For the Record: Can Black Cops Be Racist?

Photo by Tyre Nichols.

 

The big reaction on the right to the murder of Tyre Nichols by the five Memphis police officers who beat him to death on the suspicion that he might have been "driving recklessly" has been to deny that racism had anything to do with it, because the cops in question were Black, like their victim.

"pure evil" isn't a concept you can use in social science--not really a concept at all, more a cry of helplessness

— Beep Beep Yer Yas (@Yastreblyansky) January 29, 2023

We heard the same thing after Freddie Gray was caught avoiding police and having a (legal) knife in his shirt pocket, and rattled to death—a ride so rough it severed his spine—in the police van taking him to the station in 2015, and three of the six cops involved, including the driver, were African American. But I think it's a good deal more anxious and urgent now, maybe because we're in the age of George Floyd and they're feeling more threatened than before. 

Made Men

 

Via Heavy.

I am going to be discussing how sorry I feel for Kyle Rittenhouse in a minute—not as sorry as I feel for the guys he murdered and their families and friends, and not so sorry as to doubt whether he deserves to be found guilty, and (of course) not as sorry as he feels for himsself, but something, a liberal twinge—but I need to work myself into it. 

From a headline, now gone, in The New York Times continuing updates page on the Rittenhouse trial:

Kyle Rittenhouse, who styled himself a medic, said he is now studying nursing.

As the report clarifies, he was lying both times. When he and his friend Dominick joined the crowd on the night of the shootings and he told people he was making it up. He doesn't even have a high school diploma—he dropped out of school three years ago, and I can't find any suggestion online that he earned a GED (he was taking online GED courses in June). Not that being a high school dropout makes you a bad person! But habitual lying does make you a liar. 

By the same token he is not studying nursing at Arizona State University, as he testified under oath:

There's still work to do

 

Sheriff's deputy Jason Meade, left, and the late Casey Goodson, right, via Atlanta Black Star.

Sometime last night, following up in The Times on the story of the 16-year-old in a Columbus foster home who was shot dead by police just a few minutes, as it happened, before the announcement of the verdict in the murder of George Floyd—Ma'khia Bryant, who was apparently having a conflict with a couple of other girls in the home and had threatened them with a knife, which would be a bad thing, though not a capital crime to be punished without trial, right on the spot—I noticed, down toward the end of the story:

Columbus has been gripped by tension over police shootings since early December, when Casey Goodson Jr., 23, was shot to death at the entrance of his home by a Franklin County sheriff’s deputy assigned to a fugitive task force.

Refund the police? Prefund the police? Confound the police!

Jean Cocteau, "Le Barman du Boeuf sur le Toit" (Bartender of "The Ox on the Roof" aka the Nothing Doing Bar), from Cocteau's scenario for a ballet to the score by Darius Milhaud, via Musica Brasiliensis. In the course of the scenario, if memory serves, there is a police raid, and the bar swiftly turns into a bucolic, innocent "milk bar" (section in slow waltz tempo with massed polychords around 7:00 to 9:20) and the baffled police leave them alone, after which the samba music starts up again.

Here's the thing. People want police. They do not want police who commit crimes. They do not want police who are on the take. In particular, they do not want police who kill children, or anybody. White people don't really want police to kill black people, though they often don't mind as much as they should. They want police who are good, and protect them from crimes. Black people want police to protect them from crimes too—that was a major impetus behind that famous crime bill back in 1994, that the African American community in cities wanted more police than their local governments were willing to pay for. 

Stingy local governments run by white people were shorting Black neighborhoods of policing, out of what was sometimes known in those days as "benign neglect", or maybe not so benign. They just didn't want to spend the money, and some people thought the federal government ought to pitch in. That was the reason a crime bill existed.

As it turned out, the crime bill did indeed provide enormous federal funding—for 100,000 cops. But it did nothing to ensure that the new cops in the inner city neighborhoods had any understanding of the neighborhoods they were going to be working in, and led to a lot of cops acting like occupying forces of a foreign invasion, some corruption, and quite a bit of violence. That was not a good thing. (The other aspect, the Republican part of the bill as it were, the new rules on criminal sentencing, the absurd differentiation between smoked cocaine and snorted cocaine as different kinds of "crimes" and the "three strikes" rules inviting states to adopt them, were a different kind of problem, though by no means a less serious one.)

For the Record: Punk Abolitionism

Archival image from AnOther magazine, with an article claiming the safety pin was coming back (in 2017—I don't remember noticing at all, but that doesn't mean much).

The zombie argument over the slogan "Defund the Police" continues, for reasons I can't comprehend; to me this kind of "leftism" is like Punk politics. I saw the point of Punk music back in the day, though not to the extent of wanting to follow it intensely, but I thought the early fashion was just silly and self-defeating. Shouting "defund the police" to me is the equivalent of putting a safety pin in your nose—if you insist it's attractive you might be making some valid aesthetic point, but it's not the thing that's going to sell a lot of records.

Some bright spark who identifies as a "foxy leftist" and advocates "Abolish the Police" thought he'd come up with an unanswerable analogy out of history and I wanted to lay down the answer here for posterity:

Is that why 1860 Republicans denied vociferously that they would abolish slavery? Or was it just because the abolitionists WANTED TO WIN THE ELECTION and figured the non-abolitionists would come along afterwards (as they in fact did)? https://t.co/c4AkVDOTzm

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 4, 2020

The "conservative rightwingers" didn't give a fuck about the slogan--they weren't going to vote for that Republican party no matter what. And the states they ran seceded, launching the Civil War, when the Republicans won.

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 4, 2020

But the cautious liberals like Abraham Lincoln said "take it easy on that abolition." And that's how they won the election. Then three years later Lincoln signed the Emancipation Prolamation. No records say if he called it a "big fucking deal," but it's not impossible.

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 4, 2020

(I see I misspelled "proclamation". Damn Twitter and its refusal to let you edit anything.)

God love the radicals, including the more or less elderly ones anxious to look woke like Seward, who was certainly no fool and would end up as one of our best secretaries of state, but they needed a crafty politician like Lincoln to get them hired for the job. 

Also I offered some slogans I thought would be satisfyingly radical without putting voters off so much. Nobody's objected to any of them so far.

SOCIALIZE THE POLICE

NO RACIST POLICE

POLICE FOR THE PEOPLE

WHOSE COPS? OUR COPS!

MAKE US SAFE DON'T MAKE US DEAD

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 3, 2020

For the Record: With Cheap Shots

To be clear the ICE rule has existed for a while, and it had a legit purpose, to stop exploitation of foreign students by fraudulent online diploma mills like University of Phoenix (though why administered by ICE and deporting students instead of DOE to regulate schools?) https://t.co/JOcKWq9ihO

— 🔻Cookin With Yas🔻 (@Yastreblyansky) July 8, 2020

But it clearly should have been suspended for this year's emergency when schools are being punished for doing whatever they can to ensure student safety. Goes along with Trump trying to discourage masking, and it's evil.

— 🔻Cookin With Yas🔻 (@Yastreblyansky) July 8, 2020

Not to mention the administration's ongoing effort (not likely to succeed, because he doesn't have the power under our "federal" system which seems like a good thing for a change) to force public schools to open ahead of time, which just seems ridiculously dangerous, for teachers and other staff, for kids (and the horrible danger of the Kawasaki-like syndrome that has afflicted some when "normal" Covid-19 left them apparently unscathed) and the parents and grandparents to whom they could bring the disease home. I have my own theory of what his "plan" is—

Foundering

Via.

Getting pretty crazy, huh? In the middle of a deadly pandemic, this whole other issue of police brutality, and US Army helicopters bearing the Red Cross insignia bearing down on protests in Lafayette Square under, apparently, orders from the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces who is as you know our head of state and head of government, a biggish failure in the fabled separation of powers in our constitutional setup, or the "highest levels of the Washington D.C. Army National Guard" (WaPo), or maybe the attorney general. Seriously, the attorney general? 

Mr. Barr was concerned about demonstrations near the White House over the weekend that had resulted in a small basement fire at St. John’s and graffiti on the Treasury Department headquarters, so he resolved to push the security perimeter farther from the mansion.

And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in military fatigues and the secretary of defense walking with the president and his all-white goon squad over to St. John's Episcopal (where the pastoral staff and colleagues from other churches, far from terrorized by the nearby graffiti and the small fire, had been passing out water bottles and snacks to the protesters while Black Lives Matter workers filled squeeze bottles with the mix of dish soap and water you can use as an eyewash in a tear gas attack) to, um, film him looking with puzzlement at a Bible and waving it in the air and dandling it up and down like a colicky baby.

Hi, it's Stupid

A happier Dallas protest moment, September 24 2015, from NBC-DFW.

Back in the day when Left Blogistan was just a couple of mud huts and a stray cow, and I was a dumbstruck lurker, there used to be a poster at Kos (I think, even that detail is getting vague) calling himself Stupid, who would always begin, "Hi, it's Stupid to say..." and go on to say something so naive and helpless that none of the smart and savvy news junkies was smart enough to think of it. As in—

Hi, it's Stupid to say there's something left to be learned from the horrible events in Baton Rouge and St. Paul and Dallas over the past week. We know it all already, don't we? And yet nothing changes.

Except it does, you know. What I've been learning, listening to the radio all morning (including a wise Mayor Bill de Blasio on his weekly call-in on WNYC):

Oh no de Cologne

Photo by Bernd Rosenbaum.Kölnische Rundschau.

Merkel muß raus! Yep, Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is demanding the resignation of the German chancellor:

Angela Merkel must go — so that her country, and the continent it bestrides, can avoid paying too high a price for her high-minded folly.

Does that count as a diplomatic incident?

What it's about, of course, is the awful fracas of Silvesterabend in Cologne and some other German cities:

ON New Year’s Eve, in the shadow of Cologne’s cathedral, crowds of North African and Middle Eastern men accosted women out for the night’s festivities. They surrounded them, groped them, robbed them. Two women were reportedly raped.

Though there were similar incidents from Hamburg to Helsinki, the authorities at first played down the assaults, lest they prove inconvenient for Angela Merkel’s policy of mass asylum for refugees.

Thus the Monsignor aligns himself with what Die Welt memorably calls "ein Shitstorm" of demands for Merkel to step down—

Effluenza

Image via CleveScene.

Why the Tamir Rice killers walk, along with so many others:

Even with indictments, juries will remain reluctant to convict police officers absent evidence of malice, said Eugene O’Donnell, a former officer and prosecutor who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Tremendous incompetence, the worst kind of training, disregard for people is really not enough,” he said. “You’re going to have to go beyond that because the police are different.”

I get some sympathy out of that for prosecutor McGinty in Cleveland, looking at this Times article about the legal barriers that exist in our states to the prosecution of homicidal police. Yes, it's kind of disgusting the way the charade of the grand jury was staged to make it seem as if he was looking toward the possibility of justice, but there wouldn't have been any in the end in any event. If a killer is a cop, "depraved indifference to human life" isn't an adequate reason to put him in jail. "Give this unfortunate young officer a break," says the law, "he's a piece of shit, but is that a reason to punish him? He's suffering from effluenza."

#RiseUpOctober: Bad apples

National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Thursday 10/22, via Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

Some beloved commenters here and at NMMNB have made me feel misunderstood over yesterday's post on FBI director James Comey. Commenter Ten Bears wrote,

I have issues with this notion the cops are "protecting" me. They do not, nor have they ever. Me, or my family. More like an armed gang roaming the countryside terrorising the population.

Ten Bears, that's exactly what "protection" means, in certain circles.

The post wan't well enough written, though, and I'd like to try to make my point more explicit.

I don't actually know whether a majority, vast or otherwise, of US police officers are hardworking professionals and deeply humane and caring individuals or not, and strictly speaking there's no way I can know, because the institutions of police accountability seem to be designed to make sure we can't find out, which might make you a little suspicious.

I do know that a lot of us feel that there's a real problem with it, and I don't think we're hallucinating. Maybe it's a few-bad-apples in a vast-majority-of-brave-and etc., and maybe it's a set of institutional problems that put so many cops on the scale from indifferent (as when our Brooklyn apartment was robbed three times in two years and I couldn't even get them to produce a report to explain to the cable company why my cable box was missing) through venal (from traffic cops issuing tickets to narcotics agents seizing serious property, as if their central task was to shake citizens down), to downright violent, inflicting special torments mainly on African Americans, ranging from constant harassment to murder.

Why does James Comey hate cops?

"A hunky Baltimore police officer has been inundated with marriage proposals after a photo of him cuddling a stray kitten he rescued and then adopted went viral....  The image [of Jon Boyer with friend] received more than 4,000 likes and several hundred comments praising his selfless work -- and handsome looks." (Daily Mail) How many politicians got on his case for this unseemly publicity?

We're accustomed to various privately funded agents of fascism—the heads of police benevolent associations, the radio-talk Ciceros—issuing blackmail threats on behalf of the police, to the effect that if the behavior of cops is subjected to some kind of public scrutiny cops will just refuse to protect us.

And I generally discount it, because I believe the responsible figures who tell me that the vast majority of police officers are serious and dutiful and good people who would never dream of conducting their work like a protection racket, and have no reason to fear seeing it exposed. At least I'd like to believe them, but it's somehow not very easy to find out how true that is.

But I get taken a little aback when the director of the FBI does it, as reported today:

Mr. Comey lent the prestige of the F.B.I., the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, to a theory that is far from settled: that the increased attention on the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals. But he acknowledged that there is so far no data to back up his assertion and that it may be just one of many factors that are contributing to the rise in crime, like cheaper drugs and an increase in criminals who are being released from prison.

#BlackLivesMatter, still

Samuel Dubose, via NBC.

Something that struck me this morning from the NPR coverage of the murder of Sam Dubose, the Cincinnati man who was being busted for a missing front license plate and ended up getting shot to death because a cop felt insufficiently respected, enough that I ended up transcribing it off the audio; an interview with the head of the national Fraternal Order of Police, Jim Pasco, objecting to the murder charge against the cop, toward the end of the segment:

the ground has shifted let's face it prosecutors are sensitive to the mood of the community

it goes to show that to whatever extent people thought that prosecutors were necessarily going to protect police officers couldn't be more wrong in fact in this case it doesn't appear that he is willing to give him the presumption of innocence

#BlackLivesMatter

What I can't get out of my mind from the audio of the Sandra Bland tape (I haven't watched the video, I don't think I need to): it's harrowing, like a miniature play by August Strindberg, in the tranformation of the cop from cool-neutral and bureaucratic to freaked-out monster, while the victim remains the same, irritable and not very accepting, as you can understand. My inner racist is whispering, well, he's being respectful, he's being courteous, and she's not taking it. Though of course why should she? He has no reason to pull her over in the first place, no reason to arrest her, no reason to make demands on what she does in her private space.

It's that his politeness is a fraud from the start, based on his confidence in the power relations, that he's entitled to do with her whatever he wants. He thinks he's being a good person because he's not doing it with an angry voice, or because he's not hitting her. He thinks he's very patient and forebearing, and what freaks him out is that she's not impressed. His need to humiliate her is so great, and just keeps getting greater until it explodes. 

Eat lead, you dirty varmint. No, wait, don't!

Actually an English tourist at a Las Vegas machine gun. Photo by John Locher/AP.

Heard this on the radio from RevealNews, and subsequently saw the story in prose from the Seattle Times, which has been doing a mammoth investigation of the subject:

For over a year, The Seattle Times has been investigating how people shooting at dirty gun ranges across the U.S. have suffered from lead poisoning. Sometimes, they’ve lost feeling in their hands and feet. Other times, they’ve been too tired to get out of bed. Police are especially at risk because they have to go to gun ranges to keep their jobs. We hear from a corrections officer who got sick, and we talk to the family of an officer who died after a weeklong training session. We also look at steps firing ranges can take to prevent lead exposure.

It's the conservatism, stupid

#NotAllBlueWalls. Just saying. Photo by Bonnie Hull.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, writes:

Last December, my colleague David Brooks noted that police unions are resisting change on every issue where police reform might be contemplated, from body cameras for officers to reversing the militarization of local law enforcement.

Running the gamut from paragraph 7 to paragraph 8, as it were. Brooks wasn't "noting" anything. Everybody knows that Police Benevolent Associations and Fraternal Orders of Police are out-of-control, retrogressive monsters. What Brooks was actually doing in that column, of course, was taking advantage of our horror at the New York PBA treatment of Mayor De Blasio at the time of the Eric Garner and Akai Gurley killings to make the case that public sector unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees are out-of-control, retrogressive monsters—by asserting that the police associations were a typical case (which they aren't) of the public sector union in general:

If could be worse. In fact it was.

April 1968. Via Ghosts of Baltimore.

Michel Martin at NPR remembers the riots following the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., personally, from when she was a little girl in New York City: her father was that rare bird, an African American firefighter, so she has a wonderfully round perspective. It made her think to interview some veterans of 1968, a Baltimore cop and a Washington firefighter, both white, to put the current Baltimore disturbance in context.

One thing that stands out is how small-scale this disturbance seems in contrast to those days, when it was whole neighborhoods, not a few individual buildings, that were burning, and went on for much longer; there are areas in Baltimore that still haven't recovered from the property damage of 40-odd years ago, it's one of the urban-rot problems that makes the city such a mess. The current disturbance is awful, but it's nothing like the awfulness of back in the day. I think we really need to recognize this.

Half-formed thoughts and delicate emotions

Via BenSwann.

Oh, Brooksy. For some reason, possibly involving the fact that there is finally, as of last Tuesday, film of a policeman murdering an unarmed black man (Walter Scott of North Charleston, South Carolina, on April 4) so plainly brutally that it can't be dismissed or denied, he's on about cops wearing cameras, which he has decided to support (as does this page). Only the whole column is about what a bad idea it is, which makes it a tad confusing. He was for it before he was against it, but then he was for it again in the last paragraph.

Driftglass is way ahead of us on this one, and Roy Edroso has found it necessary to weigh in, so there's really not much left to say, but a couple of Brooksological points deserve consideration.

One is the problem of privacy in police-civilian interaction:

Truthiness from David Brooks

Montreal cops in 2008 or 2009 protesting against government messing with their pensions by dressing down. They are a real union. You never hear of Montreal cops killing unarmed black men. Coincidence? You decide. Via CyberSmokeBlog.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Union Future", December 19 2014:

I'm not going to lie, police departments are pretty abusive. Kind of like teachers, refusing to fire incompetent officers, refusing accountability in the form of body cams, refusing to apologize. Some socialists accuse them of racism, but even-the-liberal-Conor-Friedersdorf will tell you the real problem is they're unionized.

For Mike Brown and the witnesses

BooMan says he's "tired of trying to figure out what happened" in a case like the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO, and I am too. I've been tired of it since Trayvon Martin was killed, this whole situation where one set of people is obviously lying and another set of people is plainly telling the truth and I'm going to sit there and try to weigh all the evidence, judiciously, and come up with my own independent conclusion, and I'm not going to do it any more.

I mean, not unless I want to and think I can make a contribution nobody else is making.

Because I don't know much, and am not likely ever to learn much, about the forensics of the thing, the bullet entries and exits, the angle at which the person fell, the identification of screams off cell phone audio, all that. But I'm pretty confident I know who's lying, and who's covering up, and fairly confident I can find out who's corrupted.

The cops of Ferguson are lying, and covering up, and motivated by fear, of being exposed as bigoted murderers and bad cops. The community witnesses (including this one who turned up today at Kos) are telling the truth the best and the most precisely they can. That's all the story I need. You go ahead and sift your evidence, and do your diligence, for the court system and the gearheads, and I'll read it as far as I can, but I'm not working at it. I'm on strike against taking those liars seriously. I'm on strike against disbelieving, "just for the sake of argument", those who are true to the complicated and novelistic way I understand the world.

Michael Brown, via 3chicspolitico.