Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

funny i thought we didn’t want the federal gummint telling us what to do

State legislators (and this is a somewhat bipartisan phenomenon, tho more pronounced in the red states) see themselves as the ultimate authority. They see no conflict in saying both that the feds shouldn't tell them what to do and that they should be able to boss around local governments all they want. "It's the United STATES of America," they say.

Yeah, we had a real pissing match in Georgia during the pandemic between Brian Kemp and the then-mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms. Needless to say, this was a red/blue conflict as much as it was a turf war.

Yep, those tensions are always there (see NYC vs. every NY governor), but in the red states where all the big cities are blue, it's much more heightened. We've already had Mississippi state government trying to deploy its own state police in the middle of Jackson, I won't be surprised to see more and more of this shit — sort of a backdoor way to create a state police force, by limiting local control over them.

Oh, our own governor also wants to deploy some of the state Highway Patrol in "high crime" areas in Memphis.

hell, DeSantis as usual is one step ahead in turpitude. He's got his own team, the Florida Guard.

And of course we have Abbott building a National Guard military base in Texas to "protect the border." These guys are very into having their own military. And this is the kind of stuff that really chips away at what I've always thought was one of our best structural protections against having a real police state, because power over law enforcement is so generally decentralized and historically there's actually been a lot of tension between fed-state-local agencies. To the degree that all of that gets "streamlined" under the command of governors and state legislators, it's obviously bad news.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2024/new-orleans-police-child-sexual-abuse-rodney-vicknair/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/14/trial-new-orleans-police-child-abuse/

Why does this seem vaguely familiar?

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/state/2024/04/26/frank-tyson-police-death-canton-ohio-i-cant-breathe/73466345007/