I may have posted this in here already but this point was echoed by our chief of police who refused to deploy the bearcat when rioting literally broke out at the pumpkin festival because he felt it would only serve to escalate the situation and they were focused on deescalation.
At Wednesday’s protests, the police again seemed to be aiming for deescalation. Pairs of police in their normal uniforms standing casually at the corners bordering the protest calmingly charting with each other and with people, Chief of police, local sherrif and female police officer standing with the protestors holding signs saying the were listening, calm intervention to relocate a counterprotestor looking to instigate a fight…
I’m grateful that our local police seem to get it. I’m sad that they seem to be the exception, not the rule.
This is more awfulness though.
This is LA.
Love needs fury to defeat hate.
All week long, I’ve been watching videos of cops beating young people and POC with batons like they are trying to free candy from a stubbornly durable pinata. Not to mention shooting them in the face with rubber bullets. So, kind of a bummer that pushing an old white guy represents the “you’ve gone too far” tipping point. Not that it wasn’t awful, but it says something about what we implicitly expect and allow.
As a member of a cop family and someone who used to do cop-adjacent stuff (jailer), I’ll tell you this. It’s not a few bad apples. The tree is poisoned. It needs to be torn out of the ground. All of it. Branch, trunk, and root. And then salt the earth where it stood. I am not smart enough to have an answer about how to accomplish that, or what form policing should take in this country, but what we have is irrevocably broken.
None
4099
I believe it was noted scholar and modern-day philosopher Tracy Lauren Marrow who said it best back in the day.
You know what you’d do if a kid got killed on the way to school,
Or a cop shot your kid in the backyard.
Shit would hit the fan, muthafucka,
And it would hit real hard.
Yup.
Not all cops are bad. But all cops are complicit. So…
rowe33
4101
Where are those ‘good cops’ I keep hearing about?
CraigM
4102
Bad cops standing up for bad cops.
Fuck the lot of ‘em.
Yep. That’s one way to weed 'em out.
Iceland? Parts of Scandinavia? Canada? (for some reason i associate Mounties with good things. probably TV)
The question is how long will white folks remember this stuff. Right now there’s solidarity, but for how long?
After reading about the shit First Nations people go through in Canada, I’m not so sure about them anymore.
KevinC
4107
Police stations are clearly the Mos Eisleys of America.
KevinC
4109
That’s interesting. I can’t imagine the crew hijacked a helicopter and went joyriding, so what’s up with that?
Yeah, I’m not sure exactly.
I guess one scenario I can imagine is that they were called out to be present, and then the order violation would be the low level they took the helicopter to. That could’ve been the crew freelancing a bit.
