Talks with the wind

Growing up white in a white neighborhood meant I was trained from age 0 that police are there for you if you're in trouble. You could give them a friendly wave, and they would wave back. They came by my K-8 schools and talked about that, even though my grade 3-8 school was significantly minority.

Then Rodney King happened. In March of 1991 a guy with a VHS camcorder (the over-the-shoulder kind) who was walking his neighborhood happened across a police stop. The procession of events is extremely familiar in 2020 (King 'reached for a gun', and before too long was on the receiving end of a taster and a boot-party by four cops), but it was literally the first time white America saw that on ABC/CBS/NBC national news. There weren't riots and mass protests in 1991, because it was caught on video, how could anything but a conviction be possible? And yet, in April of 1992, the country saw for the first time what conditional immunity allows police officers to do, and all four were acquitted. That's what sparked protests and an uprising.

That was the first big chink in my police are OK indoctrination. Because I was going to a very black high-school in 1991-1992, I heard talk of how beatings like that were actually pretty common, so long as you were black. I watched how people like the Urban League talked my classmates out of uprising themselves. It was the first time I was really aware that police are only friendly if you look right, and are in the right place.

Then the 1994 crime bill happened; but I was going to an extremely white college (8% black. They recruited at my high-school to improve that percentage, and ended up with white ole me), so didn't really notice what it did to everyone that didn't look like me.

Then 9/11 happened. The legislative aftermath of 9/11 included such gems as the Patriot Act, as well as legislation enabling the military to sell surplus hardware to law-enforcement agencies and creating the Department of Homeland Security to pass out funds to law-enforcement agencies to buy surplus military hardware. I noticed this, and noticed that police agencies were getting anti-insurgency hardware. I even saw some of it, since I was working for a City government until late 2003 and had a chance to be in the police vehicle garage a few times. I didn't know what they intended to use APCs and vehicles with cannons on them for, but the departments sure wanted them.

Then Ferguson happened in 2014 and the uprising that came along with it. It was the first time in 23 years that police acting badly made national news in that way. The sleepy white progressive movement, which to be honest includes me, finally noticed there was a problem here and started signing on.

Somewhere between 2015 and 2018 after seeing the deaths by police, and hearing stories about how our just throw people in jail stance is at odds with just about every other westernized society, I started working on prison abolition. Our prisons were created by the loophole in the 13th amendment that allowed slavery for convicted felons. It functionally nationalized slavery; no more private ownership, but the State could lease slaves out to private parties. The school to prison pipeline was a real thing, and police departments are the slave-takers. Modern state-sanctioned slavery is a time-limited thing, no more being born into it, but the system is set up so that doesn't really matter all that much. It's a bit better than the Jim Crow era, but not a whole lot (thanks, 1994 crime bill and the war on drugs).

2020 brought George Floyd and the Minnesota uprising which seems to have pushed America as a whole over a tipping point. The cruelty of the Minneapolis Police Department was on national display, with local activists keen to point out just how much of a jack-booted white supremacist thug the Police Union chief is. Floyd was the third high-profile police-death in the Twin Cities in six years, with Philando Castile and Tamir Clark preceding him in death. That was enough.

The observation I made in 2002, that police departments were being equipped to fight counter-insurgency operations, was made very clear this year.

• Surplus military body-armor and weapons just in case an armed uprising happens.
• Surplus military vehicles to shock and awe rebels into fleeing.
• Surplus military helicopters to do likewise.
• Surplus military veterans/contractors, of the kind that liked busting heads in Afghanistan, working with their buddies rather than integrating back into civil society.
• Community Policing, making friends, is a Hearts and Minds operation to improve perception of policing.
• Riot-line training was on evidence in every city with a large protest, proving that all police are trained in herding/pushing crowds of lesser-armed angry people.

Now that some of the emissions from the Minneapolis Police Union chief have come out in public we now see how the reality bubble of policing is shaped.

• Police have a uniquely hard job (debatable) and deserve special protections from society as a result.
• Anyone can turn into a perpetrator, and perps are true evil geniuses when it comes to using every-day items in criminal ways (which is how bike-tire shims magically turn into lock-picks, and a candle turns into an IED).
• Community Policing is just something you do to get politicians off your back (which is why it hurt so much to hear Biden talk about improving Community Policing rather than anything that would actually work)
• Police are domestic warriors, the thin blue line between civil society and the lawless elements that would overtake it (siege mentality, great for cementing loyalty against outside challenges like politicians getting uppity).
• Officer safety is our top concern. (When the smile and a friendly chat doesn't work to get someone to stop what they're doing, you're allowed to use any force up to and including shooting them to get them to stop.)

American policing descends directly from Slave Patrols, and it shows; there to keep the lesser classes in line and fine society happy and feeling safe. But since 2002 it has also been equipped like a counter-insurgency operation, which keeps its mailed fist of freedom packed away and ready for use at a moment's notice. Because until 2020 (I hope) all it took was a few days/weeks of less-than-lethal riot-line work to wear out the malcontents and train a new generation that you just don't fight the police.

Except in 2020. We have a chance, here. It will take years of work, which means our results are far from assured. But enough of America has realized that police are a counter-insurgency force that also does some other things on the side that we might, if we push, turn our police forces back into something that helps the community. It won't be policing, it will be something else. I've seen a lot of talk about Iraqi de-baathification, and there are a lot of parallels there between that process and what we will have to do.

• Qualified immunity needs to end. This gives police forces impunity to do whatever they want to whoever they want, so long as they can hang a fig-leaf of I felt threatened on it.
• Police unions need to be cast out of the major labor organizations. This is a hard sell, since Labor in-fighting is a capitalists dream and many labor people realize that.
• Along with ending qualified immunity needs to come revisions to officer discipline procedures. Decades of police-union wrangling, and the unique pressures police unions can bring on balky politicians, have built in massive protections of officers against facing any kind of consequences.
• Citizen safety needs to be the top concern, not officer safety. You won't get this with the current police power-structure in place.

These are going to be hard, and this is the core of what defund the police is calling for. You will not reform our existing departments into a shape that isn't counter-insurgency, but abolish and recreate has a chance of doing it.

The Useful Idiot's tweets about the US nuclear arsenal have been triggering many friends old Cold War anxieties. Let's talk about that.

( Cut-tagged because nuclear war is still triggering to many of us. )