I haven’t really said much on the ongoing race issues involving deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of cops. But, I see it regularly on my feeds, and it’s Christmas, so I feel like making a post. As always, this is more of a “here’s some food for thought” kind of post, something that can be carried out to other, wider discussions if any of it rings true. It’s not heavily thought out or researched by any means.
I said unarmed black people up there because even though most media attention has been on nearly adult age males, the truth is that we have the same problems hitting both sexes, of all ages.
So anyway. In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. got a lot more militaristic. We headed into Iraq, we created the Department of Homeland Security, we instituted all kinds of new security measures and military level procedures. Terrorist attacks used to get heavy press coverage, like the bombing at the Atlanta, Georgia Olympics in 1996 and the 1993 WTC bombing, but those incidents never really got the government or the country to focus on security at the price of freedom.
We also learned that to ensure the idea of security, the government allowed torture, complete with a bit of cronyism, and tried to relabel it all as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Incredibly despicable, brutal behavior was given a free pass in the name of “freedom.”
That sounds irrelevant at first blush, but that background is critical to what I’m about to say next.
In the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the government had certain surplus military goods that they were willing to give to U.S. police. Police departments had to fill out forms, but often they got what they wanted even if it made absolutely no sense and those departments had no real reason for the equipment. In the climate of fear of terrorism I outlined above, these police departments really bulked up on military-style provisions, forming SWAT teams even in little suburbs that don’t really need them. In some cases, SWAT teams are sent out for fairly innocuous drug raids on tenuous counts just so they get use and can justify their continued existence.
I want to now interject a separate thread, here. Voting. For the past several years now, there have been accusations of a risk of voting fraud in American politics. These accusations led to changes in how the right to vote operates that disproportionately hurt the ability of minorities to participate in the electoral process. While this was already building, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was referred to as “not relevant” anymore by the Supreme Court, under the claim that the Southern states have moved past the need for that act.
This is where all these threads converge into one messy tangle of problems.
The same police resources given to police departments by the government for efforts to stop terrorism (which are rare) can also be used in cases of civilian protests and riots. Before Ferguson, perhaps the most notable recent instance of the police breaking up civilian protest was Occupy Wall Street. The police successfully managed to break that group apart, leaving it to slowly diminish into being nothing today.
Now let’s look at Ferguson. These protests didn’t happen out of nowhere. It was a gradual progression as more and more unarmed black men were killed and the people who killed them managed to walk away with just about no consequences. I don’t leave it only at cops because Trayvon Martin wasn’t killed by a cop… though it IS noteworthy that George Zimmerman was the community watch coordinator, which is a similarly security-focused position.
We have a string of deaths of unarmed black men, with court cases that are increasingly dubious in how they were conducted and their results. Lately, they’ve been very, VERY bold in their criminality, as officers that very clearly committed wrongdoing have been allowed to walk free as if they did nothing wrong.
Got all that above? Good, because here’s the final piece of the puzzle: individual racist cops within these police departments now believe they essentially have a free license to kill unarmed black people and get away with it.
They can shoot an unarmed black man, game a system that is prejudiced in favor of cops simply for being cops, and walk out a free man. The media, too, has been cowed into not questioning government agencies very hard because post-9/11, it was stressed that news agencies could hurt efforts against terrorism if they said too much and investigated too deeply. If there’s a protest or a riot, the government has given them and their departments some powerful means to shut those protests and riots down, means they didn’t have before 9/11. Likewise, the process of dealing with these issues through the electoral process has similarly been sabotaged. Regulations to prevent voting fraud leave black people at a disadvantage, and the protections black people had with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been taken away.
That’s all I really have to say on this. I may not say anything else again, but I hope these thoughts and little facts help in some small way.
salarta 