Everybody was talking about the Chinese balloon: It’s spying on us, and if Biden had balls he’d shoot it down. Well, on Saturday, Biden did just that. The Airforce shot it down in the Atlantic off of the Carolina coast. Wrongo is sure that our military will recover the important parts of the balloon. Once we take a look at the technology that the Chinese are using, we’ll know why the balloon was sent over the US, and confirm whether it is a device for spying or not.
We need to view the balloon saga in the larger context of our relationship with China. John Dean has a good observation:
“I’m starting to see China as an enemy. I type those words, of course, on my Chinese-made HP laptop. I watched news reports of the balloon on my Chinese-made TV. The chair I’m sitting in may even be Chinese. The only thing I’ve bought recently that isn’t Chinese, I’m sad to say, is the Chinese food I had for dinner last night, but I could be wrong.”
Our current relationship with China is complicated by our dependence on them for much of our manufacturing. They also are a huge export market for US commodities. As China has flexed its muscles, they have become an economic and geopolitical competitor with the US. Our relationship with them will become much more difficult in the coming years as we wrestle to contain them geopolitically in Asia, while blunting their advances in the rest of the world.
Dean points out that our trade with China has provided them with the resources it is using to build its military force. We need to wake up and wean ourselves off of Chinese goods. Otherwise, we’re paying for two militaries, ours, and theirs. On to cartoons.
Late afternoon, Mt. Baker, WA – January 2023 photo by jsmooth
Let’s take on a few key questions raised by the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of the Memphis police. Wrongo’s primary question is: “Is the life of a police officer worth more than the life of any other citizen?”
Police in the US are trained to see every interaction with the citizens that they are sworn to “protect and serve” as a potentially life-threatening situation. Their primary concern is to go home at the end of their shift, healthy and in one piece.
That level of fear encourages aggression. All police have heard stories of other officers shot as they approached a car, So they often are as tense as a solider in a warzone. And in an America that’s drowning in guns, that fear is well-placed.
When there’s a confrontation with a suspect, police culture focuses the cop on making the suspect comply with the cop’s initial order. And police culture tilts toward the use of physical force when compliance isn’t immediate.
Police culture is based in male bonding, and in an “us vs. them” mentality. Police culture brings with it a code of silence to protect even wrongdoers. Finally, police culture is reinforced by local police unions that are led by mostly older white men, who oppose any progressive change.
A second question is: “Where should we assign blame for continued police violence?” Sherrilyn Ifill’s newsletter has useful context. She asks if the failure of white people to effectively confront and contain the violence by white cops against Black people should be considered as a failure of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, as some pundits suggested this week.
The BLM movement helped white Americans understand what systemic racism meant. It showed America how it impacted people’s lives through violence by police throughout the US. But to ask a Black political movement to change police culture which tilts conservative, White and military, places the burden on the wrong political organization. The correct place for managing this change is local city governments and their citizens. They need to take on the task of creating true civilian control over their local police forces.
The fact that the five officers charged in Nichols’s murder are Black complicates discussion of the role of race in policing. We’re used to cases involving White officers and Black victims. But this case makes it clear that there’s a larger issue at work: an entrenched police culture of aggression and dehumanization of Black people. It is as much the system and its tactics that fosters violence, as it is the racial identity of the officers involved in the brutality.
The NYT quotes Professor Jody Armour, a University of Southern California law professor:
“It’s not just a Black and white issue, but a Black and blue one. And when you put on that blue uniform, it often becomes the primary identity that drowns out any other identities that might compete with it.”
After the George Floyd killing by cops in 2020, Americans realized that police violence was a national and possibly an intractable problem. Various US states approved nearly 300 police reform bills after Floyd’s murder, creating civilian oversight of police, more anti-bias training, stricter use-of-force limits, and alternatives to arrests in cases involving people with mental illnesses, according to a recent analysis by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.
But as the NYT’s Charles Blow says, America caught Covid and then simply walked away before the work was done:
“Too many liberal politicians showed us that their commitment to legislation, and even language, to protect Black lives from police violence was polling dependent….They ran scared of being labeled woke or of supporting a “defund the police” ideology.”
More:
“Police unions also learned a lesson: that they could survive the most intense and coordinated denunciation of their practices they had ever faced and still dodge federal legislation to address the violence that happens on their watch.”
We like to say, “this isn’t who we are.” The evidence, though, is that this is exactly who we are.
Time to wake up America! Let’s ask why police lives should be worth more to our community than the lives of those they are sworn to protect.
To help you wake up, listen to the late Tom Verlaine of the band Television who died last week. Television’s first two albums, “Marquee Moon”, and “Adventure” were critical successes but didn’t sell. “Marquee Moon” is considered one of the defining releases of the punk era.
Wrongo and Ms. Right lived in a loft in lower Manhattan in the very late 1970s – early 1980s. Wrongo occasionally went to CBGBs, then the mecca of punk rock. Once, we had the Dead Boys entertain at a party at our lakeside weekend place. It’s tough to think that the icons of early punk music are now in their 70s.
There aren’t many videos of Television performing live. But here they are doing “Foxhole” from their album “Adventure”, at the UK’s Old Grey Whistle Test in 1978:
The band included Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, and Fred Smith on guitar, with Billy Ficca on drums.
Sample Lyrics:
You show me the war but the war’s such a bore.
In the line of duty, in the line of fire
A heartless heart is my proper attire.
Water Lilies, Balboa Park, San Diego CA – April 2022 photo by Sharyl Edmiston Mitchell. Like Monet but in focus.
Three items for your review this Saturday. First, the watchdog group American Oversight published emails that revealed Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, asked Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to join a weekly coalition meeting of conservatives with ties to a group she founded called Groundswell.
She suggested that DeSantis’ office would be familiar with her because her husband had been in contact with the governor “on various things as of late.” That was in February.
DeSantis has two policy items that are likely to go before the Court: Florida’s Congressional redistricting map (drawn under DeSantis’s supervision) and Florida’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks. Could these be among the “various things” that DeSantis and Clarence Thomas discussed?
We may never know because the Supreme Court has no enforceable code of ethics and no mechanism for reporting ex parte communications between justices and politicians or lobbyists. We’re headed backwards in America: Our sadness is that a minority, aided by the Supreme Court will now define what America really is.
Second, A 26-year-old black Grand Rapids, Michigan man was administered the death penalty by a cop for a minor traffic violation after he resisted arrest. Patrick Lyoya was a Congolese refugee who came to the US fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014. Wrongo will not present one or more of the gratuitous violence porn videos of the incident that are all over the internet.
Here’s a chart showing just how many more people are killed by cops in America vs. those killed in other wealthy countries:
Note that cops in other developed countries don’t kill very many people. For a cop to kill somebody in Western Europe or Japan, it is extraordinarily rare. In comparison, three people are killed by cops every day here in the land of the free.
On the other hand, there are 300 million guns out in the wild in the US. That’s surely making police more trigger-happy than cops in the rest of the civilized world. While that’s true, US police work isn’t nearly as dangerous as the police unions want you to believe, since death by Covid was the leading cause of police death for the second year in a row.
The typical take on this will be “You won’t die if you don’t run from the police.” That’s reasonable in the abstract, But should failure to comply with established Best Practices for America’s Docile Citizenry be a death sentence? That’s an authoritarian mindset.
There may be situations where it is legitimate to shoot a fleeing suspect to prevent the actual threat of death or severe bodily injury; but this was not one of those cases. Police now have the mentality that their primary goal is achieving compliance with their orders in every situation, and whatever they need to do to achieve that is ok. They’re wrong, it isn’t ok.
Third, old US Senators have got to retire. We currently have the oldest Senate in US history. From the WaPo:
“Twenty-three members of the Senate are in their 70s; only one is under 40. According to the Congressional Research Service, the average age of senators at the beginning of this year was 64.3 years — the oldest in history.”
“Colleagues worry Dianne Feinstein is now mentally unfit to serve, citing recent interactions.”
The article quotes other Senators on her failing mental acuity. Feinstein’s term runs until January 2025.
With all that’s wrong, it’s time to leave the news of the week behind and focus on centering ourselves so we can try to handle next week’s horrors. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.
Spring has sprung on the fields of Wrong. The forsythia and daffodils are blooming. We’ve mulched all plants and trees; the lawns have been dethatched and seeded. It’s still too early to put out the garden furniture, but our plans to create a pollinator garden are proceeding.
Now grab a comfy chair by a south-facing window and since this weekend is important to three of our great religions, settle back and listen to Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus”. Mozart composed this motet in D major in 1791 during the last year of his life to celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi.
Here it is performed by The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge directed by Daniel Hyde. It is from the BBC’s “Easter from King’s 2022” broadcast on BBC Two today:
(The Wrongologist is taking a few days off. The next column will appear on Wednesday 9/9)
Wrongo has no idea if The Atlantic article with Trump’s remarks insulting our WWII dead is accurate or not. It has been corroborated by other news organizations, including FOX, and the AP. Despite Trump’s denials, no high-level military officer has said it didn’t or couldn’t have happened. OTOH, the event happened two years ago, and for something this explosive to be unmentioned, only to float to the surface 58 days before the presidential election, has a whiff of disinformation about it.
There’s no confusion about Trump’s announcement that the administration is now prohibiting federal agencies from conducting cultural sensitivity training. According to the report, this kind of training is “divisive, anti-American propaganda.” Trump feels that diversity training that focuses on educating participants about white privilege, critical race theory and the racist origins of the US apparently create “division and resentment” among federal employees. From Forbes:
“What is deeply problematic about this new ban is that the US has a habit of avoiding the country’s dark and racist past. Evading the issue will not make it go away…..In June of 2020, America was finally willing to look in the mirror, acknowledge the past and start the long process to make amends in order to move to a point of racial reconciliation and healing….But with the Trump administration’s…announcement, the racial equity that the country has been striving for will be stalled.”
It’s very difficult to see how this step will help Trump win in November. On to cartoons.
“Hands enlarged to show detail”:
What are the chances a Trump October vaccine announcement is legit?
Trump says killing a black man was justified because cops choked:
Trump’s interview with FOX’s Laura Ingraham included comparing cops shooting Jacob Blake to a golfer missing a short putt: “sometimes you choke”. But, Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back, and he was unarmed.
Temple of Luxor –August 2020 photo by Hossam Abbas
If you have not seen the horrifying video of Jacob Blake being shot point-blank in the back by police, while his children were watching, while bystanders were screaming for his life, you’ve certainly heard about it.
Kenosha, WI is now the nation’s new epicenter of unrest. Government buildings were left damaged and businesses were burned out in the city’s downtown. Somehow those seven bullets didn’t kill Blake, but he’s paralyzed from the waist down. We’ve seen so many of these incidents that it seems unbelievable that police continue to shoot people in front of cell phone cameras.
One of the most maddening parts of these incidents is that they remain so commonplace. It’s hard to know what will spark change. Part of police training involves the concept of situational awareness. So you’d think, since George Floyd’s murder, that every cop is aware that each confrontation will be captured on cell phone video. Clearly, you’d be wrong.
Here are some stats: 1,146 people died at the hands of police in 2019 in the US. The UK had 3. Denmark, Switzerland, and Iceland had 0. The US rate of police killings per capita is right below Iran’s and just above Angola and Colombia.
That isn’t something that we should accept. It also doesn’t mean we have to accept riots with people burning cars and damaging buildings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, or anywhere else. But it does mean there has to be both acknowledgement of the problem, and action to fix it.
Both Parties have to deal with this. Let’s start with how the Republicans decided to handle it.
Wrongo didn’t watch the Republican Convention (If you ain’t Indicted, you ain’t invited) on Monday, but he doesn’t believe Jacob Blake was mentioned. The internet-famous St. Louis couple Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who brandished an assault rifle and pistol at Black Lives Matter demonstrators marching by their home went another way, speaking about white grievance.
“When we don’t have basic safety and security in our communities…we’ll never be free to build a brighter future for ourselves, for our children or for our country.”
Actually they do have both safety and police protection in their community. There was no need for them to come out of the house brandishing guns. And the future she is speaking about is only for some white kids. The McCloskey’s seem to be garden variety racists scared to death of Black people.
However, Black people do not have safety and security in their communities because the police do not protect them. Police are very likely to violate Black people’s constitutional rights, verbally attack them, injure, or kill them whenever there is an encounter.
The McCloskey’s were saying to Trump supporters: Those young Black thugs are coming to take what you have, to kill you and your family too, and only Trump can fix it:
“Make no mistake: No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”
But Democrats can’t be silent on the rioting and property damage in cities across America. If they remain silent, they will be defined by the Republican racists. After the Blake shooting, Biden called for an immediate investigation, and for officers to be held accountable.
He also said systemic racism is “the urgent task before us.”
So far, so good, but the Dems need to make clear where they stand on street violence that flows from police violence.
Biden must walk a tightrope. The BLM movement has deep and wide support from persons of color as well as from white voters, but, between the lockdown and the riots, the sense of insecurity on the part of small business owners has never been higher. People who live in cities are also insecure when rioting occurs in their part of town. Large-scale destruction pushes away some of the people who are inclined to listen.
Some are already asking why Biden hasn’t yet denounced the street violence. And Pew Research has found violent crime is increasing in importance as an issue for voters in 2020:
“59% say violent crime will be very important to their 2020 decision…”
For context, it’s nearly as important to Americans as the coronavirus, which ranks fourth with 63%. Not surprisingly the Parties feel differently. Here are the details. Trump supporters in red, Biden’s in blue:
The widest gaps between Trump and Biden supporters are on climate change (57 points) and racial and ethnic inequality (52 points).
Great Falls, VA – photo by Zev Steinhardt Photography. These falls on the Potomac River are about 15 miles west of DC.
A few distressing stories about police and their relationship to our society came up in the past few days. First, the NYTreported on a claim that anti-police employees at a NYC Shake Shack restaurant had “intentionally poisoned” three officers who ordered milkshakes.
The story was initially broken by the Detectives’ Endowment Association in New York, who claimed on Twitter that the officers had been targets of an attack:
“Tonight, three of our fellow officers were intentionally poisoned by one or more workers at the Shake Shack…”
The NY Police Benevolent Association (PBA) chimed in, insisting that the attack was part of a larger, nefarious anti-police crusade:
“When NYC police officers cannot even take a meal without coming under attack, it is clear that [the] environment in which we work has deteriorated to a critical level. We cannot afford to let our guard down for even a moment.”
Numerous media outlets then reported that NYC officers had been poisoned on purpose.
But, the story was misleading. NYPD found that no crime had been committed. The problem may have been that the milkshake machine wasn’t properly cleaned. Eric Boehlert:
“The false story played right into a right-wing fantasy portrayal of police critics and the Black Lives Matter mindset — the idea that activists are plotting ways to poison and kill members of law enforcement….the mainstream media is too quick to buy into the false portrait and to embrace bogus stories that support that characterization.”
So much paranoia. Who knew police are such snowflakes?
The WaPo reported that Vince Champion, the southeast regional director of the International Brother of Police Officers said:
“This is not an organized thing, it’s not a blue flu, it’s not a strike, it’s nothing like that…What it actually is, is officers protesting that they’ve had enough and they don’t want to deal with it any longer.”
The “blue flu” is a de facto police strike in which a large group of officers simultaneously call in sick. Essential state employees, like police and first responders, are legally forbidden from actually walking out on the job in many jurisdictions.
These police are protesting about no longer being automatically above the law in Atlanta. This is a form of extortion by some police who fail to perform their duty; it is another form of abuse that is being shown by elements of the police in our nation. Trump gave them air support on Fox News:
“I hope he [the former officer] gets a fair shake because police have not been treated fairly in our country…”
Once again, the myth that police are the real victims persists. The road to reform will be long and torturous. We will not succeed in reforming the police by calling it “defunding”, or “reimagining” them. We have to start by taking away their military style weapons and by holding them accountable for their actions.
In other words, we have to defang the police.
Law enforcement has simply been allowed by towns and cities to rot. The problem has lasted because people of color are the police’s primary targets. White people aren’t harassed by the police anywhere near as much as people of color. So if something doesn’t affect you, you tend to ignore the problem, or do nothing to eliminate it.
Cops and their supporters keep going on and on about the supposed “good apples”. Yet those supposed good cops seemingly keep protecting the “bad apples”. How is it possible for them to be “good cops” when they keep protecting the bad guys.
We have to start by DEFANGING the police, but it won’t be easy.
Let’s remember that the last person to successfully break up the police was Sting.
Bright Angel Trail, in the middle foreground, Grand Canyon NP – photo by glowrocks
The chickens are coming home to roost. Michael Flor was originally the longest-hospitalized COVID-19 patient. Somehow, he survived. He came close enough to death that a night-shift nurse held a phone to his ear while his wife and kids said their final goodbyes.
Today, he’s recovering at home in West Seattle, WA. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he just got the bill. From the Seattle Times:
“The total tab for his bout with the coronavirus:…$1,122,501.04, to be exact. All in one bill that’s more like a book because it runs to 181 pages.”
More from the Seattle Times:
“…the charge for his room in the intensive care unit was billed at $9,736 per day. Due to the contagious nature of the virus, the room was sealed and could only be entered by medical workers wearing plastic suits and headgear. For 42 days he was in this isolation chamber, for a total charged cost of $408,912.
He also was on a mechanical ventilator for 29 days, with the use of the machine billed at $2,835 per day, for a total of $82,215. About a quarter of the bill is drug costs.”
Those charges don’t include the two weeks of recuperating he did in a rehabilitation facility.
Since Flor has Medicare, it is unclear how much he will actually have to pay out of pocket. Further, since Congress set aside more than $100 billion to help hospitals and insurance companies defray the costs of the pandemic, it’s possible that Mr. Flor may not have to pay even the out-of-pocket charges normally billed by his Medicare Advantage policy, but that remains to be seen.
The insurance industry has estimated treatment costs of COVID-19 could top $500 billion, so unless Congress steps up with more money, co-pays for COVID will soon become injurious.
One outcome of the pandemic may be that America takes a closer look at universal health insurance. There are many detractors in Congress, but the sticker shock that so many families will see from COVID-19 cases may restart the discussion. Medicare for all could work: A single payer with a set system of prices would be good for employers and employees alike.
It will be hard. Universal health insurance is such a tough problem to solve that only 31 out of 32 developed nations have managed to do it.
A second issue for today is the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta over the weekend. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
“Officers were called to the restaurant after receiving a complaint about a man asleep in his vehicle, which forced other customers to go around his car to get their food at the window. The man, Atlanta resident Rayshard Brooks, was given a field sobriety test, which he reportedly failed…”
Brooks grabbed a cop’s Taser. More:
“…surveillance footage from the Wendy’s appeared to show Brooks turn toward the police and attempt to fire the Taser as he ran away. That’s when the officer chasing Brooks pulled out his gun and shot him…”
Tasers are a form of de-escalation instead of using firearms. The Taser momentarily incapacitates, but ultimately doesn’t threaten life. So shouldn’t it follow that if a suspect steals a cop’s Taser and threatens to use it, the cop can’t just shoot him dead since he’s being threatened by an ultimately harmless weapon?
The cops had his car, it’s likely they knew where he lived. They could have picked him up at any time. Instead, they killed him. The police tried to do something, the suspect resisted, and in the heat of the moment, the cop escalated to show that he’s in charge. It was a terrible reason to kill someone.
Time to wake up America! We have both out-of-control policing and out-of-control capitalism harming our society. To help you wake up, listen to Sly and the Family Stone’s 1969 song, “Everyday People”. This is Playing for Change again, along with Turnaround Arts students. Trust Wrongo and watch:
Sample Lyric:
Sometimes I’m right and I can be wrong
My own beliefs are in my song
The butcher, the banker, the drummer and then
Makes no difference what group I’m in
I am everyday people, yeah, yeah
And different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo-bee
Ooh, sha sha
We got to live together
I am no better and neither are you
We are the same whatever we do
Of course there was racism back in 1968, but the musicians were preaching integration. Despite the racism back then, people were optimistic. Compare that to today.
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Looking Glass Rock, from Blue Ridge Parkway, NC – 2020 photo by 2paymentsof19_95
On Sunday afternoon, a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s police department (MPD), which has endured harsh criticism in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.
This step is considered part of the movement that is wrongly called “Defund the Police”. What Minneapolis is doing is reorganizing, re-imagining and redirecting their police. Calling this movement “defunding” is a misnomer that some in BLM, and others on the left have advocated, while the right has jumped on it to discredit Biden along with all Democrats.
Groups advocating defunding have put forward a variety of ideas. Some simply oppose police budget increases, others advocate mass personnel reductions, and some are fighting for actual defunding as a step toward abolishing police forces. Some initiatives are linked to the fight to close prisons. All are pushing for a reinvestment of any dollars saved into community services. Only the first two are mainstream ideas.
A reasonable question is what would the defunding advocates want on their streets instead of police?
Polling this month from Data for Progress indicates that 68% of voters answered that they would support: “Creating a new agency of first-responders, like emergency medical services or firefighters, to deal with issues related to addiction or mental illness that need to be remedied but do not need police.”
According to a study from the Treatment Advocacy Center, a person with an untreated mental health issue is 16 times more likely to be killed by police than other members of the community. Even though many US police departments’ duties include responding to non-violent, non-emergency calls, departments keep expanding their military-style arsenal.
The question by Data for Progress had broad support, including 62% of Republicans, and higher percentages of Democrats, whites and blacks. Versions of this concept are already in place in Eugene, Oregon; Austin, Texas; and Denver, Colorado.
It is also reasonable to ask, “Can’t we just fix what’s wrong”? The answer is yes, but efforts to do this have been underway for decades. If police and city officials in most cities had been serious about reform and policy change, we wouldn’t be hearing dumb ideas like “Defund the Police”, and people would not be this angry.
Newsweek reports that Camden, NJ had success in 2013 when it disbanded its 141-year-old police force. In its place, the surrounding county formed a new police department. This move had the result of busting the local police union. But the Camden County Police Department rehired most of the laid-off cops, along with 100 new officers, at much lower salaries and with fewer benefits than they had received from the city. From Bloomberg:
“The focus was on rebuilding trust between the city’s residents and officers. The remaking of Camden’s police department appears to have led to crime rates falling in the city. Camden recorded 67 homicides in 2012, while last year, there were 25.”
For Camden’s Black Lives Matter protest on May 30, officers left the riot gear at home, and brought an ice cream truck. The police department’s chief, Joseph Wysocki, who is white, brandished a “Standing in Solidarity” poster alongside residents holding “Black Lives Matter” signs.
And yes, the Camden police department is again unionized.
Disbanding police departments isn’t going to happen everywhere, but “reorganizing” local police departments is a necessity in most places, especially when the municipality’s police union management is not interested in reform.
The argument shouldn’t be to defund them, but to take away their military toys, and hold them to higher performance standards. With the right to exercise lethal force should come closer scrutiny for their behavior.
“Defund the Police” should mean: See what is happening in your town with clear eyes. See the original sin of placing property rights over human rights. See the original sin of racism in America and how it impacts the community.
Policing in America is deeply broken. Few departments are controlled effectively by their elected officials. America needs stronger mayors, town councils and district attorneys who can be for “law and order”, and also for protecting the rights of the people who are confronted by day-to-day policing. We will only have stronger public servants by voting them in.
It’s going to be a long struggle to rebuild our police departments into something that creates a peaceful community while valuing Constitutional rights.
When we see each other as enemies, we are the Middle East, and we can no longer work together for the common good. Consider what happened last week at a Minnesota WNBA basketball game:
Four off-duty Minneapolis police officers working the Minnesota Lynx game at Target Center on Saturday night walked off the job after the players held a news conference denouncing racial profiling, then wore Black Lives Matter pregame warm-up jerseys.
Lt. Bob Kroll, president of the Minneapolis Police Federation, the union that represents rank-and-file officers, praised the officers walk out:
I commend them for it… If [the WNBA players] are going to keep their stance, all officers may refuse to work there.
What is lost in the police union grandstanding was that the Lynx jerseys in question read “Change starts with us, justice and accountability” and on the back had Philando Castile’s and Alton Sterling’s names along with “Black Lives Matter” and the Dallas Police Department shield. How is that seen as anti-cop? This highlights how thin-skinned police forces around the US are whenever criticism emerges about bad policing.
But what can be done?
The most recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics quadrennial “Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2008” shows that there are 17,985 state and local law enforcement agencies with at least one full-time officer or the part-time equivalent in the US. All of them are managed by local, county or state governments, and the majority of police are members of a local union. Wrongo is not anti-union, but the social identity of being in law enforcement cultivates a code of unduly protecting members, hiding evidence, and blindly supporting the position of other officers simply because of their collective identity. The “Blue Wall of Silence” around cops is the excuse to cover up bad behavior in the face of investigation.
A black life is a life under the threat of social death, a social life constituted by precarity and the potential of imminent death…Blue lives have no analogous history, no precarious location from which their collective lives need recovery…Blue lives are not…living under conditions similar to black life. It is the history of black lives not mattering that gives meaning to the hashtag. Blue lives have no such analogous history.
Russell goes on to say:
Blue lives have always mattered, present and past. Their experience of social space is (for the most part) one of…deferential treatment… It is profoundly misrepresentative and disrespectful to develop an analogous hashtag, as if blue lives have an analogous experience of social life in America as black lives have. This hashtag is wrong in so much as it connotes that the lives of law enforcement officers have failed to matter sufficiently in the broader public consciousness.
For the umbrage-takers out there, relax. Wrongo isn’t saying that cops don’t deserve respect, they do. He thinks that cops have a tough job, and that we must mourn any cop killed on the job. But, we can’t be blind to the power of this confrontation between #Blue and #Black to tear us apart.
Here is ginandtacos: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
I keep holding out hope that we will learn something from this, that police can say to themselves “All those Dallas officers wanted was to do their job and go home alive at the end of the day” and have some moment of inspired transference wherein they realize that every black person they pull over in a traffic stop wants the same...
More from ginandtacos:
If most cops are good cops as we are repeatedly told – and statistically that’s true, as most departments have a few officers who account for the majority of complaints – then it is time for the Good Cops to stop participating silently in a broken system. It’s time for Good Cops to do something about Bad Cops.
Is this realistic, given the Blue Wall of Silence and the power of the police unions, who go ballistic at the merest hint of criticism? Politicians who criticize their PDs are seen as “weak on crime.” However, when police unions are part of any decision to fire a cop, what is the alternative? Two additional considerations:
An armed society makes for nervous and trigger-happy law enforcement officers.
Police have an expectation of immediate and absolute compliance with every command. Anything less is deemed justification for using force.
Fixing all of this will take action on multiple fronts. We have to soften the Blue Code. We need to see fewer guns on the street. We need to reform police protocols.
The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Friday that the additional scrutiny and criticism of police officers in the wake of highly publicized episodes of police brutality may have led to an increase in violent crime in some cities as officers have become less aggressive.
Comey is lending his support to a meme called the “Ferguson Effect”. As the “Ferguson Effect” theory goes, police have slowed down enforcement due to public scrutiny, which has led to more crime, including homicides. In the absence of tough policing, chaos reigns.
Ever since Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, MO last year, people across the country have taken to the streets to protest police brutality and the mistreatment of black men and women. At the same time, police officers and pundits began arguing that demonstrators are jeopardizing community safety, pointing to rising violent crime rates.
This theory for the uptick in violence in some cities is partly based on a cherry-picking of violent crime data, since some increases actually occurred BEFORE the Ferguson demonstrations, and in general, the data are unclear. We know that far more people are being killed in America’s cities this year than in many years. And to be clear, the increases are largely among people of color, and it’s not cops that are doing the killing.
Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase. These are cities with little in common except being in America—places like Chicago, Tampa, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Orlando, Cleveland, and Dallas.
So something big is happening, but what? Comey thinks he knows, and in Chicago, he floated the same idea as Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently floated, that cops are not doing their job because people have started taking videos of police interactions with their smart phones.
Here is snippet of what Comey said:
I spoke to officers privately in one big city precinct who described being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high, taunting them the moment they get out of their cars. They told me, ‘we feel like we’re under siege and we don’t feel much like getting out of our cars.’…I’ve been told about a senior police leader who urged his force to remember that their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video.
If Comey’s impression both of the Ferguson Effect, and the role of cameras is correct, cops have stopped doing the job we pay them to do because they’re under amateur surveillance.
If Comey’s right, what he’s describing is the chilling effect of surveillance, the way in which people change their behavior because they know they will be seen on camera. That the Director of the FBI is making this claim is more striking, since the surveillance cops are undergoing is targeted, and by the public. It is not the total government surveillance (such as the use of small planes and stingrays to surveil the Baltimore and Ferguson protests), which both the FBI and NSA use in inner cities.
Comey can’t have it both ways. Since he said in Chicago that surveillance has a “chilling effect”, that it makes cops feel under siege, maybe he should consider the implications of what he is saying about surveillance by his own agency and the NSA of all Americans.
If the targeted surveillance of cops is a problem, isn’t the far less targeted surveillance conducted on Americans a much larger problem?
And why can’t Americans hold two diametrically opposed ideas in their minds at the same time? We love the police, and want them safe. But, the real problems in US law enforcement have to be addressed.
And why does Comey imply that we need to accept a trade-off between a brutal police state and weakened policing? Why can’t we have civilized police who focus on getting the real bad guys, instead of choking a man to death for selling loose cigarettes?
So, wake up Mr. Comey! Show us data that support your feelings, or get in line with the data we have. To help you wake up, here is Humble Pie doing “30 days in the Hole”, from their 1972 album, “Smokin’”. The song was featured in “Grand Theft Auto V”:
For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.
