Category Archives: Politics

Part 1: Fixing the Police

Posted on by

When politicians and police talk about reforming the police, it’s good to be skeptical. From The Guardian (see the article for a number of links):

Body cameras, bias training and other popular initiatives have not addressed systemic problems

New York banned chokeholds. Seattle required de-escalation training. Los Angeles restricted shooting at moving vehicles.

But those reforms did not stop police from killing Eric Garner, Charleena Lyles or Ryan Twyman, who died when officers used the very tactics that the changes were supposed to prevent.

Since the early days of Black Lives Matter protests six years ago, lawmakers and criminal justice groups have pushed reforms aimed at curtailing discriminatory and deadly police conduct. Some mayors and police chiefs mandated the use of body cameras for police officers. Other local governments passed regulations that banned controversial policing tactics. Departments hired more officers of color, and African American officers took over troubled departments.

But as the death of George Floyd continues to spark a national reckoning over police violence and an avalanche of videos has shown militarized officers brutalizing protesters, city leaders are facing mounting pressure to recognize that those incremental reforms have not addressed systemic harms and, as some studies show, have not diminished bad behavior by police.

Activists say those realizations have created unprecedented momentum for the more radical ideas they have long promoted, like defunding and abolishing police, and reinvesting in services.

“We’re watching in real time all these alleged ‘reforms’ failing,” said Phoenix Calida, a sex worker rights activist in Chicago. “None of it is doing what it’s supposed to. De-escalation isn’t working. Using ‘less violent’ methods isn’t working. Having cameras for accountability isn’t working. So why did we dump all of this money into ‘reforms’?”

The false promises of popular reforms

A growing body of research suggests that some of the most widely adopted reform efforts have not succeeded at curbing police violence in the ways the policies intended.

Research into the use of body cameras by police officers has shown no statistical difference in behaviors or reduction in force when the cameras are on. Body cameras also haven’t stopped egregious killings, have rarely led to discipline or termination, and have almost never yielded charges or convictions.

In 2018, three years after Sacramento began a $1.5m body-camera initiative, officers fatally shot unarmed Stephon Clark in his family’s backyard. The release of the videos traumatized the family, but prosecutors ruled the killing was justified because officers thought his phone was a gun.

In Oakland, California, a police department monitor found that officers were failing to properly turn on cameras nearly 20% of the time.

And over the years, police have mostly used footage to prosecute civilians, research shows….

Policies aimed at preventing excessive force and protecting free speech rights at protests have similarly led to little change. In protests across the country this week officers from some of the same departments that enacted reforms were seen violating those policies.

In Austin, policy dictates that officers may use beanbag rounds to de-escalate potentially deadly situations or “riotous behavior” that could cause injury. But at one of the early protests after Floyd’s death, police fired a beanbag round at a 16-year-old boy’s head, even though he was alone on a hill far from officers, and appeared to be watching the events. His brother said the ammunition fractured his skull and required emergency surgery. “The policies certainly don’t allow you to shoot an unarmed child in the head for no reason,” said Emily Gerrick, managing attorney with the Texas Fair Defense Project.

In Los Angeles, protest footage analyzed by the LA Times appeared to show officers firing projectiles at someone’s head and firing from a moving vehicle, both of which are prohibited.

And although New York’s governor touted a new state law passed this week banning police use of chokeholds, others have called it “useless”, noting that the city police department had banned the practice in 1993, two decades before an officer placed Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold.

Studies have also come to mixed conclusions as to whether increasing the diversity of police forces has led to culture changes within those departments.

One researcher who interviewed hundreds of residents of Ferguson and Baltimore after the uprisings in 2015 found increased representation didn’t address structural and cultural problems within the departments… Despite its relatively diverse force, Baltimore continued its “severe and unjustified disparities” in stops and arrests of black Americans, the justice department found in 2016.

When Eddie Johnson stepped up as Chicago police superintendent in 2016 following intense controversy over the killing of Laquan McDonald, he immediately faced backlash for saying he has never witnessed misconduct in 27 years on the job….

“People thought that being black he would understand systemic racism,” said Calida, the Chicago activist. “Having more racially diverse police isn’t going to help”…

Efforts to train officers to more frequently use non-lethal force have also not stopped tragic killings. In 2017, Seattle insisted it had created a progressive model for crisis intervention and de-escalation training, aimed at finding ways to slow down situations, isolating people so they can’t harm others, and using non-lethal force.

But when Charleena Lyles called 911 to report a burglary, two officers showed up to her door, and within less than three minutes shot her dead in front of her one-year-old son, later claiming she was holding a knife. Both officers had completed the crisis training.

There is also minimal evidence that implicit bias trainings affect officers’ prejudiced behavior on the job, and some research suggesting they could even be counterproductive, making officers resentful and more entrenched in racist viewpoints. In San Jose, California, earlier this month, a black community activist who had trained police on implicit bias for years, and personally knew the chief and others, tried to de-escalate a confrontation between officers and protesters. Police shot him in the groin with a rubber bullet…

These kinds of repeated scandals are reminders that misconduct, abuse and brutality aren’t isolated acts that reforms can fix, activists said.

“The issue is not a ‘bad apples’ problem,” said Alisa Bierria, an organizer with Survived and Punished, a prison abolition group. “There is something specific about the institution of policing that is intrinsically violent.”

That idea was exemplified this month in Buffalo when two officers were suspended after video showed them shoving a 75-year-old peace activist to the ground. More than 50 officers, the entire emergency response team, resigned from that unit after the suspension, apparently in support of the two colleagues.

The push for alternatives

In the wake of protests, a handful of US mayors have pledged to reallocate some funds from police, and many more have, once again, promised to improve policies.

But given the failure of many past reforms, a coalition of activists actively opposes such moderate policy shifts and argues the US needs more radical change, pointing at the failures of past reforms. These activists say that it would not only be a waste of the momentum of these global protests, but that continuing to rely on police departments to address their own violence will simply lead to ongoing harm.

They point at the continued power and influence of police unions and legal protections for police officers accused of wrongdoing and excessive force as barriers to change. If police and politicians who oversee law enforcement continue to adopt policies that focus on fixing individual behaviors, they say, it will not address institutional and deeply embedded cultural problems….

Relevant Comments from the Last Century

Posted on by

Ken Makin of the Christian Science Monitor says that, at times like this, it’s too easy to quote the final words of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, when King looked forward to the day “all of God’s children … will be able to join hands and sing … Free at last! Thank God almighty, we’re free at last!” Mr. Makin suggests we remember some of Dr. King’s other, more specific words.

From his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?:

Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves – a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified, and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans.

From his final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”, delivered in Memphis, Tennessee, the day before he was shot:

Let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we’ve got to keep attention on that. That’s always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers were on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor [the mayor being one of our “sick white brothers”]. They didn’t get around to that.

And from the “I Have a Dream” speech five years earlier:

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

The Contagion Has Spread (and the Virus Has Been Bad Too)

Posted on by

From the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman:

Chances are you watch the news and see 1) large, [very] peaceful protests that have been 2) met with [sometimes] brutal force by police, while 3) some opportunistic radicals from both the right and the left, along with people just looking to steal stuff, take advantage of the situation for their own purposes.

[That the protests have been large and peaceful] is what matters most, now and in the future, both in terms of what this activism really represents and the substance of what it demands. These protests appear to be mainly opening many Americans’ eyes to the reality of police brutality and the need for reform.

But what you may not understand is that a significant portion of America — a minority, but still an ample number of people — is seeing something very different.

Millions of loyal Fox News viewers tune in every day to be offered a perspective from the upside-down, in which they’re told that what’s happening in America right now is a smattering of legitimate protest surrounded by a sea of looting, rioting and attempted murder of noble police officers.

In this nightmare vision, violent black people and their terrorist allies are not only destroying cities but also will soon be coming for you, the angry, frightened white people who make up the audience.

“Violent young men with guns will be in charge” when all the police officers are gone, [Fox host] Tucker Carlson warned his viewers on Tuesday. “They will make the rules, including the rules in your neighborhood. They will do what they want. You will do what they say. No one will stop them. You will not want to live here when that happens.”

His colleague Sean Hannity informs his audience that “Black Lives Matter is planning to train armed militia for war on police.” Hannity, like [Sen. Tom] Cotton, says [the president] must deploy the military: “He has the full authority to go into these states and restore order, which he now must do.”

Unquote.

One of those poisoned and poisonous Fox viewers sits in the White House.

From Vox’s David Roberts:

The signal feature of the 2016 election is that it settled the question of whether US conservatism — the actual movement, I mean, not the people in Washington think tanks who claim to be its spokespeople — is animated by a set of shared ideals and policies. It is not.

For many years, many people have convinced themselves otherwise. A lot of people believe to this day that the Tea Party uprising and the subsequent eight years of hysterical, unremitting, norm-violating opposition to Barack Obama was about small-government philosophy and a devotion to low taxes and less regulation, and had nothing to do with social backlash against a black, cosmopolitan, urban law professor and his diverse, rising coalition.

But that kind of credulity can only stretch so far, and Txxxx has stretched it to the snapping point. He abandoned the Very Serious conservative script entirely and the right ate it up. He pledged not to cut Social Security or Medicare, condemned free trade, and insulted the military and intelligence services, and they ate it up….

Before Txxxx, they thought the economy was terrible and Russia was bad. Now they think the economy is great and Russia is good. He’s one of their people, he hates who they hate, and he drives the libs crazy; that’s good enough….

Even the conservative lawmakers alleged to be horrified by Txxxx, leaking anonymously to reporters about how terrible he is, scarcely ever stand up to him, for the simple reason that he’s enormously popular with the base.

So what motivates this swell of right-wing support for Txxxx? At this point, … the evidence is overwhelming: It was cultural backlash, against immigrants, minorities, uppity women, liberals, and all the other forces seen as dislodging traditional white men from their centrality in American culture….

[More than a dozen studies, papers and surveys] all point in the same direction: Race and gender had unusually high salience in the 2016 election, and what distinguished Txxxx supporters most of all, more than income or education, was racism and misogyny, i.e., feelings of hostility toward minorities and women.

What Txxxx revealed, in the most dramatic way possible, is that the conservative base in the US today is driven not by ideology but by white resentment. That’s the underlying thread. Txxxx may lurch back and forth on policy — or more often, demonstrate an almost cosmic ignorance of policy — but he speaks to, and in the voice of, America’s angry whites, who want their imagined old America back. He is the prototypical Fox News viewer, tossing off endless insults, conspiracy theories, and furious aggrievement.

What’s happening in the US today is not a contest of governing philosophies. Txxxx doesn’t have one, and his administration barely tries to pretend it does. It’s not a philosophy or a plan that won — it was a team, a tribe. They are living it up, rewarding their friends and [destroying] everything the other team did before them.

More broadly, what’s going on in American politics is a contest between those who believe America is an idea and those who believe America is a people, a particular culture — white, Christian, and patriarchal. Txxxx represents those who want that culture restored to primacy.

The people who support Txxxx have been embedded in a hermetically sealed right-wing media bubble for so long that they only know liberals as horrific caricatures and only experience politics as a war to save white Christian culture from its sworn enemies. They are exposed to endless lies and conspiracy theories designed to keep them in a frenzy, convinced that antifa is around the corner and Sharia law is imminent.

From Esquire’s Charles Pierce:

The contagion is deep in the people now, reaching everywhere, twisting reality into burlesques of itself…. And the pandemic is pretty bad, too.

[Quoting Washington state’s Peninsula Daily News:]

The family — a husband and wife, their 16-year-old daughter and the husband’s mother — were driving a full-size school bus and had prepared to camp off a logging road spur…The family had shopped for camping supplies at Forks Outfitters and were confronted “by seven or eight carloads of people in the grocery store parking lot… The people in the parking lot repeatedly asked them if they were Antifa protesters. The family told the people they weren’t associated with any such group and were just camping”….

“The family had to drive their bus around vehicles in the parking lot in order to get back onto Highway 101.” The family told deputies that at least four vehicles followed them as they drove northbound out of Forks. They said that two of the vehicles had people in them carrying what appeared to be semi-automatic rifles.They drove their bus … onto a logging spur road, where they pitched a tent to camp for the night, they told deputies, but then heard gunshots in the distance and power saws down the road from where they were camping. They packed their camp to leave. They found that someone had cut down trees across the spur road. They were trapped.

In a very Pacific Northwest manner, these unfortunate people were saved by four high-school students with power saws, who dismantled the impromptu barricade so that the family could free itself from the Talk Radio Militia. This is the contagion which now has spread to the country’s police forces, and which has its primary vector the Executive Branch of the national government, which is edging toward a substantial body count.

Why did these people think the campers were “antifa,” as though there were an actual organization by that name? Because the president* told them so. Because the attorney general told them so. Because various ambitious bobble-throated slapdicks in the Senate told them so. Because their favorite radio and TV savants have told them so.

After all, this was a multi-racial family. Res ipse loquitur.

The contagion is deep in the people now. And it’s spreading. And there is no vaccine, and there is no safe quarantine.

Desecration in Washington

Posted on by

An art and architecture critic, Phillip Kennicott of The Washington Post, examines yesterday’s disturbing image of troops at the Lincoln Memorial:

Who in the Pentagon, or the leadership of the National Guard of the District of Columbia, thought this was a good look? Who thought what America needs now is a viral image of the American military in camouflage and body armor occupying a memorial that symbolizes the hope of reconciliation, that has drawn to its steps Marian Anderson to sing for a mixed-race crowd during a time of segregation and Martin Luther King to proclaim “I have a dream,” and millions of nameless souls, of all races, who believe there is some meaning in words like “the better angels of our nature”?

A photograph of members of the District’s National Guard on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial began racing around Twitter and other social media Tuesday, as the country was still digesting a violent assault by Secret Service, police and guard troops on peaceful protesters outside the White House on Monday. The photo showed troops standing resolutely, perhaps provocatively, on the memorial’s wide and inviting steps, as if they owned it. To many, it symbolized the militarization of Washington, of our government and country, and the terrifying dissolution of old boundaries between partisan politics and the independent, professional military….

Anyone who has photographed the Lincoln Memorial knows that it is hard to find a spot sufficiently distant to include the whole thing in the frame. That, in part, may explain some of the of ominous power of one of the images that circulated widely Wednesday, taken by Getty Images photographer Win McNamee.

Untitled

That picture was taken from the side of the steps, such that the cornice and frieze of the memorial, emblazoned with the names of the states that Lincoln helped stitch back to political unity, plunge precipitously at an angle to the lower left of the frame. A soldier looms large in the foreground, his face covered by a mask, his eyes hidden by sunglasses, his thoughts and his humanity obscured by a carapace of military resolve and inscrutability.

Throughout the crisis of the past week, there have been images, scattered but reassuring, of National Guard troops and some law enforcement officers joining in expressions of common purpose with protesters, speaking respectfully, even taking a knee with people who have flocked to the streets…

The image of troops arrayed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial only added to the sense of crisis and civil disintegration. No matter their intent and purpose, the D.C. Guard looked not like protecting sentinels, but possessive custodians. Ultimately, their orders came from the president, and so it is inevitable that many people will see their presence there not as protective, but aggressive, as if they are facing off with the city and its residents, whom they are meant to serve.

The District, which is not a state, has long been at the mercy of the federal government and opportunistic politicians, despite having no voting representatives in Congress. The guards, who were local troops, looked like outsiders, like a colonial force.

Given the volatility of the current moment, images like this suggest that a worrying trend — of the military being co-opted into partisan politics — is accelerating, from the president signing Make America Great Again hats on an Army base in Iraq, to last summer’s display of military hardware during a traditionally nonpartisan Fourth of July celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, to new concerns about Trump’s plans for another display of the military during a pandemic, this coming Independence Day.

The decision of Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to march with the president across Lafayette Square, which had been violently purged of peaceful demonstrators, and the participation of Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper in a religious-themed photo op at St. John’s Episcopal Church, is yet more worrisome.

The power of the image is also directly connected to the fraught power of the Lincoln Memorial, which is architecturally one of the most beautiful in the country….

The bulk of the memorial’s substance and content is about who goes there, the history of who has stood on its steps, facing the Capitol in the distance, and the obelisk devoted to George Washington, simultaneously the founder of the country, the American Cincinnatus and a slaveholder. The memorial is about the concerts and speeches and protests that have transpired there, about the continuing impulse of ordinary Americans to make it a pilgrimage site.

But one dark truth of the memorial, accidentally amplified by this image of soldiers on its steps, is: For many white Americans, it symbolizes a fantasy of society made whole by Lincoln, of a country that skipped from the trauma of civil war straight to the reconciliation and healing that was adumbrated but not achieved by him, nor any of his successors…

Now we have an image that suggests that raw, naked power — old-guard, old-style, patriarchal military power — has taken possession of something that is already a fragile cultural symbol. To many people looking at this photograph, it seemed to say, “they own it,” not us, not we, not the people.

And that raises an even deeper fear, one that recalls memories of the National Guard at Kent State and atrocities committed by U.S. troops in its wars overseas…. It exacerbates a fear that Washingtonians feel keenly, as more troops pour in, military hardware rattles through the streets, helicopters shatter the calm of night, and as the president’s bellicose rhetoric continues to spew like a fire hose. It’s a simple fear, and a question every soldier, no matter his or her rank, must answer: If the president tells you to shoot us, will you do it?

A Look at the President’s Promenade

Posted on by

A fashion critic, Robin Givhan of The Washington Post, evaluates the president’s attempt to appear presidential:

The president could have opened the Bible. He could have read Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd. Federal law enforcement had just fired tear gas at peaceful demonstrators, pelted them with rubber bullets and chased them away on horseback. Txxxx now had the secured space to stand in front of cameras in front of a historic church. And he couldn’t even be bothered to crack the spine on the holy book.

Instead, he corralled members of his staff for a photograph that, in its nightmarish awkwardness, revealed all the ineptitude, cowardliness and pettiness for which the whole charade was a grotesque cover.

After a law-and-order speech in the White House Rose Garden, President Txxxx strode across Lafayette Square to the unassuming facade of St. John’s Episcopal Church. He didn’t go inside. Instead, the structure loomed behind him — a lemon-yellow, three-dimensional set for his tortured stage play.

The president was accompanied by a throng of staff, but the person who stood out in the blur of dark suits crossing the square was his daughter and adviser Ivanka. Always Ivanka. She stood tall on her stilettos. She rose, golden-haired, above the group. She was dressed in black cropped pants and blazer. She was toting a very large white handbag and later was wearing a matching face mask with tiny metallic stars.

Ivanka long ago perfected the art of playing the part, of moving through life like an Instagram feed made real. Over the weekend, she’d tweeted a Bible verse. That was followed by an acknowledgment of Pride Month with a rainbow line of heart emoji. And now she was in the park just violently cleared of peaceful protesters. She was surrounded by police in riot gear. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark A. Milley, was in camouflage.

If other members of the administration were trudging across the plaza to a kind of doomed publicity stunt, Ivanka looked as though she were just gliding through — on her way home after a busy day in a comfortable corner office doing important things. As one of the few women in the group, she already stood apart. Her mask made her a laudable loner. The handbag clasped in her right hand announced that she was not sticking around. She was there, but not committed — not to empathy, not to the militaristic display of strength, not to this gamesmanship, not to the horrors of this national stress test, not to anything but the Ivanka-ness of her public image, which is always about being power-adjacent.

Ivanka doggedly inserts herself into the center of photographs and conversations where she does not seem to belong, but this time she remained on the sidelines when the posing started.

Attorney General William P. Barr, national security adviser Robert O’Brien and White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany were among those pulled center stage with Txxxx. Barr stared slack-jawed in an open-collar shirt, no tie. His jacket was open. O’Brien was buttoned up in a gray suit with a pale blue tie that was a shade lighter than the president’s, which trailed below his waistband as usual. McEnany was in a closefitting double-breasted blazer with gold metallic buttons and skinny trousers. She was perched atop a pair of stiletto pumps — a style of footwear that this White House, all on its own, may be keeping in circulation.

None of them was wearing a mask, because that would remind everyone that the world is still facing a pandemic, and besides, the masks would ruin the picture. Everyone stood apart, but not six feet apart. They didn’t lower their head in prayer or silent tribute to George Floyd — the man whose death after nearly nine minutes under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer sparked this uprising. Their arms dangled at their side. No one seemed to know where to look or what to do or how long to stand there.

In some of the photographs, one can see Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, as well as Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper. They don’t elevate the images; they only make them more desperate — just two more faces looking blankly into the distance.

The photographs in front of St. John’s captured the president’s fundamental discomfort with what it means to exist out in the open where people do not soothe him with flattery, where brute force is an accelerant, not an answer, and where imperfect lives spill outside their borders. Txxxx worked so hard for his flaccid, sanitized photograph: a man standing with nothing but white bureaucrats — most of them men — on the plaza in front of a neatly boarded-up house of worship. Txxxx isn’t even really at the church; he’s in its vicinity.

At one point, standing alone, he’s holding the Bible not like it’s a source of enduring comfort but like it’s a soiled diaper.The choreographed group picture captures none of the agonizing emotion of this moment. But it was out there, in the wild, and Txxxx had to pass by it. The pain was scrawled in jagged, vulgar graffiti on the walls abutting his path, on walls that couldn’t be scrubbed clean for his benefit.

The picture he orchestrated shows no hint of a commander in chief rising above or binding up anything. The photograph doesn’t convey power or competence. From every angle, in every iteration, it’s an image of a whitewashed group turning a deaf ear to a country convulsing over racial injustice.

Before Txxxx crossed the street, he announced with great fanfare to the American people that he was going to “pay my respects to a very, very special place,” one that was [slightly] damaged in a fire Sunday. But it wasn’t a building that was calling out for care.