Police Reform? Not If It Is Allowed To Be Solely About Race

Stephanie Lopez was arrested by Bernalillo County sheriffs deputies on charges of child abuse and witness intimidation. This is a real thing.

Stephanie Lopez is the president of the Albuquerque Police Officers Association, ie: the APD officers' union. I've seen her in action for some time thanks to my own activism against police violence in Albuquerque and around the country, and compared to many other police union presidents she seems quite sane and even compassionate. She looks out for her officers' interests, but she's also very conscious of the need for police accountability and for the need to reduce police brutality and the number of police involved killings.

She's on administrative leave from the police department and the union while these matters are sorted out in court. Her replacement as union head is Shaun Willoughby who has not typically been as sane. But then, there's been an element of good-cop/bad-cop in their public presentations throughout Albuquerque's police-reform saga (a saga that's still going on.)

Police reform in Albuquerque has meant that APD no longer routinely kills suspects. At least one of the sniper squads has been disbanded, and there has been a real and sustained emphasis on deescalation of force and crisis intervention. Obviously, the word went out from the top to "stop the killing" and it has almost stopped -- at least by APD. There are other police forces at work in the area, including sheriffs, other city's police departments, and state troopers, none of whom seem to have gotten the message, and all of whom have kept on killing.

Since the reforms kicked in last year, an APD officer was killed and a number have been wounded (one by friendly fire that is suspected not to have been friendly at all...). The two APD officers who executed James Boyd as he was surrendering have been charged with murder, but they are out on bond until their trial sometime next year, and the officer who shot and killed Mary Hawks successfully sued to get his job back despite his repeated failure to follow procedures regarding his body cameras and other matters.

Let's say that reform of APD has meant two steps forward and one back, which is progress, yes, but not enough.

In Albuquerque, though there was a racial component in the abuses that were protested and which ultimately led to reform, the focus was not on race. The focus was on failures by the department and the city which led to so much abuse and killing. Failed mental health care and homeless services. Failed crisis intervention. Failed apprehension and custody tactics and so on. All of which led to a constant litany of death and destruction, most of which was avoidable.

Race and class were part of the overall picture of abusive, violent and deadly policing, but they weren't the whole thing, and the reforms did not focus solely on class and race issues.

The reforms seem to be working, but whether they'll become permanent, who knows? The arrest of Stephanie Lopez, however, makes me wonder. There is so far no sign that her arrest was arranged -- shall we say -- to eliminate her relatively conciliatory approach, but that's the upshot. Willoughby is not a conciliator and may prove to be problematic as the reform effort continues. We shall see.

Meanwhile, there is apparently a media push to acknowledge that the "national conversation" about policing has reached a climax of sorts and that "reform" is now the leading topic of discussion. The reforms being discussed by the "nation", however, appear to be almost exclusively focused on race and the disparate level of police violence and killing employed almost universally in this country against communities and people of color.

Wait. No. The problem of violent policing is not and has never been entirely a matter of race, and if the "national conversation" (which is really a matter of the elites talking to one another and has almost nothing to do with what the public wants/needs) devolves the problem into one exclusively of race, then quite simply the problem will not be solved, in fact, it may be made worse.

I've said many times here and elsewhere that police in general see armed people of color, particularly males, whether or not they are actually armed and whether or not they are threatening others, as existential threats to be neutralized with as much firepower as can be brought to bear. We see the videos of such summary executions -- which is what they are -- all the time, practically every day. They are horrible and in almost all cases, they are egregious, unnecessary. In some cases, regardless of "justifications" they are outright murder.

More white folks die at the hands of police, it's true, but the rate of killing by police falls most heavily on black and brown men. Abusive policing in general falls most heavily on black and brown men. Mass incarceration falls most heavily on black and brown men. Mentally ill black and brown men are exterminated at a profoundly disturbing rate. But they are not the only ones.

What seems to have happened during the media-memed "national conversation" about violent policing is that it has been characterized in almost exclusively racial terms. The Black Lives Matter movement has tried to avoid that exclusivity while at the same time focusing attention on the disproportionate levels of violent policing experienced by the black community. That seems to be recognized relatively widely today, and it is acknowledged as a problem even by many police chiefs. Something should be done about it. 

The problem of disproportionate policing is one thing, the problem of police violence and murder is another, and yet they have been conflated by a media which seems to want to keep the focus on policing the Negros, while barely recognizing that police violence is systemic. One has to deal with both the disproportionate policing that has virtually destroyed millions of lives and families and communities, and the violence the police routinely employ against civilians of any color or gender, violence which can and way too often does include summary execution.

If the issue is allowed to be solely about race, there will be little or no reform of police conduct; the killing will not stop. Mass incarceration may pause for a while, but the destruction wrought by violent policing will not be remedied.

If there is to be real and lasting reform of police conduct, it has to be system-wide, top to bottom, and I detect real resistance at the top to engaging in that kind of reform, starting at the very top with the DOJ and the FBI, neither of which even bother to collect let alone analyze statistics of police violence. At the top, the Attorney General and the FBI Director defend police conduct, almost without exception and almost regardless of how egregious. The FBI Director has falsely and repeatedly claimed that something called the Ferguson Effect (ie: scrutiny of police conduct) is responsible for a spike in violent crime, a spike for which there is no statistical evidence. Neither of the recent Attorneys General will hold police accountable for their actions, pretty much no matter what they do. The numerous consent decrees mandating reform of police departments throughout the country are primarily designed to regularize and professionalize police conduct,  not to reduce the killing and the violence police employ but to rationalize it.

Make it consistent. Make it defensible. This can mean an even greater level of violence by police, because there is no real intent to reduce the violence, at least none that I've seen, in the consent decrees.

Some police departments take it upon themselves to ratchet down the levels of violence they have been using against the public, but many do not. Some actually increase the use of violence in the face of protests, and their chiefs show utter contempt for the public in the process.

That internalized contempt is part of the problem of reform, and part of why I'm not convinced the kinds of reforms that are necessary are possible. Abolition may be the only viable way to do it, but there's very little sign that abolition is even conceivable in light of current "conversations."

Of course abolitionists of yore faced the same -- indeed worse -- odds.

James Boyd was executed by two police snipers as he was surrendering in the Sandia foothills in Albuquerque in March of 2014. Those snipers were later charged with murder, and their trials are scheduled for some time next year. I don't expect them to be convicted, but the fact that they were charged and will be tried is "something." Protests against that killing got under way in Albuquerque soon after Boyd was killed, and they triggered protests against police violence and killing much more generally. Those protests have continued relentlessly all over the country ever since, and it's been almost two years now. People are not letting this issue go.

Many police chiefs have recognized there is a problem with violent policing and mass incarceration, and some have taken steps to address the problem, but so far the rate of killing by police has not been reduced, in fact, it has increased since the protests against it went viral.

Control of police violence has to be exercised from the top. The police departments are hierarchies. When the chiefs and their bosses, the mayors and city managers, tell the police to stop killing, they will. So far, that order has only gone out in a very few cities.

Many more police chiefs need to hear the call and issue the stop killing order before the bloodshed will be significantly reduced. But it can be done.

Maybe next year....

Emmett Till

I have vague memories of the news stories of Emmett Till's murder 60 years ago. I have more memories of the outrage at the acquittal some weeks later of the men who did it. But I also knew that at the time in Money, Mississippi, whatever white men did to black folks was considered right and just and proper by definition, and there wasn't a damn thing black folks could do about it.

It wasn't just in Money, Mississippi, either. Los Angeles (where I lived at the time) and many other parts of California had rules almost as broad regarding the impunity of white people to do to black and brown folks pretty much whatever they wanted. There was very little the victims could do about it in California, either.

That was the way it was.

The outrage over the murder of Emmett Till and the subsequent acquittal of his murderers was somewhat muted, therefore. It's not that people weren't upset and angry. Even plenty of white people were. It's that the conditions under which these things happened -- and they did happen with shocking regularity -- were time-honored, even integral to the national sense of itself.

In those days, blackness (and brownness, indeed, every skin-color but whiteness) was criminalized, and that criminalization justified oppression, exploitation, and occasional murder.

That was the way it was.

I've mentioned previously that in those days -- indeed, for all my life until moving to Northern California in 1959 -- I lived in an integrated neighborhood. So far as I was aware, there was no racial animosity. But as I think back about the people who lived there, I suspect there actually was a good deal of white animosity toward the "colored" in the neighborhood -- "colored" which included blacks, Latinos/Chicanos, and Japanese that I can recall, and may have included others I don't recall -- but it was not expressed openly or frequently. Now the neighborhood is almost entirely Latino as is most of the San Gabriel Valley, but from the pictures I've seen recently it appears to be little different than it was 60 and more years ago when I lived there.

Street where I lived facing east c. 2015

Street where I lived facing west c. 2015; our house was the yellow one on the right

While ethnically it has become an almost entirely Latino neighborhood, visually, it is almost the same as it was when I lived there. A few houses have been extensively remodeled, but most haven't been. Some still look like they did when I walked or bicycled through the neighborhood as a boy.

Living in an integrated neighborhood was somewhat exotic in California at the time, but I thought nothing of it because I had never known anything else. It seemed perfectly natural to me. And the story of Emmett Till -- what little we children knew of it at the time -- was frightening to us because it was easy for most of us and for me to identify with him. He was older than I was and so he must have been wiser to the ways of the world, and still he was killed -- they say for whistling at a white woman? That didn't make any sense at all. Boys did that. Nobody paid more than a minute's attention to it unless it got out of hand, annoying, and then some grown up would tell the boy to stop. That's it. So they killed Emmett Till for something most people would simply ignore? What madness was this?

All we children knew of these things was that some adults were just out of their minds crazy and brutal. We all knew it. We had our own mystery stories of kids being killed by grown ups, by their own parents sometimes. We knew it happened. But this case... no, something was bad-wrong, and what was wrong was that two white men killed this black youth, "Negro" was the word then used, out of... spite? Or just because they could? And somehow they knew they'd get away with it if they did.

About 20 years ago I was asked to write a play about Emmett Till's murder, his lynching as it was being referred to. So I did a lot of research on the story, and it was very ugly indeed, especially with regard to that part of Mississippi, to the two men who killed him, and with regard to the so-called "justice" system which acquitted them.

Everything about it reeked.

As I was doing my research, I found a story about a white boy who was kidnapped and murdered at about the same time. I don't remember his name, nor can I recall where the incident took place (it may have been Michigan), but I felt that these stories were parallel examples of something uniquely American, a social and cultural belief system that devalues and enables the extermination of certain lives while protecting the lives of certain others.

The white boy, ultimately, was no more protected and valued than Emmett Till was, you see, and his killer or killers remain unknown to this day. They weren't let off like Emmett Till's killers were. They were simply never found. That's because -- in my estimation -- that incident was swept under the rug. It wasn't investigated more than superficially, and if the authorities had a suspect or suspects in mind, they never pursued it. The boy was dead and it was just as well... or so it seemed.

So I wanted to parallel this case with the case of Emmett Till as an indictment of the broader American social environment in which these sorts of things went on all the time. Well, that didn't fly with the professor who'd asked me to write the play. He didn't want any "white boy" messing up the story of Emmett Till. While I understood his point of view about it, I told him that I thought it was important to broaden the picture by including the similar murder of a white boy and showing how his life in the end was worth no more than that of Emmett Till, but we could not reach an agreement on that aspect, so the script was never written.

The Black Lives Matter movement is trying to hammer into American consciousness and conscience the fact that to a horrifying degree, black lives don't matter, especially to police and the interests whom the police serve. They are instead killable, disposable, pretty much at will. Until recently, it was almost impossible to get a police officer indicted for the clearly outrageous uses of force employed wildly disproportionately against black and brown people. While indictments are now being issued periodically, provided the case is outrageous enough, we aren't seeing convictions, and still, too often,  police are getting away with murder.

The current situation is remarkably similar to the situation in Money, Mississippi, in 1955, where a black youth could be murdered pretty much at will, and hardly anybody cared a whit. Except for his immediate family, of course.

We aren't seeing so many civilian lynchings -- though they still happen from time to time. Instead, we are seeing a daily body count, four to five a day, of men and women and sometimes children, killed by police who, in effect, have become the delegated lynching squad. Police encounter a black person mouthing off, getting uppity, not being submissive enough or obedient fast enough, or being belligerent, or even doing something wrong, and police feel perfectly justified in killing them, summary execution style, or taking them in and torturing them, or whatever they want to do, because... they think it's their job.

When lynchings by civilian mobs were commonplace in this country, the powers that be thought little or nothing of it. That was the way it was, and nothing could be done about it. Until something was done about it. What was done was mostly social shaming. That took decades to bring the number of lynchings down from hundreds a year to a few to -- officially -- none. Shaming works, but it takes a long time.

President Franklin Roosevelt twice refused to sign anti-lynching legislation proposed and (I believe) passed by Congress in the 1930s. They say he refused to sign so as not to piss off his Southern Democratic base which was filled with crackers, rednecks and lynchers, too. But it wasn't just the white trash he was concerned about. It was the white elites in the Southern Democratic Party, old line Confederates in many cases, those who suffered from Reconstruction or at least white folks claimed to have been its victims. Memories were long. The Lost Cause lived and breathed through these survivors and their descendants. To an extent, it still does.

By the 1930s, the number of lynchings per year had been on the decline, thanks in part to some brave Southern women who were fed up with the mob violence that characterized their part of the country more than any other -- violence which brought shame upon the South. You feel many echoes of it in the story of Tom Robinson as told by Harper Lee in "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Life was froughtful for black folks in the South -- it was froughtful everywhere, truth to tell -- and death came often in the night and hideously. Black folks lived in mortal peril every minute.

Emmett Till was from Chicago. He'd been sent South to stay with relatives in Money, Mississippi for the summer before he returned to school in Chicago in the fall. That day was coming soon when he went to the shop in Money to buy some chewing gum (I believe it was) and as he was leaving, they say he whistled at the proprietor's wife who was helming the store in her husband's absence. They say. Accounts vary regarding what Emmett Till actually did -- or didn't do -- that day. The point was that in no way was what he did or didn't do a threat or indecent or what have you.

He had, apparently, "broken code" though. He (apparently) did what black folks in Money, Mississippi, were not allowed to do -- under summary penalty which any white man was allowed to administer by common custom.

That summary penalty could include fiendish tortures and death. A mob may no longer be openly involved, but the result was the same, and the point of it was also the same: to perpetuate white dominance by terrorizing the various "Others" into submission and compliance.

Whatever Emmett Till did that day, his companions knew he was in trouble for breaking code. The assumption is he didn't know that there were certain things he must not do while he was in Mississippi if he valued his life. Yet I suspect he did know most of what he couldn't do, and whatever happened at the store was either a deliberate act of mischief or of defiance. I suspect he did know because he'd been there long enough, he seemed to be extremely social and bright, and it appeared he could pick up social cues well beyond what he was told he could or couldn't do. He was known in the town, too, as were the relatives he was staying with.

He was no stranger.

And he was going back to school in Chicago soon enough.

Whatever he did at that store was no doubt innocent of bad intent, I would say, but it must have rankled Carolyn Bryant to the point that she felt something had to be done or this uppity nigra boy would give the rest of the nigras in the area the wrong idea.

So she told her husband when he got back to the store that something had happened with that nigra boy from Chicago and she didn't like it a bit. Time to teach that boy a lesson, don't you think?

There were certain things in rural Mississippi that simply couldn't be allowed.

Carolyn Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went out to the house of Emmett's great uncle with whom he was staying and they demanded that the boy be turned over to them for... discipline, I suppose you would call it. The white folks as a rule never saw what they did to black folks as wrong in any way, any more than police today see what they do as wrong when they kill or brutalize to terrorize the way they do.

When you believe that black folks -- or any designated "Other" -- is nothing more than a savage animal, rabid by nature, and should be put down at a moment (the legendary "split-second decision," no?)  and it's your job to do that, to put down the savage, rabid animal, that's what you do, and you do not let conscience or any other form of empathy enter into it.

So Roy and J. W. -- good ol' boys in the time honored Southern tradition -- only did what they had to do. They took Emmett out to the river, beat him senseless and bloody, then shot him in the head and threw his corpse into the Tallahatchie River weighted down with a cotton-gin fan, and then went home and had a beer while they told of their bravery and cunning.

That nigra boy from up North wouldn't cause any more trouble, oh no. And I don't doubt they laughed about it, laughed out loud. They felt proud of what they had done. Remorse wasn't an option.

No more remorse than they would have had killing a stray, rabid dog or a thieving raccoon or a stink-spewing skunk or a skittering palmetto bug. They did no more than any upstanding white person would have done. They got rid of a pest.

The fact that they had to go on trial for their action was an inconvenience but there was essentially no chance whatever that they would be convicted of anything, let alone murder most foul, any more than police officers today -- even if indicted and handed over for trial -- are likely to be convicted of anything at all, no matter what they do to suspects or "subjects" as they are known in the trade.

A white man protecting his white woman from the predation of a rabid, savage black is only doing his proper and necessary duty. Right?

This is exactly the same attitude that informs so many police today. They are told and they are trained to believe that killing is their highest and most honorable duty to those they serve. They are told and they are trained to believe that the greatest threat to themselves and their women are black males. They are told and they are trained to believe that their first duty is to protect themselves, and that black males are the biggest threat to their personal safety and security; they must be on constant guard in any encounter with a black person, particularly with black males. And they must be ready to kill instantly if they perceive anything that might be a threat from the subject.

That's what they are told and are trained to believe.

They act as if they must make periodic examples of blacks and browns and designated Others -- by maiming and killing them -- or the rest of the "savages" would get the wrong idea and get out of line. So they kill. And kill and kill some more. Just doing their jobs.

Roy and J. W. were doing the same thing in the backwater of Money, Mississippi back in 1955. I guess the big bellied sheriff wouldn't have done it for them. Well, no. He actually was the one who arrested them. No, if the good ol' boys had gone to the sheriff about Emmett Till's offense, the sheriff would have laughed in their faces. Emmett broke code but he did not break a law, no matter how the good ol' boys tried to exaggerate what happened. The sheriff likely would have told the good ol' boys that they would have to take care of it theirownselves. And they might get into a bit of trouble if they did. "Good luck, boys."

Police are left to use their own judgement in their encounters with the public, especially using their own judgement with regard to use of lethal force against... "subjects."  They may have to account for their actions, but they will most likely never face serious consequences -- such as conviction in a court of law. That's reserved almost entirely for gross corruption and sexual impropriety. Not for killing and brutality while on the job.

White men had to act on their own in rural Mississippi back in 1955 because the law would not do it for them.

In 2015, however, police take care of these problems so white men don't have to do it on their own.

Progress, right?

The murder of Emmett Till and the acquittal of their murderers in 1955 caused such a strong reaction among so many people because it was so outrageous -- and ultimately so frightening -- that it couldn't be allowed to pass without notice. The murder victim was a child. The murderers were a couple of no-account white bucks, tobacco spitting, arrogant creeps, the infestation and ruin of the South. Something had to be done.

But nothing was.

Roy and J. W. went to their graves free men.

That's the way it was in America and that's the way it still is in much of America today.

L to R: Roy Bryant, Caroline Bryant, Juanita Milam, J. W. Milam. Acquittal. America.

The confession that appeared in Look Magazine in 1956:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/sf_look_confession.html

In Other News -- The Rise of the Racist Right (Again)

The Summer News Cycle is winding down -- the shark and missing white people stories are being put away (this summer it seemed to be white boys going missing rather than the usual white women), and the presidential campaign for the 2016 election is being given the media's main spotlight.

Bernie, The Donald, Herself... and the wild card of Ol' Joe (Biden)... seem to be sucking out all oxygen from the newsroom.

The Bernie campaign is the one with the most populist energy in that the campaign is drawing large crowds practically everywhere. Some of those crowds are immense. They seem to arise spontaneously. In some ways, the Bernie campaign reminds me of the Howard Dean phenomenon when time was, and I cannot help but recall the real shock the single digit vote results in the primaries were. How could that be, we all wondered, when he had been drawing such enthusiastic crowds? Why could he not even break into double digits -- except in Vermont?

Well, I think Bernie is going to be faced with a similar situation. How such large and enthusiastic crowds translate into such a small vote result is something for a scholarly study I haven't seen yet, but I suspect it will happen to Bernie (though he might do better than HoHo did.)

The #BLM interruptions of his campaign speeches and his subsequent acknowledgement of and policy program to redress structural and institutional racism has been taken as a marker of Bernie's civil rights and progressive cred. But what he doesn't say is the same as every other politician on the national stage. He won't endorse or repeat the principal demand of the protesters: "Stop Killing Us."

Nor will any other politician on the national stage.

Not one.

The killing is apparently something to deal with in the future, the distant future preferably, once the problem of structural and institutional racism is solved. Or maybe the killing isn't to be dealt with at all. It's really hard to say.

The killing, though, is the immediate, emergency problem, and the rate of police killings keeps climbing despite all the protests, inconveniences and interruptions of routines that the protesters engage in.

The message here is that the political class as a whole -- Bernie included -- is not particularly troubled by the killing. Nope. I've seen arguments that it is actually quite a rare thing for someone to be killed by the police (despite a higher rate of police killings than just about anywhere else in the world) and those who are killed for the most part "needed killing" anyway, so the problem of police killings is not really that much of a problem when you really look and sort it all out.

Racism, though, is something else again.

At least that's the political message.

Racism is the issue that we must tackle with all available resources and from every angle. Structural racism, institutional racism, historical racism, personal and private racism, overt and public racism, all must be tackled and dismantled, or we will forever face an intractable, socially destructive  problem of racial injustice and discrimination.

And we're better than that. Or something.

So I was cruising around the interwebs and found a story that said the Prairie View, Texas, city council had voted to rename University Blvd to "Sandra Bland Drive Parkway," and I thought, "well, isn't that something?" Not necessarily progress -- that would be expecting too much -- but at least it was an acknowledgement that her life mattered. And that's something.

The story I read was from Channel 2 in Houston, and the comments on the story were filled with racist invective, literally in every comment I read. Oh my. I've seen this before on the internet. In fact, I see it pretty frequently. Racist invective seems to be a feature of the internet, not a social bug at all. It's built in to the structure of internet commentary somehow, but every time I see it, it's a shock. I thought I was fairly sophisticated about these things, but the sort of racist animosity I've been seeing for the last several years -- and sheer amount of it -- is both bewildering and shocking.

I regard it as specifically an internet phenomenon and not particularly representative of the general feelings and beliefs of Americans, but I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is just the tip of a racist iceberg...

What I saw and read in the comments on the Channel 2 story about renaming the street on which she was manhandled and arrested for Sandra Bland was appalling, but it's not unique.

Apparently since the removal of the Confederate battle flag from places of honor in several Southern -- and some not so southern (ie: Albuquerque) -- places, a certain variety of white racist, incensed at the disrespect for their flag, have taken to arms and are prepared to fight the nigra tide that is sweeping over them... yadda, yadda, yadda. It's just ridiculous, but there you are. OK then. So be it.

The problem with this kind of white racism is that even though it may involve a relatively small minority of white folks -- though I can't be sure of the size of the current racist rise -- it can be very powerful because it taps in to America's original sins -- black chattel slavery and Native American genocide. Both were fundamental for the nation's creation and sustenance. There could be and would have been no United States of America without them.

Every effort to overcome those original sins has been fiercely resisted by some white folks for generation upon generation, and so far, while there has been progress -- chattel slavery has been largely eliminated, genocide renounced if not ended in practice -- these sins are still inherent in the nation's very being. The current level of racist internet trolling may be shocking to me, but apparently there are plenty of white folks who live this racist reality all the time.

It's powerful and it's dangerous.

I suppose that so long as it is largely confined to internet trolling, it's not really a serious problem, but I don't know that the internet actually confines it.

The #BLM movement has forced the issue of disparate justice and violent racist policing into public consciousness (again -- it's really always been with us) but so far has been ineffective in reducing the level of disparate justice and violent racist policing. In fact, the rate of police killings has substantially increased this year over last, and courts will still cheerfully charge, try and sentence black and brown folks far more severely than whites for the same offenses. Those same courts will also overlook police violence and killing.

In other words, nothing has yet positively affected the problem which has long since been identified.

At least superficially things are getting worse, not better.

There are some hopeful signs which I will try to get to in another post. But for the time being, the white racist trolls are having a field day.

Not a pretty picture.

A Ferguson Town Hall -- In Which the Mayor is Skewered Six Ways From Sunday

Ferguson, MO town hall audience -- Credit Durrie Bouscaren, St. Louis Public Radio

The audio is embedded in this link: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/fergusons-mayor-faces-heat-forum-dissects-citys-divisions

It runs close to two hours, and some of it is very powerful. There are at least two Fergusons, the "black side" and the "white side," and the mayor is clearly nearly oblivious to the presence of the "black side" -- apart from his ability to bamboozle and screw its residents through those ever useful and productive fees, fines and forfeitures. He claims he's never had a problem with (his) negroes, but then what plantation owner ever did? At least they never did before the slave revolt.

Ferguson has had a mini slave revolt, and the white owners are trying desperately to figure out how to keep the idea from spreading. They send down Jesse Jackson and The Reverend Al to calm the negroes. They place negro overseers to ensure the pacification of the... well... savages.

Let's be clear.

From the evidence in this recording and from the many other recordings of incidents in Ferguson, it's clear that the owners (including the mayor as their agent) regard the colored folks as little more than exploitable resources, crops as it were, to be punished severely when they get out of line, to be mostly ignored otherwise. They are not human, they are not people. But they are "savages."

That's why we saw such sick, sick and ridiculous force being applied to control them starting within minutes of Michael Brown's execution when the St. Louis County police arrived with dogs and assault weapons at the ready to keep the crowds gathered on Canfield Drive "under control." They had the dogs out within minutes.

As many people at the town hall pointed out, the police were inciting  the crowds from the outset, and they kept right on doing it, over and over and over again, and their incitement was a direct cause of the people's anger and upset. Could the mayor even begin to understand that? No, he could not. If the police were over-reacting, it wasn't his police.  No, no, no, you negroes have to understand that his police were pulled off the streets -- except at the police station -- within a day or so of the "incident" and the police who were on the streets during the "disturbances" were St. Louis County and State Highway Patrol and all sorts of municipal police forces from around the area. They weren't Ferguson police. So, no harm no foul, right?

Where was the mayor during all this? Nobody saw him. Oh, he was at the police station sometimes; otherwise he was at home. Why? He talked to lots of constituents. He will not resign in disgrace. He has no control over the police chief and cannot hire or fire one, only the city manager can do that. The city manager has not been instructed to do that, and he probably won't be.

No one mentioned Darren Wilson and how the city is protecting him.

Strange.

Even stranger, the fact that almost all the audience for this town hall (at least initially) was... white. See the picture above.

I guess that goes to show who doesn't listen to NPR.

The Military and Police Abuse

The way we think it used to be but never actually was.

There is constant discussion about the fact that "since 9/11" US police forces have been militarized.

Anyone who's been following the problem of police abuse in the United States would likely take issue with the notion that police militarization has only been an issue "since 9/11." In fact, the military model is at the root of modern urban policing, dating back to the 19th century, and the hyper-militarization of American police forces is an outgrowth of the Perpetual War on Drugs which has its roots in Nixon-time.

In other words, militarized police have been with us for a long time. The anomaly is not militarized police, it seems to me, it is the ideal of the "helpful officer in blue" -- something that we read about in children's books but which has only rarely been the reality.

This children's book from Britain's Ladybird series makes the point...



Prior to the modern era, law enforcement was often made the responsibility of the military. This was true in New Mexico during Spanish and the Mexican rule as well as afterwards under Anglo-American occupation.

The military often used extreme measures to enforce its rule in New Mexico, starting with Hernan de Coronado, who is said to have burned 200 rebellious Tiguex Indians at the stake as punishment for their temerity and slaughtered numerous others who tried to escape. That was in 1540.

Coronado said the Indians had declared war on him and his adventurers when they tried to stop the ravage of their fields by Coronado's horses and the rape of their women by Coronado's men.

The attitudes of those in power hasn't changed all that much since then.

Last week, Sam Markwell posted at La Jicarita his exploration of the specifically American tradition of "publicly sanctioned killing" as a way of providing context to the current protests against APD's bloodthirsty behavior. His point is much the same as mine: what's going on is baked in to the culture of policing in New Mexico and in the country at large. It is derived from the military culture that preceded the modern civil police forces, and it is deeply imbued with racist and classist notions about who should be subjected to the full force of the law.

Markwell puts it this way:

People and groups that identify primarily as citizens tend to locate APD’s problem in its supposed deviation from American norms of policing and see the solution as reestablishing a more authentic form of American policing. It is usually claimed that a prior moment of national life, when“good policing” prevailed,was lost during 9/11, World War II, or some other event of dramatic national transformation. This fall from grace, it seems, is always repairable by returning to the origins of the U.S. national project.

The trouble is, that's not the way it is. There was never a golden age of policing in this country, at least not for designated out groups, and there was no fall from grace from some better time.

Markwell continues:

But the claim that the militarization of police and technological surveillance are solely due to post-9/11 invasions into citizen freedoms does not take seriously the decades-long problems with APD, or the historical dynamics of how citizenship has been racially defined and policed in the U.S, and in particular Albuquerque. To put it differently, legal killing did not arrive in Albuquerque with the execution of James Boyd and the 25 killings APD has committed under Mayor Berry’s administration. Killing has been part of operative logics in the various legal regimes that have been enforced since the U.S. occupied the region in the mid-eighteenth century. As David Correia’s work in the Alibi and La Jicarita has emphasized— echoing the work of generations of Native, Chicano, and Black social justice activists—the problem must be situated in a much longer historical trajectory that is shaped by the racial structures and dynamics of U.S. colonization projects.

It isn't just race dynamics, though that's a key component. Class matters almost as much.

In New Mexico:

“The two principal problems which the territorial government faced …were to establish satisfactory relations with the military, and to bring the Indian menace under control.”  [According to UNM professor Thomas Donnelly.] The formation of militia’s to kill “red thieves” and the construction of penitentiaries to imprison “white thieves” reveals the racial logics enshrined in the U.S. law and policing systems. These systems mutually determined how violent forms of policing targeted different populations to establish public order for the new U.S. settler regime.

The ethic of policing in the United States has long followed the same path. The "Indian menace" in New Mexico Territory was no different than the "Indian menace" faced by Anglo colonists from the outset of their efforts in North America. The native population had to be suppressed and dispossessed, and if they resisted -- or were thought to be about to resist -- they had to be exterminated. Black chattel slaves had to be controlled and punished if they resisted their enslavement -- or were thought to be about to resist. The same with Hispanics who became "Americans" with the seizure of the Southwest from Mexico.

It was always the same.

These violent processes are the preconditions for U.S. civic rule, which deems who is a valued member of the national body and who is a killable “threat.” The military is not invading domestic police forces in an unprecedented fashion. They have long been interdependent entities whose boundaries are co-determined in and through the territorial and political contestations that shape them, and the national labor pool that provides them bodies to be set out on violent trajectories. The jurisdiction of the militias and police forces that secured the new settler legal order has been transformed since the beginning of the U.S. occupation in 1848. Essentially, this legal order has been organized around the protection of settler-citizen life and property against perceived threats (the Indian, the criminal, the homeless, the mentally ill).

Who, specifically, is subject to the kinds of violent processes that police and the military engage in changes from time to time, but always the race and class component is paramount. It's often been said that the APD doesn't kill citizens who live in the Northeast Heights of Albuquerque. They wouldn't dream of it. They, after all, are the property owners and settler-citizens for whose benefit the police force exists.

Just as the military would not ordinarily attack their own general staff.

Native communities in New Mexico have been critical of this system since its inception, pointing out the inadequacies and injustices of U.S. governance. For instance, at the 1934 Congress of the All Indian Pueblo Council, Pablo Abeita, a representative from Isleta Pueblo who had served a term as a judge, spoke to the ways that colonially and racially produced inequalities structured the U.S. legal system: “I can say, without hesitation, that when it comes to pure meanness, the white people take first prize, the blue ribbon, because when the Indians have killed one, they have killed thousands. When the Indians steal or rob 15 cents the white man has already stolen fifteen million or more. And that is not all; when the Indian is caught doing these things he is either jailed or hanged, and when the white man is caught he is given a good lecture, told to be careful so he won’t be caught the next time.” These asymmetries persist, and the U.S. legal system continues to police people in ways that create violent situations that result in killings or locking the dispossessed in cages.

These days, however, it's not just Anglos doing this to protect themselves from the browner and blacker savages -- although that is a part of it. Racial (and gender) prejudice may have diminished somewhat, and the police forces may be made up of a diverse membership, but their targets haven't changed all that much. They still see their principal function as enabling and enforcing the overlordship of those with status against those without, those with property against those without, those with power against those without.

The military once did that, especially in the West, and replacing their arbitrary authority with the civil authority of police was thought to be progressive. But in many cases, police authority was just as arbitrarily imposed, and police brutality was often worse than that of the military, especially when police combined with militias to enforce rough justice.

The problem with American policing runs deeper than its current fashion for militarization.

The Venezuela Thing Updated

In all the hoo-hah over Ukraine, Pierre, Greenwald, Ames, Carr, Wheeler, et al, the situation in Caracas gets obscured.

Even if you are in the midst of the disturbances, it may be difficult to figure what's really going on and who the players are, let alone what their motives are. As best I can understand it, the middle and upper classes see an opportunity to get what they believe is their rightful power back from the monos, salvajes y zambos (monkeys, savages, and sambos) who stole it from them 25 years ago.

They will not rest until they are victorious and have possession of the Venezuelan government once again.

And they have the financial and technical backing from United States and Colombian interests (and probably more besides) in their quest.

According to a report published by RT News last November (in Spanish), the current wave of protests and disturbances were planned last summer at a meeting which included representatives of the USAID, several Colombian NGOs, opposition Venezuelan politicians and an American "security" consultant firm. The authenticity of the plan has not been verified according to RT, and yet, so far as I know, it has not been disputed. In fact, it appears that the plan is being implemented to the extent it can be, an implementation that commenced in earnest when the opposition was unable to win at the ballot box in the December 8 municipal elections.

There is no real dispute that American agencies, interests and NGOs have been actively supporting the disturbances in Caracas and elsewhere in Venezuela, though how deep their involvement has been remains to be seen. As always in these situations, there are legitimate complaints over various aspects of the Venezuelan government and society, grievances that should be aired. The problem is that the airing of these grievances is manifested through violent street protests, rather than through the democratic means available. The protests have become so violent at times, the government has cracked down with violent means of its own leading to a vicious circle of tit for tat and ever more violence.

On the other hand, it appears that many Venezuelans do not want this to get out of hand. Consequently, despite the constant violent agitation, Venezuelans seem to be working toward a resolution that acknowledges legitimate grievances and reinforces democratic institutions, while suppressing violence to the extent possible.

In fact, a government investigation was conducted regarding violence at the Feb 12 protests and a number of those deemed responsible for attacking opposition demonstrators were arrested and are being held for trial.

President Maduro, while excoriating the opposition, has repeatedly called for "peace," and so far, the only ones protesting in the streets against the government have been middle and upper class dissidents; the poor have refused to engage in these protests, even though the economic problems the protesters have been highlighting affect the poor most of all. Of course, for the agitators the lack of participation by the poor in the protests means the classist nature of them is quite starkly revealed.

Maduro, for his part, appears to be unwilling to deal with even legitimate grievances from the protesters so long as they remain in the streets and engaged in sabotage and violent demonstrations.

It appears to be a stalemate.

Also, one part of the equation that generally isn't reported in the United States media is that there are repeated large procession in favor of Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolutionary government, processions I won't call protests or counter-protests because that is not what they seem to me to be. That they receive barely a mention in this country, while the protests and the violence that accompanies them are frequently highlighted is a factor of the American propaganda industry which of course is aligned with the Better Classes, the capitalists, and the oligarchs.

The main complaint about Maduro himself is that he is a "bus driver," and thus unfit to be el presidente. They said much worse things about Hugo Chavez, but the point about Maduro I've heard over and over is that he is neither charisma nor leadership aptitude. Strangely, he seems to be muddling through.

If my sense of the relentlessness of the current wave of regime change activities is correct, every one of the targeted governments, including Venezuela's, will fall before 2016. This will be crowed by the Obama administration as an international triumph even greater than "getting Osama bin Laden." The point being that war, invasion and occupation is the least effective means of achieving the ends of the Plutocrat class.

The Great Game is ugly business...

Not All Revolutions Are Worthy of Our Support

The Maidan in Kiev, Jan 2014, before the explosion

And (so-called) progressives and leftists are fools to support the ones under way or recently manifested. Some of these uprisings and revolts are rightist, reactionary, counter-revolutionary, corporatist, globalist, and deeply contrary to the People's interests and well-being.

This sequence of reactionary, rightist, crypto-Fascist uprisings seemed to get going in Cairo last year when tens of thousands, and then reputedly millions, turned out in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt to denounce and demand the end of the elected Morsi regime. When Morsi refused an ultimatum from the military, the military removed him, by main force, and when Morsi supporters gathered in the squares of Egyptian cities to protest this clear violation of the democratic process, the military mounted snipers on rooftops to shoot into the crowds of protestors -- something that Morsi didn't do in the face of the protests against him and his rule.

When the snipers weren't able to adequately control the protests against the military coup in Egypt-- a "coup" by any other name, since the "world community" (ie: the United States government) refused to call it a coup -- the golpistas sent in the infantry and armored transport (otherwise known as tanks) and massacred hundreds and then thousands of Morsi supporters, massacred as many as it took to kill the protests against the coup, but the protests wouldn't die. Thousands, then tens of thousands of survivors of the massacres were arrested, disappeared, many were tortured, and still the protests would not die.

The Tottenham Riots

Wot?

Brits on a rampage, are they? Who would have thought, eh?

One of my browser home pages is a news site based in Britain, so imagine my surprise (though not really) to find out this morning that Tottenham London erupted in flames and riot overnight as the residents protested the police shooting on Thursday of one Mark Duggan, who inconveniently passed away, poor devil.

Of course it might be because of this:

15.36 Many are linking last night's events with the late cancellation of Hackney Carnival today. There are also rumours flying around Twitter of riots planned for Enfield and Edmonton.

Hackney One Carnival and Parks for Life event have been cancelled today - very sorry for any inconvenience caused.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyHackney Living
hackneyliving

Terms like "ignorant," "illiterate," and "subhuman" are being tossed around like candy in the comments and the twitterverse to describe the rioters, for no educated, white, Native Brit would ever ever ever commit such bestial acts as torching cars and looting shops. How rude.



How rude of these Brownies, these "foreigners who come here" to get so uppity. (aside: I actually heard an East Indian born and raised in Fiji, who came to America when he was 14, refer to later immigrants to the United States disparagingly as these "foreigners who come here." Much mirth and merriment ensued.)

What gives them the right? Deport them all!

A typical comment:

Alfonso

This has nothing to do with the shooting of a scumbag drug dealer, these sub human imbeciles just use any exuse[sic] to riot,the looters should have been shot on sight,anybody arrested that was not born and bred in Britain should now be on their way back out of the country,and those born here should now be starting 25 year prison sentances[sic].this countries[sic] stupid tolerance policies will be our downfall that is if this **** hole of a country could sink any lower thanks to the moronic society that this generation has bred,i dread to think what kind of dregs of society they will breed.

There is nothing at all to distinguish this sort of verbal assault on "sub humans" from the fancier and much more lengthy OUTRAGE!!!!™ of one Anders Behring Breivik ("Andrew Berwick" to his English colleagues) who took matters into hand in Norway a couple of weeks ago blowing up the government quarter in Oslo and massacring some dozens of mostly young Labor Party activists on Utøya. Remember?

There is no difference in rhetoric.

The issue? Well, of course, it's the same issue here: White folks (ie: Europeans of Pure Blood) are being overwhelmed by the rising tide of "sub humans" of darker hue. Immigrants who come here, where ever it is. They are drowning Europeans, Euro-Americans, exterminating them, wiping out their high culture, stealing their essence, their precious bodily fluids, their arts and sciences, destroying all in a crackling bonfire of ignorance and indifference.

The brune folk are ruining everything!

Well, them and the low-class Native Brits (ie: White Folk) who hang out with the Sub Humans.

It's pure and unapologetic racism, something most Americans have set to the side for quite some time, but it is something that is never actually gone from the scene. It's always there just below the surface, like a pustule waiting for the right moment to burst open.

As it has in Britain, but also all over Europe, given a kind of "permission" you might say, by the bombing and massacre in Norway -- which is an ongoing subject of debate. So many commentators, here and abroad, have found themselves defending Breivik/Berwick, some even suggesting he did what he had to to bring attention to the flood of immigrants (many of them, EEK, Muslim) overwhelming the stolid, peaceful, rational White Folks who just want to be left alone and in peace.

Don'tchaknow.

Not to make light of it, but Catherine Tate as the Aga-Saga Woman made a wrong turn into Tottenham one day, and this is what transpired:

On the KY It-Boy, Nitwit (Now with Update!)

[Tedious little peckerhead (h/t gunnison @ FDL) Rand Paul, MD]

I've commentated about Li'l Paul, who I've dubbed the KY "It-Boy", in several fora, mostly lambasting him for his mind-numbing Propertarian clap-trap and general incoherent babbling, but it's looking more and more (at least for the moment) that he actually might represent a Problem for The Powers That Be.

He's supposed to be a part of the Establishment like his Daddy. Oh, his designated role within that Establishment is to be on the Farthest Right Propertarian Fringe and to get the Cracker Vote all riled up and to appeal to some of the younger elements in the Propertarian/Libertarian firmament.

But he's journeyed off the reservation on the matter of the Civil Rights Act and apparently other things, and though he's apparently been provided with study material and the appropriate talking points -- "Moi? Why I support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its entirety; I can't imagine why you would think otherwise. Ha ha ha ha ha." -- I've got this sense about him that he may try to break free of his handlers, somewhat like Half-Term Sarah did, and go for something else again. Something even more populist... shall we say.

The fear of Rightist populism is completely justified given its blood-soaked history in the 20th Century -- and I'm not just talking about the Nazis.

Rightist populism has a long history in this country, too, not least in the South.

And this nitwit comes along and starts pumping it up again, after several decades of deflation.

"We've come to take the Government back." Not take the country back, you notice. That was Dr. Dean's theme, and some observers would say that Dean and the Deaniacs got pretty much what they wanted -- or at least what they were working for, whether they knew it or not -- with the capture of all three branches of Government by Democrats.

What a disappointment that's been. But that's another topic. One day I'll have to go into some of my experiences working on the Dean campaign, and how some of the same enthusiasm and personnel were transferred to the Obama campaign, as were some of the delusions. But not just yet.

"Take the Government back..." There's a lot of code-talk in the KY It-Boy's campaign designed to appeal to the fine upstanding Southern white boys who have felt their Government was taken from them by all these uppity darkies and wimmen, especially the darkie in the White House, but including dames like Mrs. Pelosi and the Always Arch She-Demon, Hillary.

So they're gonna send Ron Paul's nitwit son to sit in the Senate to git 'er done. Don't laugh. It could happen.

Nitwit though he may be, and with a birdsnest of curls on top of his very swelled head (h/t some commenter at FDL), Rand Paul strikes me as quite possibly the charismatic Rightwing Populist leader Half-term Sarah has been pretending to be on her road show. It's more than obvious that Half-term Sarah is in it for the money -- which she is making hand over fist -- just like Glenn Beck, the other potential RW Populist leader -- until the KY It-Boy came along.

Despite the fact that the Big Republican Leadership is trying to train up Li'l Paul to behave on the stump, it looks like this babbling boy is bucking the grownups and forging his own path. Half-term Sarah was apparently purchasable for hard cash, but I'm not at all sure Rand Paul can be bought. And if he can't be, Katie Bar the Door. He's got an immense ego, and he's already let his primary victory swell his curly haired head up so much he can't even get it through ordinary doors anymore.

If he continues to try to rally the reactionary Crackers -- which he's doing with every teevee appearance -- it's possible the Government will have (another) BIG problem on its hands.

The Arizona Thing was kind of a harbinger, along with the huge amount of public approval Arizona's pissant reactionary behavior is garnering.

We're going down a path we've been down before, and it's one that doesn't end happy.
----------------------
UPDATE:

Here's Rachel asking some questions of America:



But I think she's being somewhat disingenuous. The little Cracker twerp has backflipped and backtracked all over the place for the last 24/36 hours over the "Civil Rights" Thing -- scare quotes intentional -- and in the process has managed to convince a portion of the Big Media that the Controversy is meaningless, a tempest in a teapot, he's just a Normal Guy who wants to be Free, come on, anyway.

And of course plenty of his partisans and flacks, who believe as he does on the larger question of the Sacredness of Property Rights (as opposed to Human Rights), are styling him as Perfectly Normal as well. The "Civil Rights" Thing being long settled. You see.

Rachel touches on it toward the end of her soliloquy, but it is in a very arch and abstract way, laying out "questions" issue-by-issue, just barely relating them to the whole, ie: the Libertarian World View.

But it is really more fundamental than that.

Is it the Right to and in Private Property more important to Americans in the 21st Century than Human Rights?

Should interest in Property trump every other interest at all in the law?

Should the acquisition, holding, and defense of Property be the central focus of American society, law and custom?

Does the Constitution protect and defend Property at the expense of all other rights and interests?

When the questions are asked this way, the inherent dangers of Pauliac Propertarianism to all other rights and interests takes on focus. Its fundamental anti-Constitutionalism, and the impossibility of Constitutional Self-Government under Pauliac Propertarian law is revealed.

So long as the focus remains on the "Civil Rights" Thing, the danger that Propertarianism represents to all mankind is masked. ("Of course I believe in Civil Rights! Heh.") Of course. And if those civil rights -- and the concept of Human Rights -- are trumped by Property Rights... oh well!

-------------------

Furthermore: The process of "opening the discussion" of the Civil Rights Act and the Public Accommodations provisions reminds me a whole lot of the means by which the issue of torture was put in the Public Square when time was, and how, over the course of the "rational discussion" that ensued, and the careful weighing of the pros and cons, the ethical and moral "dilemmas", and all the practical considerations -- along with plenty of field practice -- it was determined that the public was actually split on the issue, and while the Obama White House promptly prohibited "torture" -- which wasn't going on anyway according to the Cheneys -- everyone expects it's still going on. And few care.

Transfer that same process to key civil rights issues, whether focused on accommodation or otherwise. We've already seen what's happened with the Arizona law requiring you to produce your papers. Americans by and large are all in favor. Well, if the civil rights and accommodation issues are "aired thoroughly" -- as they will be as long as people keep yapping about Rand Paul's outrageousness -- we'll find, surprisingly enough, that the Public is "split" on the issue.

And won't that enable justification for ignoring the laws?

Well?

Wright Stuff

I really find the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over The Rev. Jeremiah Wright's religious ranting to be jejune to say the least. Obama's response to the "scrutiny" was measured, responsible, and broad-ranging, and it didn't really get into what the "scrutiny" is all about: A Scary Black Man Hollering Scary Stuff.

Won't somebody think of the children?

Booga booga.

It does seem to have affected Obama's polling, especially in head-to-heads with Grumpy Gramps McCain, and all those who are trying to deny it need to take a step back and come to grips with the reality of White Fear of Black Rage, especially the fear among older whites who lived through a very tumultuous era of what is delicately called Civil Unrest. Riots, in other words. Again and again, all over the country.

This White Fear is easy to re-energize, and the media has been eager to do it. They play the Wright tapes in an endless loop, designed not to provoke dialogue, but to inspire Fear, fear of Black Rage. And it works.

Clinton sits back and lets it happen. After all, those fear-ridden whites are supposedly her base. Meanwhile it comes out that the McCain campaign was responsible for pushing the Wright stuff, and is laughing about how easy it was to do. And it sure lets Grumps get away with some whoppers about Iran and alQ. Win-win, hunh?

Obama has been running a Generational campaign, trying like anything to push the Old Farts off the bus, let them fend for themselves in the wilderness for all he cares, but let them please just shut up and go away. Including Rev Wright. That tack has a tremendous appeal among the young, and there's no reason he shouldn't use it except for the fact that Old Farts vote, in vast numbers, and the aging Boomer cohort is likelier than most to pull the lever.

"Unity" has been Obama's strength, so, in a classic Rovian ploy, the Media-McCain nexus uses it against him by pulling out Wright's ministry and showing the whole wide world what Obama's Spiritual Mentor has been saying, in Church, in front of the Children(!), and wah-lah, Obama's numbers go into a tailspin.

Suddenly, in a head-to-head with McCain, Clinton is surging, and Obama is way behind.

Rev Wright is... scary.

Funny, though. Hagee's anti-Catholic rants, and reverence for Apocalyptic genocide by Jee-suss throughout the evangelical teevee priesthood is considered just fine by the Powers That Be.

Until Americans are ready to take the Power away from them and their devotees and ilk, and cast them into the fiery pit where they long to be, not much Change is gonna happen.