit it, it needs to be said: stripping people of their freedom felt like a game to me for many years...

In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is “changing things from the inside.” They can’t, the structure won’t allow it...

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force: “I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity...

If you take nothing else away from this essay, I want you to tattoo this onto your brain forever: if a police officer is telling you something, it is probably a lie designed to gain your compliance.

Do not talk to cops and never, ever believe them. Do not “try to be helpful” with cops. Do not assume they are trying to catch someone else instead of you. Do not assume what they are doing is “important” or even legal. Under no circumstances assume any police officer is acting in good faith.

Also, and this is important, do not talk to cops...

Reading the above, you may be tempted to ask whether cops ever do anything good. And the answer is, sure, sometimes. In fact, most officers I worked with thought they were usually helping the helpless and protecting the safety of innocent people...

And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started...

This is where, in a sane and just world, instead of sending out more cops we need to be sending out more social workers. But gee, who wants to spend a billion dollar budget on social workers...? Back to the anonymous op-ed:

Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, “polite society”, and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel.

Instead of wasting time with minor tweaks, I recommend exploring the following ideas:

No more qualified immunity. Police officers should be personally liable for all decisions they make in the line of duty.
No more civil asset forfeiture. Did you know that every year, citizens like you lose more cash and property to unaccountable civil asset forfeiture than to all burglaries combined? The police can steal your stuff without charging you with a crime and it makes some police departments very rich.
Break the power of police unions. Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.
Require malpractice insurance. Doctors must pay for insurance in case they botch a surgery, police officers should do the same for botching a police raid or other use of force. If human decency won’t motivate police to respect human life, perhaps hitting their wallet might.
Defund, demilitarize, and disarm cops. Thousands of police departments own assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, and stuff you’d see in a warzone. Police officers have grants and huge budgets to spend on guns, ammo, body armor, and combat training. 99% of calls for service require no armed response, yet when all you have is a gun, every problem feels like target practice. Cities are not safer when unaccountable bullies have a monopoly on state violence and the equipment to execute that monopoly.
One final idea: consider abolishing the police...

As for all the calls (like this one) to "abolish the police" sounds like extreme demolition, but in the context that the op-ed writer is telling us, it's more along the lines of extreme reform. That things need to be broken down in order to rebuild something without the stain and sins of the previous shape of things. The current system, there's almost nothing good to salvage. The entire setup has to go, and a new, more humane and less violent system put in place. This requires not a revolution but determination.

A lot of this were warning signs back during Ferguson. I went back to look at what I wrote then. When the anonymous cop writes about "No More Civil Asset Forfeiture," that was one of the biggest takeaways we got from the official reports about those dark months. The way that department operated - fining the hell out of poor residents in order to raise their own revenues - created what I called an extortion racket the police couldn't give up. We had a legal system that relied on bad police behavior to the point our prosecutors and judges were accomplices after the fact. In Ferguson, much like what we've had in our cities this month, we had cops carrying firepower equal to most standing armies all to shoot and maim unarmed civilians. I still remember that quote from an actual Iraqi veteran: "We rolled lighter than that in an actual war zone."

SIX YEARS AGO, we had all these warning signs, and we've done nothing since then but let the local and county law enforcement get worse.

The need for accountability out of our guardians has always been high. The failure of our nation to hold them accountable has always been a great tragedy. Too many people have been killed and harmed already.

Who polices the police? We should, otherwise like the wife of Juvenal's satire we need to plan ourselves accordingly.

The Buildup To When It All Explodes

On top of all the nightmares - the pandemic, the mass unemployment, the escalating decay of America's global standing, the purging of federal oversight to curtail corruption, probably even the arrival of freaking Murder Hornets (thanks a lot, 2020) - one of the darkest yet consistent patterns of these trumpian years has been the public displays of racism. The blatant cruelty towards immigrants and the intentional separation of families as punishment. The demeaning and derogatory language towards Muslims, towards Chinese and Asians, towards Blacks.

All of it building off of a Far Right, conservative-backed Culture War that had been raging years before trump showed up on the political stage to make it worse.

As Adam Serwer noted, for all historians to document forever: The Cruelty Is the Point.

And this week, after months of outrage after outrage, it all exploded across the United States.

The buildup started earlier this year in February, when a black man Ahmaud Arbrey jogging through a mostly-white neighborhood in Georgia was shot and killed by two (further investigation upped the number to three) white men who claimed Arbrey was a suspected burglar. When their story fell apart (there were no burglary reports filed to back up their claim), the local law enforcement still refused to pursue the matter even as the outrage went national. In early May, a video made by the third suspected killer - released by him hoping to prove his buddies' argument - was shown demonstrating Arbrey was unarmed, tried to run around his attackers, got "boxed in" and was still shot to death. Within days, the state of Georgia took over the investigation and arrested the shooters. There is still anger and outrage at how slowly the justice system even responded to the matter, with serious allegations of how at least one of the shooters having ties to that justice system implying privilege and protection for them.

And while all of that was going down, earlier this month in Minneapolis things got worse, when George Floyd got arrested over a possible counterfeit $20 (I originally heard it was a bad check bouncing) and it led to his death-by-cop (via Catherine Kim at Vox):

The death of George Floyd, 46, was captured on video and was later widely shared on social media. In the footage, an officer pins Floyd’s neck to the ground as Floyd is begging, “Please, I can’t breathe” — a moment that closely resembles the pleas of Eric Garner, a black man who died from an officer’s chokehold in 2014. Another police officer watches the scene unfold as bystanders voice their concerns for Floyd. One person comments that Floyd has a bloody nose while another yells, “Bro, you’ve got him down, let him breathe at least, man...”

Although the video doesn’t capture the moments leading to the arrest, the Minneapolis Police Department said they were responding to a call that a man was trying to use a $20 counterfeit bill, according to the Star Tribune. In a statement, the police department said officers arrived at the scene to find Floyd — who matched the description of the suspect — sitting on a car and appearing to be intoxicated. They added that Floyd physically resisted the police and seemed to be “suffering medical distress,” which is why they had called for an ambulance.

The police’s excessive use of force seemingly has no excuse: The department does not permit the technique that was used to pin Floyd’s head to the ground, according to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Four officers involved in the case were fired by Tuesday afternoon, and the FBI has now opened a civil rights investigation on the incident...

Just to point out: The knee-to-neck method is specifically prohibited by the police department as policy, and the cop violated that policy. The cop kept his knee on Floyd's neck for eight minutes (from the probable cause filing), and Floyd was clearly dead five minutes in. He kept his weight on Floyd's neck for three extra minutes to make sure.

And from there, our nation went into the cycle of protest, and police crackdown, and shockwave of more protests to where stores have been smashed, building set on fire, and thousands hurt with rubber bullets, batons, and worse.

Right now nearly every major city has seen its marches, and several of them reporting serious destruction and harm.

Making things worse: Reports of "outside agitators," of people - a good number of them white folk - are intentionally causing the arson and damage as a means of escalating the rage and hate. At a moment our nation needs to calm down and avoid bloodshed, we're instead racing towards street war.

This feels different than the last big wave of protests against police brutality, back when Ferguson ripped apart communities and forced an ongoing debate between "Black Lives Matter" and "Blue Lives Matter." But when you watch that video clip of Floyd's murder, of his gasping "I can't breathe" in a dark echo of Eric Garner, how can you accept the argument that there's not a campaign of intimidation and force by law enforcement upon the minorities of our cities?

We had different political leadership back in 2014, when Obama was there to speak to our better angels and prevent the spread of violence. But this is the Darkest Timeline now, with trump in the Oval Office, and trump has been busy sending out more tweets to threaten "thugs" with lines like "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

Christ help us. trump's not working to mend the wounds, he's looking to rend us further into violence against each other, so he can steal a little more, cheat a little more, ruin this nation's future a lot more.

This does feel like a civil war this weekend, the divisions not by state line but by cultural obsessions and willingness to spill the blood of men and women who are marching for the sheer simple call of "No More Police Brutality."

This year 2020 just gets worse all the time.

Cycle of Violence, Unending

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr (1967).

What are we doing to ourselves?

This past week we had two questionable, honestly horrific situations where police used lethal force to kill two black men, Alton Sterling one day and then Philando Castile the next, in situations that begged the question - yet again - at what point should lethal force even be considered? In Castile's case, it was over a minor traffic stop - over a busted tail light? - that for a white guy - like myself - would have meant a warning from the cop and the chance to drive home and fix the tail light by tomorrow. But for a black guy like Castile it was a death sentence.

And then things got worse last night when - during a peaceful street protest in Dallas regarding Sterling and Castile's deaths - a gunman with an assault rifle took a sniper's position overlooking the protest and opened fire on the cops working the security detail. The shooter wounded twelve officers and civilians, killing five.

Every account about the protest up until then was that it was by the book, nobody causing problems, a genuinely peaceful protest that by all definitions our Constitution encourages. Word is, Dallas is one of those cities than has been effective in maintaining professional relations dealing with the public, had been avoiding the militarization of the police that took place in Ferguson and Cincinnati and a hundred other cities, that had been reducing the kind of bad confrontations that led to last night's protests in the first place. 

There is horrifying irony in this, that a place where policing was actually working right had to suffer the loss of four police officers and a transit officer to another angry guy with a gun. All because one angry Black - a military veteran of Afghanistan with no previous police record, and "upset about the recent police shootings" - decided to take his "revenge" on the cops who had nothing to do with those other deaths.

We're still not over what happened in Orlando last month, home to the worst one-shooter gun massacre in our nation's history. Given how bloody that history is, that fact ought to upset every single American. The fact of that shooting - like every other mass shooting our nation's seen - involved yet another angry guy with access to military-level assault rifles ought to stir up action to prevent such guys from easy access to weapons that can kill in a heartbeat with the pull of a trigger finger. And yet...

And yet we dare not talk about any attempt at sensible gun safety laws lest the NRA throw yet another hissy fit. I don't even know why they bother to throw one: they're too busy raking in the dough as more gun nuts race out to the armories to buy up more weapons and ammo out of fear that "Obama's gonna take our gunz."

/headdesk

We cannot gather in peace in public to protest or celebrate or dance or learn. We cannot assemble in our churches or our schools or our shopping malls without fear of the angry guy wielding the almighty gun. We cannot calm down our police forces, who fear every traffic stop and street protest for the likelihood of violent escalation, who overreact and kill those who didn't deserve to die.

Meanwhile, we keep making this nation a safe place for angry guys to get guns, and to use those guns, even on the good guys like cops doing their jobs, to keep the cycle of anger and violence going.

...Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. - King

We are all part of that darkness, all because of a few who live for - who love - that hate.

Where are we going that we cannot see in this darkness?

The Agency of Accountability: The Time Is Now

I didn't write or say much about the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore because at the time all I had was the same rage as before about the mindset of brutality among our law enforcement officers towards minorities.  We can repeat the names - Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, what is turning out to be tens if not hundreds more - and we can cry for justice, but time and again justice refused to hold their own accountable for their sins of excessive force and perjured ass-covering.

But at about the same time that I heard word about BridgeGate and how Chris Christie's circle of friends was getting smaller, news out of Baltimore sent shockwaves across the nation:

Six police officers were charged Friday in the death of Freddie Gray as Baltimore’s top prosecutor acted with surprising swiftness in a case that ignited protests and rioting here. She described how Gray allegedly was arrested illegally, treated callously by the officers, and suffered a severe spine injury in the back of a police van while his pleas for medical help were ignored.

Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby publicly delivered her stunning, detailed narrative of extensive police misconduct in the latest of several cases nationwide that have fueled anger over heavy-handed law enforcement tactics in low-income communities.

Unlike other moments where other cops caught on camera are facing up to the false reports and damaged lives left in their wake, this was huge because the incident itself is so recent.  Most other "official" investigations took months, went through grandiose staged grand juries that didn't peruse evidence as much as convict the victims and free the killers.

This time, Baltimore's state attorney controlling the investigation filed charges as soon as the evidence made it clear just what the cops responsible for Gray's death failed to do (and brings up questions about what they might have done):

• Walking down a street with a companion, Gray makes eye contact with a cop and shows aversion, running from the scene.  Cops give chase, leading up to Gray captured and getting injured on his leg.
• A knife is found on Gray, but it's a standard pocket-knife, not a switchblade.  It's legal.  There are no warrants or cause for arrest, yet the cops still take him in, handcuffing him and later putting him in leg irons.  He is not seated but left on the floor.
• Gray begins asking for an inhaler, having problems with breathing, but otherwise appears physically fine to eyewitnesses at his arrest.
• The police van transporting him takes 30 minutes to drive a two-minute route to the nearest station, although halfway there the van stops for paperwork reasons and because the van driver claims Gray is "irate".  Whatever happened here, the prosecutors' office investigated down to the atoms for some reason, rounding up potential eyewitnesses and finding any street cameras that documented the timeline.
• Van arrives at the station, at which point Gray is unable to talk, breathe, or move.  A medic is called, and Gray is taken to a hospital where he slips into a coma and later dies.
• Autopsy reveals that Gray had 80 percent of his spine severed.

What happened to Gray in that van is known as a "rough ride", a shockingly common practice nobody really talks about because it violates the hell out of every legal right in the book, causes excessive injuries to its victims, and is used by cops to deal with "unruly" prisoners who just happen to look at them wrong.  A rough ride - where an unbuckled prisoner would get thrown hard against something whenever the van swerved the wrong way - could have easily caused that spinal injury that killed Gray.

Just note that one part I mentioned in the previous paragraph: It's common.

It's common, apparently, for our law enforcement to act like bullies to the very people they're supposed to serve and protect.  It's common for excessive force to be used every day by the cops, whether it's pulling over guys on bicycles, or using illegal choke holds, or emptying entire clips into one unarmed black man.  It's common to use force, and then the threat of force: because once people know you're capable of it and never get called on it, they have every reason to fear your use of force, don't they...?

It's common because it was... it IS... the policy of the powerful.  To quote Ta-Nehisi Coates:

But I have a problem when you begin the clock with the violence on Tuesday. Because the fact of the matter is that the lives of black people in this city, the lives of black people in this country have been violent for a long time. Violence is how enslavement actually happened. People will think of enslavement as like a summer camp, where you just have to work, where you just go and someone gives you food and lodging, but enslavement is violence, it is torture. Torture is how it was made possible. You can’t imagine enslavement without stripping away people’s kids and putting them up for sale. And the way you did that was, you threatened people with violence. Jim Crow was enforced through violence. That was the way things that got done. You didn’t politely ask somebody not to show up and vote. You stood in front of voting booths with guns, that’s what you did. And the state backed this; it was state-backed violence.

And so the cops rarely answer for the violence they commit.  Because the state profits from it.

The other troubling thing is the crime cops commit on a regular basis for which they never answer: the constant lying about their own actions.  Oh, we know excessive force when it's used, and the cops know too, and so to make themselves look better they perjure themselves.  They lie about the reasons why they went for the gun instead of the pepper spray, they lie about why they used the pepper spray, they lie about the severity of the injuries they've caused, they lie about evidence because that planted gun and bag of drugs has to count for something to earn that conviction rate...

It happens so often the cops call it "testilying".

As far back as the Rodney King assault/arrest, I could barely accept the fact that the jury acquitted the cops of violently beating King to within an inch of his life.  What enraged me further was how the charge that they lied on their arrest reports - they reported "minor injuries" when King suffered concussion and broken bones - didn't stick.  The jury let them slide on the one thing that wasn't in argument: the fact that they lied about what they did to King.  The medical evidence clearly contradicted everything the cops claimed, and the jury still acquitted.

And we complain about the communities rising up in riots after every questionable death.  Because we as a society, we Americans living outside of that poverty zone, outside of those red-lined ghettos, can turn a blind eye because we buy those lies, we take the cops' word when time and again cops have been caught lying.  Because we refuse to hold accountable those who have the law as their excuse.

But it is long overdue for cops to be held accountable (Quis custodiet...).

...But at the same time, (Mosby) added, “those officers that usurped their authority, you have to be able to hold them accountable because it does a disservice to the really hardworking police officers. So for me it’s about applying justice fairly and accurately to those with or without a badge...”

We need to do more than talk about needed reforms in our law enforcement practices.  We need action to reduce the use of excessive force down to nil.  We need a judicial system in place that can better police its own to ensure lying cops do not profit from their lies.

We need to recognize that the injustice of excessive force can no longer be tolerated.

We need to recognize that lies kill.  Lies can kill justice as much as those lies can kill our loved ones.

American Income, American Injustice

This is, by the by, the 700th post here on this blog (under different names).  Big Hello to all the Crooks and Liars people following Mike's Blog Round-Up link!  Thank you for stopping by, and please check out the rest of this blog.  Also, I have a separate blog at WittyLibrarian And The Book With the Blue Cover, at which I have a current memorial for Sir Terry Pratchett.)

The federal investigation into the dealings of the Ferguson Police Force, not just in the Michael Brown shooting but a litany of complaints against an out-of-control agency, brought up some horrifying revelations.  Ta-Nehisi Coates aptly titled his article about it "The Gangsters of Ferguson," and for good reason:

(from the DOJ report) Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community. Further, Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias, including racial stereotypes. Ferguson’s own data establish clear racial disparities that adversely impact African Americans. The evidence shows that discriminatory intent is part of the reason for these disparities...

Partly as a consequence of City and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue...

There's a word for this: Extortion.

Extortion... is a criminal offense of obtaining money, property, or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion. Refraining from doing harm is sometimes euphemistically called protection. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit the offense...

Thing is, Organized Crime never had it so good or easy as corrupt cops and city employees, who extort through excessive fines and asset seizures using the threat of jail and the threat of police brutality to get their money.  The Mafia ain't got sh-t on a police force that basically fines the hell out of its own citizenry.

And why is this happening?  Why are the police and city governments so eager to shakedown their own communities like a bunch of street thug enforcers and their capos?

Let's ask Chad Stanton over at the Washington Monthly:

...What exacerbated such practices is the maniacal hold of anti-tax fervor that has trickled down from the federal level to the state and local level. With conservative domination of many statehouses, its clear to any ambitious politician that wants to advance in the Republican Party that their fealty to the ideal of “no new taxes” has to be iron-clad.

This lock-step discipline on taxes has become a principle unto itself. From the beginning, its support has come as a result of racializing social safety net programs. What we see is a feedback loop occurring post “formal” Jim Crow. Black people are seen as “stealing” the hard earned taxes of white people, who then support politicians pledging to never raise taxes. Revenue is still needed to run the government, however, so we see budgets for programs that benefit everyone slashed. At the municipal level, cities target black communities to make up the gap.

This targeting is then justified by the same logic that was used to rail against taxes in the first place, as we see in the report. Several officials cite African Americans’ lack of “personal responsibility” as justification for targeting them for revenue.

As long as America is under the grip of this circular logic, there will be many cities operating the way Ferguson did...

It's a wonderful cycle, isn't it?  The anti-tax crowd pushes hard to cut income and corporate taxes at the federal and state level that could otherwise fund our cities and counties and states.  The county and city governments, forced to find other sources of revenue yet unable to even consider raising their own taxes lest the anti-tax forces throw them out of office, have to rely on fees and fines to cover the costs of running their low-level government services.  As most cities are home to large groups of ethnic minorities, these cities view the minorities not as people but as statistics.  And meanwhile, those same anti-tax agitators (yes, I'm pointing a finger at you, Fox Not-News crowd) rail their base against those ethnic minorities as an ongoing social and economic threat, making it easier to ignore their suffering.

There's another word, phrase actually, that can be used here: Indentured Servitude.  Ferguson PD and other departments like them across the nation use violence and the threat of ruin to force a persecuted group - a poor minority like Blacks or Hispanics - to fork over money.  In order to recoup those losses, those minorities are forced to work harder or place themselves further into debt, only to have the PD show up and take more money.

I wrote awhile back about the police department in Waldo, FL shutting down.  It's a small, dot-on-the-map town in the northeast corner of Alachua County.  If you lived in Gainesville (GO GATORS) and had to drive to Jacksonville, you'd know about this place... because Waldo was one of the most infamous speed traps in American history.  Waldo was so small and so poor a community that the police force couldn't rely on the locals for shakedowns fines, so they went with a ludicrous speed trap instead that netted the unwary drivers from out-of-state or from parts of Florida that hadn't heard of them.  My dad got nailed driving through there once, he even knew about it and even he couldn't avoid getting caught in the speed trap.

I was caught once in a speed trap on I-4 one weekend morning, with a group of co-workers leaving a night shift job.  Our driver was accused of being 20 MPH over the speed limit, but she was driving off an expressway ramp onto the interstate having just left the toll booth and there was no way she had accelerated that quickly to the spot the cops pulled us over.  The Orange County deputy claimed an overhead plane was using some form of radar to track us, which was hard to believe because there were no planes overhead (it was a clear morning sky).  As he issued the ticket he bragged that he "always showed up in court to enforce the ticket" and essentially tried intimidating the entire minivan.  Meanwhile a small division of cop cars were swerving backwards on the interstate to reset themselves to catch more "speedsters," driving more recklessly than any civilians they were hoping to ticket.

We all openly questioned the validity of what those county cops were doing.  I argued the Waldo example, that the county was making some damn ticket quota to grind money out of the local drivers.  "It's worse than that," one of the ladies in the back seat told me.  "The cops are also looking for any undocumented workers they can pull in for immigration arrests.  If they do that, it's like a bonus."

These are just two examples of abusive, money-obsessed police actions I've been aware of my whole life over decades of having lived here in Florida.  How do you think this is like for a Black woman living in Ferguson having to cope with this sh-t five times a week? Via Coates' article:

...In one March 2012 email, the Captain of the Patrol Division reported directly to the City Manager that court collections in February 2012 reached $235,000, and that this was the first month collections ever exceeded $200,000. The Captain noted that “[t]he [court clerk] girls have been swamped all day with a line of people paying off fines today. Since 9:30 this morning there hasn't been less than 5 people waiting in line and for the last three hours 10 to 15 people at all times.” The City Manager enthusiastically reported the Captain’s email to the City Council and congratulated both police department and court staff on their “great work.”

How fares a society when we look at the institutions sworn to uphold the law and protect the citizenry... and see only bullies and shakedown artists?  Out of all the "good cops" we are repeatedly told are out there doing the hard honest work, why are the bad cops who make the Corleones look like saints the ones representing the entire profession?

And this is part of the problems we've been having with asset forfeiture, a program that's been in violation of the very concept of the Fourth Amendment (and even the Eighth and Fourteenth).

Here's the real problem: our cities and counties are tapped out of revenue sources.  Without many states able or eager to raise revenues through a progressive taxation plan - indeed with many of those states eager to cut taxes even further as part of the Far Right agenda of "kill government, let the free market overcharge us" - these cities and counties are going to raid their own communities through abusive tactics.  If we want to end these tactics, we're going to have to as a nation recognize that taxation exists for a reason and that using taxes to pay for public services is a just and fair practice.

Otherwise, the price we're going to pay for all these tax cuts for the rich and powerful will be our communities falling apart.