Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/16/george-floyd-bodycams-show-gun.html
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How did the police culture in Minneapolis get this rotten?
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The cops are begging to be arrested.
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They just don’t care because they know they won’t be held accountable for their actions. Lawless thugs, all they are.
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I know the word “thug” is often used as racist code by conservatives, but I still plan on using it to describe violent bullies like these cops.
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I blame my brain for reading that as “violent Blueies” and thought that describes the current police state
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Every Fucking Day
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We definitely have to replace our mental idea of “bad cop”. No more “person in a dangerous job who made a tragic mistake”, these are dangerous people who wanted to kill someone just to watch the person die. The reason they are cops is because they know the system is broken, that cops aren’t screened for being murderous during hiring, that cops aren’t held accountable.
I ironically think of all that “super predator” talk that used to justify racist policing. “Super predator” is a stupid term, but there really are human beings who completely lack empathy and who take glee in causing pain and destruction. And those people find a job in law enforcement very appealing.
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White supremacy. Same as everywhere else in America.
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Because it’s a part of American police culture. I don’t think the Minneapolis department is any worse than any other metro area in any other region (which, to be crystal clear, is a condemnation of police culture across our nation, not a defense of Minneapolis)
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Funny how people always use the “bad apple” defense in these situations, when the whole point of the “bad apple” metaphor is that allowing bad apples to exist spoils all the apples
To @anon50609448’s point, the refusal to do anything at all to stem police violence incentivizes the absolute worst people to apply. However, I do think this likely accounts for a small percentage. The rest are repeatedly told that blind loyalty to the badge is not only honorable, but is a dire necessity to defend them against hordes of violent criminals. Because we fund and encourage them as paramilitary forces acting in fields they have no reasonable purview over (mental health, in-school policing, etc.) and bringing violence into a nonviolent situation, the notion that they are fighting a battle against a perpetual enemy is reinforced and they become immune to their own empathy or reason. Just like apples sitting in a barrel thinking that the barrel will protect them when the rot is coming from inside.
This is why police reform must be predicated on defunding and restructuring. Abolish them to heal them.
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By design. The 13th by Ava Duvernay does an incredible and swift job of connecting the dots from slave roundup vigilantes to modern policing. It’s the shortest route to understand how the 13th amendment was intended, in part, to perpetuate slavery in an altered form and how the police hold a special role as traffickers in human bondage. By design.
ETA: Not sure how this link will work:
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Works fine for me: Netflix customer, USA, Apple desktop, Firefox.
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Can we see some charges for the slow-rolling medics too? I worked as a medic/firefighter for a while after undergrad and I promise there’s a need for a reckoning in the world of non-law enforcement first responders as well.
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I swear they teach cops how to antagonize people. Every time I’ve ever spoken to a cop they act as if every single thing I say (no matter how rationale it is) is the most ridiculous thing they’ve ever heard. I once had a border cop on the way back into Canada pull my ear plugs off a table and hold them up in my face and say “what are these for?” as if he’d never seen them before in his life. It’s clear their intention is to piss you off. Fuck them.
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But I’ve been told that Floyd was a drugged-up thug who was resisting arrest, and therefore got what he deserved?
/s
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I was recently introduced to Achille Mbembe’s extension of Foucault’s idea of biopower, necropolitics. If find its description appropriate for our current moment. I am not claiming to really understand this idea; I haven’t even read the book yet, but I plan to read it soon. But it seems to me a useful expansion of the biopower idea (which I also find persuasive/illustrative/helpful). Here’s an excerpt from the linked article:
Along with mass killings and exterminations, Mbembe argues that necropolitics implies a surveillance on individuals not so much for the purposes of discipline, but to extract from them a maximum of utility, such as in the case of sexual slavery. The instillation of those “ small doses ” of death in the daily existences of many individuals also comes from “unbounded social, economic, and symbolic violence” that destroy their bodies and the value of their social existence. Daily humiliations perpetrated by public forces on certain populations, the strategy of “small massacres” inflicted one day at a time, and the absence of basic social goods (e.g. sanitation, housing) bring about a kind of existence whose value “is the sort of death able to be inflicted upon it”
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Dead empty eyes…
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“Imagine one gang, consisting of the Bloods, Crips and Latin Kings, that’s when you start to realize what the police is: government funded gang-bangin thugs…”
– William Braunstein
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Is that an analysis of the picture, or a wish?
(I’m with you either way).
