Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

yeah big parts of our current restrictions are set to dial back on monday, so there's definite antsyness about. past couple major protests it seemed like the organizers had to strain to prompt people to show up. not this week.

i think it's definitely a mix of

1. rage boiling over "organically" from peaceful, organized protests
2. city kids going wild cuz they know there's no consequences
3. white kids from the suburbs and other outside areas
4. organized white supremacists
5. cops

haha yeah and the main cause of heat in 1 is also

1a. cops

well yeah

The most credible reason why outside white supremacists would want to create violent chaos is that no matter who causes the violence, they understand the net effect will be to strengthen police oppression and create a more favorable climate for recruitment to white supremacist groups.

This applies even if they are caught in the very act of arson and looting. Or violent assault. Or murder. They correctly suss that the chaos and their whiteness protects them, that many cops on the street will view them as allies, and that a big draw for attracting new members is the idea that they will get to engage in violent acts with impunity and this demonstrates that such fantasies can be made real.

2. city kids going wild cuz they know there's no consequences

No consequences but also no future, after two successive economic collapses in their short lifetimes. (Is one of my theories, anyway.)

well yeah

The history of the civil rights movement can show countless examples where black protests against oppression generated white rioting, with very few repercussions for the whites involved, mass arrests of blacks, and pleas from white leaders for blacks to stop protesting so calm could be restored.

budo the joke was sound

ty

Good protest in Chicago today

Protest at Miami now

I don't remember if the national narrative constructed for Baltimore in 2015 included an emphasis on "outside agitators." All I remember was the level of damage/destruction/chaos being absurdly overblown by the national media--you'd think the entire city was on fire. Minneapolis is slightly smaller, but it's a similar dynamic in Baltimore: de-facto segregation, cliques, and large portions of the city disconnected from each other by lack of public transit and desiccated by decades of blight, houses that burned in 1968 and haven't been fixed since. The only agitators here in 2015 were the police: they instigated the first and only riot in Baltimore in 2015.

I never saw ANYTHING like that video of the guy with the umbrella smashing windows, and it wasn't something that was talked about. There was insurance fraud (Freddie Gray was murdered on the west side--the night that curfew was imposed, a giant brand new empty retirement home on the east side "spontaneously burst into flames".....), but there wasn't a significant white supremacist presence anywhere. Obama was President but those were some of the darkest months I've had in my life, much worse than most of the Trump admin. Motherfucker never even came here to give a speech, the thing he was best at. PRINCE did. Obama didn't.

anyway... mumblemumblemumble
Things are relatively quiet in Baltimore right now, there is a march happening right now but having been thru 2015 so recently, I don't think the city is ready to burst.

idk I kinda feel like with all the shelter in place Covid restrictions, there is just a natural human response to go off in situations like this.

When the lockdowns were put in place, one of my first thoughts is that there would be rioting at some point - not over the lockdowns themselves, but just the fact that so many people are now sitting at home, unemployed and frustrated would create the right fuel - all it would take is a spark.

tbh the ongoing pandemic really makes me question if these protests are a great idea right now, as necessary as they seem to be

i also had some concerns about that. but i just got back from the chicago protest and my thoughts are the same as drew here:

I was skeptical about how a protest that mixed cars & walking marchers would work in the COVID era but what I saw in Baltimore today was incredibly inspiring: tons of people safely together in the streets, in solidarity, remembering the dead, & demanding that this system change

— DREW DANIEL (@DDDrewDaniel) May 30, 2020

(that's a short 3-tweet thread, btw)

you'd think the entire city was on fire

to be clear, this is exactly what it feels like in minneapolis right now

I know, sorry I wasn't clear--I only brought that up in the context of national media (mis)representing a city. I was only referring to the "outside agitators" line taken today, not the level of destruction, which eclipsed Baltimore as soon as the 3rd precinct was burned.

#GeorgeFloydprotest pic.twitter.com/jzc7JIdqvW

— Mensah M. Dean (@MensahDean) May 30, 2020

Philly City Hall

Hennepin County Jail records show vast majority of those arrested for #rioting, unlawful assembly and burglary are Minnesotans @kare11 investigates has learned combing publicly available records. State leaders claimed most were “outsiders”

— A.J. Lagoe (@AJInvestigates) May 30, 2020

the mayor of st paul claimed their arrests, in ramsey county, where things were quieter last night, were all outstaters. the mayor of minneapolis and the governor said similar things but hedged.

in any case, there are plenty of cracker-ass minnesotans living outside the metro area, even in the suburbs. it can take the better part of an hour to get from saint paul to minneapolis on a bus so 'outsiders' are relative.

it just flatters twin citians' self-images as part of 'one minnesota' to say things like 'outstate' because they really mean something like 'came over the river from wisconsin' and they have to be better than the people from wisconsin

They are better tbh
But I digress

what's troubling me — and my head's not as clear as it could be these last couple of days, so forgive me if i'm not making myself as clear as i'd like to be — is how quickly the narrative changed from (1) people need to understand the historical and socioeconomic context of rioting, this is a language of an oppressed people who have no other recourse to "speak" (quoting MLK and such), and the swift murder charges prove that the intensity of this anger and devastation were in fact not only efficacious but justified, to (2) community leaders would never advocate for folks fucking up their own turf, nor is it in these folks' best interest; all violence and destruction of property is therefore necessarily being perpetrated by outside actors, and given the scale and the inability of police to contain this it must be "professionals" who have organized through channels in the underworld of white supremacists etc.

as i suggested upthread, i think that the protests / riots are an amalgamation of diverse actors achieving (to whatever degree) an array of outcomes that sometimes overlap and sometimes contrast distinctly. what i find to be difficult is (1) parsing these actors / their desires / what their actions have wrought both in the raw physical reality of burning buildings but also changes in the public consciousness / actions in judicial / political spheres and (2) accounting for the self-evidently positive (though not definitive) outcome of murder charges.

in other words, to what degree does a shift in attitudes (among the public and among law enforcement) re: jailing + charging police officers who murder POC actually offset the cost of property destruction, insofar as the latter has been more or less acknowledged as an act of political speech ? and if we accept that, to what degree does it matter to whom we attribute the acts of highly visible escalation ?

xp flappy i don't think you were being unclear, i was just being emphatic

i don't understand what you mean about 'offset' there in your last questions.

it seems to me fairly uncontroversial that protesting could shade into rioting easily and 'naturally'—who wouldn't wanna fuck up shitty-ass midway minimall franchises?. it also seems like ppl like the governor and frey were stupidly willing to lean into the idea of 'outsiders' having some particular stake. there can be shit-stirrers around with just as much potential to thwart the mpd's understanding of how to handle the situation.

offset = make up for, justify

so you are asking how much our being comfortable with responding to (some of?) the point of the protests also goes, or should also go, toward making us accept some degree of protest-related damage to property and infrastructure (without, say, our needing to appeal to fictions about outside agitators to make us accept it)?

Be careful out there, District of Columbia residents.

This is currently happening outside the White House pic.twitter.com/kiG6ozAzur

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) May 30, 2020

its MAGA night

Ladies get in no cover!

its MAGA night

― frogbs, Saturday, May 30, 2020 7:17 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Best Kool & the Gang song imo

stay safe you all.

― Yerac, Saturday, May 30, 2020 12:59 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sending love out y'all's way

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Saturday, May 30, 2020 1:02 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

flash bangs in Seattle

FB live feed of a speech right now

https://www.facebook.com/nikkitaroliver/videos/10100889561204440/?hc_location=ufi

Asked if he's talked to @LADAOffice about lack of prosecutions of officers, @MayorOfLA says: "It is very difficult to convict a police officer when we all know they have done something wrong." (I went back and listened to this several times to make sure I got it right.) @KNX1070

— Claudia Peschiutta (@ReporterClaudia) May 30, 2020

The mayor in control of the most murderous police force in the country btw

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/trump-accuses-dc-mayor-of-refusing-to-help-secret-service-at-white-house-demonstration-over-killing-of-george-floyd/2020/05/30/9bb59212-a276-11ea-9590-1858a893bd59_story.html

"By early evening, hundreds of protesters were circling the perimeter of the White House grounds, which was fortified with law enforcement vehicles, metal barriers and rows of armored Secret Service, D.C. and Park police sweating and shouting through masks worn to protect themselves from the deadly virus still consuming the Washington region."

While he hides behind his fence afraid/alone, I stand w/ people peacefully exercising their First Amendment Right after the murder of #GeorgeFloyd & hundreds of years of institutional racism

There are no vicious dogs & ominous weapons. There is just a scared man. Afraid/alone...

— Muriel Bowser #StayHomeDC Lite (@MurielBowser) May 30, 2020

Fucking hell, I’ve been staying on the fringes in Seattle

Just watched a man with a handgun take an assault rifle from a young man on live tv in Seattle #seattleprotest pic.twitter.com/Xm2yCYNxeJ

— Shawn Garrett (@ShawnGarrett) May 30, 2020

jeeeeeeezus

Just saw an FB live video of a guy marching down Walker in mid-downtown Houston as people were smashing windows. A guy defending a bar got hit in the head by a projectile (a chunk of glass?). The vid ended when the filmer got jumped at the mid-Main trainstop, not far from the bar I worked at for a couple years.

My mom (who turned 75 today, but is not one to look back) was comparing this to the '60s. But in the '60s no one was walking around strapped with assault weapons.

I don't know why anything surprises me anymore

Garcetti says every testing center in the city of LA has been closed. This appears to have been a punitive response. In his response as to why the centers were all closed rather than in specific areas: "We're not going to stand for the burning of police cars."

— Scott Frazier (@safrazie) May 30, 2020

Re: that guy grabbing the gun, comments indicate it could be a cop or security and that they took it for safety. If you watch the video, he immediately removes the magazine and a round from the chamber, so at the very much knew what he was doing and made the weapon less dangerous.

Self XPS I'm seeing now that the video I saw was actually taken last night.

The ⁦@CityMinneapolis⁩ just sent this tip sheet for tonight to residents. So, yeah. pic.twitter.com/vZHk56Gz98

— Jonathan Kealing (@JKealing) May 30, 2020

Sorry if this has already been posted--having trouble loading the whole thread and keeping it open. Anyway, a friend suggested I watch it. I think it's moving and wise beyond words.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG0yrng0eY4&t=312s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo2-Xuko8XY