Monday Reads: and the beat goes on
Posted: July 18, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections, Afternoon Reads, American Gun Fetish, Black Lives Matter, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crime, Criminal Justice System, domestic military/police exercises, Rule of Law | Tags: A Clockwork Orange, Baton Rouge Police shootings, Connecting PTSD to violence, Donald Trump, Dystopian Fiction, Eight Amendment, Fifth Amendment, first amendment, fourth amendment, Mad Max, mass shootings, PTSD, second amendment, veterans connected to mass shootings, Water World 41 Comments
What can be said about the violence erupting around the country and around the world these days? Words can fail us. We’re losing hearts and minds along with lives. How did we get here? I hope we don’t have to wait on historians to deconstruct the causes because we’re careening towards a future that seems better imagined by George Miller and Byron Kennedy of Mad Max fame. Dystopian fiction should not actually portend reality. It should be a harbinger of possibilities we can avoid; not outcomes we bring on to ourselves.
Today will be another reminder that one of the two major parties has completely lost its ability to govern and is stuck some where we should not be. We have the Republicans about ready to nominate a dude that reminds me of the Dennis Hopper character in Water World. Trump sounds as crazy as that character. I’m waiting to hear his big convention floor speech and wondering if he’ll be waving a cigar and a bottle of Jack and be wearing an eye patch, frankly. We’re losing our sense of community and our sense of responsibility as members of community.
Our sense of alienation perhaps comes from a world where we are more likely to connect with technology than with a human being and where our jobs are continually dehumanizing us. This generally makes us susceptible to folks that play on our anger. We’ve had two very angry pseudo populists on the national stage who really represent privilege that have done a great job of stirring up resentment. They’ve also stirred up some insane reaction to that visible resentment. I personally am watching my neighborhood be torn apart by already rich people looking to make more money by dismantling everything and every one deemed unprofitable. I feel like I only exist to many of them as a possible source of monetization although I can tell I’ve outlived my usefulness for that as an aging woman of little means these days.
How did we get to a point where one of the two major parties is actually going to nominate a man whose speeches call for the dismantling of the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth amendments to our Constitution? Are we so far down the rabbit hole that we’ll actually sell out the rule of law for guns and anger?
Trump has from the start of his campaign sparked controversy with statements, actions, and proposals that disregard the First Amendment. He and his aides have created blacklists of journalists, and the candidate has expressed an interest inrewriting libel laws in order to intimidate, punish, and potentially silence critics of powerful individuals and interests. Trump has, as well, proposed schemes to discriminate against Muslims and to spy on mosques and neighborhoods where Muslims live—with steady disregard for the amendment’s guarantee of protection for America’s diverse religious communities.
But that’s just the beginning of Trump’s assaults on the Constitution. Trump has encouraged the use of torture and blatantly disregarded privacy protections that have been enshrined in the founding document since the 18th century. He has attacked the basic premises of a constitutionally defined separation of powers, with rhetorical assaults on individual jurists and the federal judiciary so extreme that House Speaker Paul Ryan described one such attack as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” He has proposed instituting religious tests. He has shown open and consistent disregard for the promise that all Americans will receive equal protection under the law.
Many of us have long harbored the idea that today’s Republican Party only cares about the idea of a Second Amendment on steroids and 
the rest of our civil liberties and rights should be damned. The realities of what I used to believe were brief moments of paranoia are just on full display this week. Have you seen the pictures of the up-armored bicycle police in Cleveland? I mean, how Clockwork Orange is that? Don’t even get me started on the entire idea of letting folks with assault rifles into the protest pits to strut around like dildo-toting S&M bondage RPers who are likely trigger happy. We just had three police officers ambushed and killed in Baton Rouge and the response is to let more crazies out on the streets with guns? Really? Really?
Hours after the head of Cleveland’s police union pleaded with the governorto suspend Ohio’s open-carry laws during the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump’s spokesperson told ThinkProgress she is “not nervous at all” that people are walking around the city with assault weapons.
“I am recommending that people follow the law,” Katrina Pierson said Sunday when asked whether she believes people should arm themselves in the convention zone. Under Ohio law, residents over 21 years old who legally own a firearm can openly carry it in public.
In light of the shooting and death of three police officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday, the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association asked for an emergency suspension of the state’s open-carry law for the duration of the Republican National Convention.
“We are sending a letter to Gov. [John] Kasich requesting assistance from him,” union president Stephen Loomis told CNN. “He could very easily do some kind of executive order or something — I don’t care if it’s constitutional or not at this point.” Kasich denied the union’s request.
The violence in Louisiana on Sunday was only the latest in a series of deadly clashes between police and civilians over the past few weeks. When an angry, heavily-armed civilian began shooting at police during a Dallas Black Lives Matter protest earlier this month, the state’s open-carry law made it difficult for police to track down the assailant. Officers mistook at least one legally armed resident for a suspect, and the proliferation of guns made it more difficult for them to determine who posed a threat.
In the weeks leading up to the RNC, Cleveland officials expressed concern that Ohio’s law, like Texas’, would create a dangerous and hectic environment outside the convention.
I’m going to put up a few links about what’s been going down in my state but I really have gone past words at some level. I have a few scattered thoughts. First, the two most recent shooters–while being black men–remind me more of Timothy McVeigh than anything coming from BLM. These recent institutional shooters all have a military background and appear to have spent extensive time in theater over in the Middle East.
The Dallas police shooter was an army Vet and a “loner”. The Baton Rouge Shooter was a former Marine. Here’s a list of 22 serial killers with military backgrounds. Are we really doing a good job of identifying vets with problems and helping them before setting them loose on society again? Don’t we owe them and ourselves something at all? If we broke them, shouldn’t we fix them or at least help them in some way to cope with their experiences?
There’s a lot of studies and work that’s been done that show PTSD contributes to violence. Are we just beginning to see some more of the real costs of invading Iraq and Afghanistan and sustaining a brutal ground war?
At the end of their 15-month tour in Iraq, the Lethal Warriors returned to Fort Carson with an impressive battlefield record, having cleared one of the worst parts of Baghdad, in some cases digging up IEDs with little more than screwdrivers and tire irons. Unfortunately, the Lethal Warriors achieved a kind of notoriety that was less for their battlefield exploits than for the battalion’s connection to a string of murders. In December 2007 two soldiers from the unit, Robert James and Kevin Shields, were killed, and three fellow soldiers were charged with murder. The killings were part of a larger pattern of violence extending back to 2005, including 11 murders, in what was the largest killing spree involving a single army base in modern U.S. history.
The increased violence around Fort Carson began at the start of the Iraq war. A 126-page Army report known as an “Epidemiological Consultation” released in 2009 found that the murder rate around the Army’s third-largest post had doubled and that the number of rape arrests had tripled. As David Philipps wrote in Lethal Warriors, his 2010 book about the crime spree, “In the year after the battalion returned from Iraq, the per-capita murder rate for this small group of soldiers was a hundred times greater than the national average.” Tellingly, 2-12’s post-traumatic stress disorder rate was more than three times that of an equivalent unit that had served in a less violent part of Iraq. The EPICON summarized all this in classic bureaucratic language, noting dully that there was “a possible association between increasing levels of combat exposure and risk for negative behavioral outcomes.”
Put another way, war has a way of bringing out the dark side in people.
Our institutions seem to do be doing that to a lot of people. Combine that with easy access to military grade weapons and candidates whose stump speeches bring on anger and resentment and you’ve just got some kind of accelerant to death and violence imho anyway. Mother Jones has started to keep a database on mass shootings and the profiles of the perpetrators is really quite enlightening. This is from 2012 to get you situated. Here’s the list of the deadliest Mass shootings from 1984 to 2016. The US is resplendent with well-armed rampage killers. Many of them are trained and experienced killers, quite damaged, and have easy access to weapons.
This is a 2013 Wired article that shows that a lot of the killings at that time were associated with folks with no military experience at all. A lot of these killers have a fascination with military life styles but that is more along the lines of militias rather than the US military.
The basic pattern found by the New Jersey DHS fusion center, and obtained by Public Intelligence (.PDF), is one of a killer who lashes out at his co-workers. Thirteen out of the 29 observed cases “occurred at the workplace and were conducted by either a former employee or relative of an employee,” the November report finds. His “weapon of choice” is a semiautomatic handgun, rather than the rifles that garnered so much attention after Newtown. The infamous Columbine school slaying of 1999 is the only case in which killers worked in teams: they’re almost always solo acts — and one-off affairs. In every single one of them, the killer was male, between the age of 17 and 49.
They also don’t have military training. Veterans are justifiably angered by the Hollywood-driven meme of the unhinged vet who takes out his battlefield stress on his fellow Americans. (Thanks, Rambo.) In only four of the 29 cases did the shooter have any affiliation with the U.S. military, either active or prior at the time of the slaying, and the fusion center doesn’t mention any wartime experience of the killers. Yet the Army still feels the need to email reporters after each shooting to explain that the killer never served.
How will these recent, targeted shootings of police change our ideas of mass, rampage shooters? The Baton Rouge shooter has left a huge manifesto on various social media outlets that will likely be analyzed by crime profilers and psychologists for some time.
Long posted dozens of videos and podcasts on his webpage “Convos With Cosmo” in addition to regularly tweeting and posting on Twitter and Instagram under the pseudonym “Cosmo Setepenra.”
In a video titled “Convos With Cosmo on Protesting, Oppression, and how to deal with Bullies” that was posted a week before Sunday’s shooting, he rants about “fighting back” against “bullies” and discussed the killings of black men at the hands of the police, referencing the death of Sterling, who was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge earlier this month.
No matter what kinds of lessons we learn about motives or triggers to these kinds of horrible shootings, the one thing we do know is that we have scads of damaged men that have easy access to incredibly powerful weapons wrecking havoc on our communities. We also know that there is a hard core group of gun fetishists and profiteers that don’t give a damn about that. While ignoring the perpetual drip drip drip of lost rights from other amendments, the second amendment is being hyped, dosed, and morphed into something that it was never meant to be. The Republican party is complicit to each and every murder victim. Machine Guns are not protected by the Second Amendment.
A Texas man who sued the federal government because it wouldn’t approve his application to manufacture a machine gun doesn’t have a constitutional right to possess the automatic weapon, an appeals court ruled.
Jay Hollis sought permission to convert his AR-15, a popular semi-automatic firearm, into an M16 — an automatic firearm that is banned under federal law, except for official use or lawfully obtained pre-1986 models.
After he was rejected, Hollis mounted a constitutional challenge to the Gun Control Act of 1968 — which Congress amended in 1986 to make it illegal to possess or transfer newly manufactured machine guns. Among other things, he argued that an “M-16 is the quintessential militia-styled arm for the modern day.”
In a unanimous ruling issued Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected Hollis’ arguments, categorically noting that “machine guns are not protected arms under the Second Amendment.”
The court explained that the leading Supreme Court precedent on the right to keep and bear arms, 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, only protected individual handgun possession for “defense of hearth and home.”
“Today … ordinary military weaponry is far more advanced than the weapons typically found at home and used for (self)-defense,” the court said, adding that machine guns are “dangerous and unusual,” and nothing like what militias might have used at the founding of the republic.
“Heller rejected a functionalist interpretation of the Second Amendment premised on the effectiveness of militia service,” the court of appeals said.
Aided by a number of gun rights groups, Hollis had pressed a number of other arguments — that anything that is “ordinary military equipment” is protected, that the Second Amendment really exists to allow a rebellion against the government, and that machine guns aren’t really “dangerous and unusual.”
The 5th Circuit was largely unimpressed, calling the last argument “tantamount to asking us to overrule the Supreme Court.”
We’ve got some major dysfunction in this country that can’t be more clearly represented than by the toxic Trump/Pence ticket.The problem is that a huge portion of our citizenship feels so disenfranchised that they seem to be in search of the end times. Their viewpoints appear to be funded and shaped by the very folks that are making this happen. The one thing that’s discouraged me most is that leftists are playing into a similar narrative.
![Title: BLADE RUNNER ¥ Pers: SANDERSON, WILLIAM / HANNAH, DARYL ¥ Year: 1982 ¥ Dir: SCOTT, RIDLEY ¥ Ref: BLA040BT ¥ Credit: [ LADD COMPANY/WARNER BROS / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ]](https://skydancingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/blade-runner2.jpg?w=300&h=200)
It seems unlikely that Trump will be president. I’d like to think that Hillary Clinton will be our shero. But, without a full functioning set of government institutions, how are we going to get beyond the Thunderdome? Why are we electing officials whose goal in life appear to be sabotaging our country? If most people reject Donald Trump, why do we have a Speaker Paul Fucking Ryan whose favorite dystopian fiction writer has an overwhelmingly negative impact our US Policy?
As the GOP convention gets underway in Cleveland today, three national polls released over the weekend showed Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump: A CNN poll putting Clinton up by 49-42; an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll putting her up by 46-41; and a Washington Post/ABC News poll putting her up by 47-43.
But buried beneath the toplines is evidence of another dynamic that gets at something important about the state of this race: While both Clinton and Trump are very unpopular, large majorities in two of these polls believe that only one of them is qualified for the presidency, and equally large majorities believe that the other one is not.
The new WaPo poll finds, for instance, that Americans say by 59-39 that Clinton is “qualified to serve as president,” but they also say by 60-37 that Trump is “not qualified to serve as president.”
Paul Ryan :: Ayn Désastre :: The Sinking of the S.S. Prospérité
Again, my hope is that Trump/Pence go down yugely and take the likes of Paul Ryan with them. You can’t have one set of them without the others who basically feel the same way but signal their intent with weasel words.
So, obviously, we down here in Louisiana are reeling from all the recent killings. I think some of the policy prescriptions are obvious otherwise it will be upward and onward with “a bit of the old ultraviolence.”
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: A Change is Gonna Come
Posted: July 11, 2016 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Black Lives Matter | Tags: Baton Rouge, BRPD 55 Comments
Good Afternoon!
I’ve been trying to sort out the events that happened over the weekend in Baton Rouge which is the capitol of the state where I have lived for over 20 years. I know it’s easy for a lot of folks to look at this as a southern problem given that this is Louisiana and Ferguson was Missouri and Dallas is Texas and you “know” the history and the attitudes of many Southern Americans. But, we’re also seeing the situation in St Paul, Minnesota. The outrageous rates of incarceration of Black Americans and black men specifically is actually worse in the Northern than in the Southern USA so it’s an American problem.
This is a problem with institutional racism that is poisoning our country and our laws. It’s killing our neighbors and stealing their future. It’s perpetuating intense animus and distrust between American police and Black Americans. It is all our problem and it is all our responsibility to end this and end the unequal treatment of Black Americans by all aspects of the Criminal Justice System including the police.
One in nine black children has had a parent behind bars. One in thirteen black adults can’t vote because of their criminal records. Discrimination on the job market deepens racial inequality. Not only does a criminal record make it harder to get hired, but studies find that a criminal record is more of a handicap for black men. Employers are willing to give people second chances, but less so if they’re black.
“Jim Crow and slavery were caste systems. So is our current system of mass incarceration,” wrote civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander in her 2010 book “The New Jim Crow.”
These consequences entangle the broader economy. Yet, many people who study employment and the job market haven’t been paying attention to the criminal justice system. That’s a big mistake, according to Western.
“From my point of view,” he says, “mass incarceration is so deeply connected to American poverty and economic inequality.”
Treatment by militarized police forces of Black Americans is well documented and is now playing out on TV much the way the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights protests did on Nightly News in the 1960s. It’s reaching a critical point with the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile near St. Paul, Minnesota whose deaths were captured clearly on cameras and–in Sterling’s case–from several angles. It’s difficult to ignore the factors surrounding their deaths. Last week, a total of four black men were killed by police. One happened in Houston and the other was in New York. So, we’ve only heard about half of the incidents.
I‘m going to focus on the protests in Baton Rouge because I’ve had friends on the ground reporting from there, protesting from there, and living there. I also have access to the local media and I have a lot at stake since it appears that the Baton Rouge Police Department has violated the civil rights of protesters and the property rights of a local home owner. This will undoubtedly mean that there will be trials. These folks are my neighbors. This is my community and civil rights violations cannot stand.
Ieshia Evans prior to her arrest on Saturday in Baton Rouge. Taken on July 9, 2016 by Jonathan Bachman for Reuters.
It’s very difficult to talk about much of what happened last night because the BRPD response was so over the top that I felt immediately propelled to a much younger self watching the so-called 1968 Race Riots from the window of our station wagon in 1968 while driving to my Grandfather’s rest home through The Paseo area of KCMO. Between that and watching the NBC nightly news, I learned that Black Americans experience a very different reality than I did and even at that age I knew that was wrong.
I had friends on the ground in Baton Rouge on Sunday which was even more disturbing to me. One of my friends was using Periscope Live to broadcast and describe the events. Another has been on a freelance assignment for NYDN. Another was there as a free lance reporter for The Daily Beast in places where even journalists were arrested and threatened. He tweeted early on that he was being threatened and corralled . One of the most amazing things was that DeRay McKesson was arrested along with a Breitbart Reporter on the first night. Both are convinced their arrests for basically blocking traffic were unconstitutional although each blame a different root for the cause.
Breitbart reporter Lee Stranahan on Saturday night found himself housed in the general prison population of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison after getting arrested while covering ongoing protests related to the death of a black man last week. But rather than blaming the police for arresting him, Stranahan, who has worked for the conservative outlet since 2010, said Monday that his arrest is symptomatic of a larger problem with the city’s Democratic mayor and Louisiana’s Democratic governor.
“You know, obviously, anybody who’s heard me on the show or reads my work knows that there’s nobody who’s a more strident supporter of law enforcement or critic of Black Lives Matter than I am,” Stranahan began to explain on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily,” discussing his work on an upcoming documentary.
One HuffPost Reporter was threatened by a young police woman with a semiautomatic. This was on Saturday night when the BRPD responded to protesters in a neighborhood looking like an invading army. Let it be noted that these were peaceful protests and that the several hundreds of people arrested were charged with things like blocking roads and evading arrest.
One officer, armed with an assault weapon, deliberately aimed the gun at protesters and journalists, forcing them to retreat. HuffPost senior crime reporter David Lohrwas among them.
Lohr arrived in Baton Rouge earlier this week to help capture moments from the Black Lives Matter protests that took over the city’s streets. He launched a live-stream on the HuffPost Black Voices Facebook page around 11 p.m. that captured some tense moments, including police making several arrests and one protester getting shocked by a stun gun. In one jarring moment, Lohr captured an officer pointing her assault rifle at protesters ― and at him.
“An officer just pointed a machine gun at me,” Lohr says in the live-stream. “I’m not quite sure what that female officer was doing; she pointed an assault rifle at us.”
I was watching the Facebook page of my friend, fellow blogger, and my pets’ favorite mommy substitute from the days when I went to Seattle to be with my father as 
she documented the events from Sunday. Here is the last of yesterday’s accounts from Margaret Coble.
ok, i really need to get to bed so that i can walk the dogs tomorrow, but i’m wound up from my day and also my ac in my bedroom isn’t working so i’m sweaty hot. but i could scroll endlessly trying to catch up on all that i couldn’t see today and all that was going on in other locations in BR and around the country. but i gotta at least try to get some sleep.
i didn’t go there today thinking there would really be any conflict. i was going to a peaceful march and rally organized by youth activists of BR. though the march took off a little earlier than the time they’d posted widely, it otherwise went off without a hitch, mobilizing thousands of people to march to the capital through the largely empty downtown area. the rally was great, with several brilliant young people speaking truth, offering poems and prayers, and just generally being so strong and amazing. and then we marched back to the methodist church where we’d first assembled, back to government street.
and then, there was no plan. folks stood around in the parking lot; some folks lined govt st. with their posters and banners and chanted; and eventually, someone got on a bullhorn and said why don’t we march to airline hwy. (i’m assuming they were going to the BRPD, where there had been a protest going on for much of the afternoon already.) so some folks took off down govt to do just that, but not everyone had heard and lots of folks were just standing around confused. some folks, mostly white, started to leave to go home.
Tom Nolan @ThomasNolan Criminology Professor @ Merrimack College, 27-year veteran (former lieutenant) @ Boston police department
we spent a few minutes google mapping to try to figure out how far it was away and whether we should maybe just drive there so we didn’t have to walk back (we are old and had already marched a lot)… so we headed towards our car and started making our way to that destination. when suddenly, about a dozen cop cars came whizzing past us in the other direction, going back to where we’d just come from, and it took us only a few beats to realize what was happening – they were going to cut the marchers off, keep them from getting to airline. (i also think they maybe thought the group was going to block the interstate, but i never heard that as a plan.)
so we turned around and headed back, taking back streets cuz govt was now blocked off, and we parked in some random business parking lot but with an easy exit access. and then we all quickly figured out how to use fb live cuz none of us had used it before and i’d forgotten to download periscope onto my phone… and well, you saw the rest. (and if you didn’t, just scroll back on my timeline.)
i can’t unsee what i saw today. it’s not that i never believed it before or didn’t get it – because obviously i did – but it’s kind of driven home in a whole new way when you’re right there seeing the line of riot cops coming at you a few feet away. and when you see a random protestor who is maybe chanting louder and angrier than others around him suddenly get ambushed by several cops who came outta nowhere, specifically targeting him amongst a crowd of others, plowing him and his partner down to the ground and violently arresting him. one of the cops pushed me out of the way as he was making his way to him. they came from behind us, as we were standing across the street from the line of riot cops. it was so sneaky. and unnecessary.
pretty much all of what i witnessed today was unnecessary. NO ONE in that crowd today was violent in any way. people were just exercising their constitutional rights to protest and make themselves heard. peacefully. and at some point, even on someone’s private property they had been invited onto. none of it mattered. the cops didn’t want us there, they’d had enough, so they used that awful siren/alarm thing that hurts your ears (wish i’d remembered earplugs – put that on the protest list of things to bring), eventually used some tear gas, tased the fuck out of some poor guy that they took down really violently, and brought in the hummer/tanks and riot gear, shields and all. it was all just so ridiculous really, but yet, ridiculous isn’t a word i can use when i witnessed people get unnecessarily hurt and arrested. last night i know they arrested a few journalists; today, they arrested at least one legal observer (really? wtf?!!). i don’t know what the total count was but it was a goodly amount.
i just don’t understand it. they created a dangerous situation where there was none to begin with. boys with their military toys is what i saw. testosterone poisoning in action. this is not what policing should be, if there should be any policing at all. WE are paying their salaries. to harass and arrest us. and, well, if you’re black, maybe kill, too.
watch the videos that people have posted. look at the pictures. read the first-hand accounts, not the stupid news channels’ accounts, but the social media accounts from real people who were there. i know what i saw. i can’t ever unsee that. and while there were maybe only a few moments where i personally ever felt unsafe – of course, my white skin privilege in action (but also we worked hard to not be up in the mix of it – none of us had gone there today intending to get arrested) – it was a scary scene there today where there didn’t need to be. at all.
i hope everyone who was arrested is ok. we did our part by identifying the guy and his partner who got arrested next to us and called the legal guild on their behalf. and gave their friend who rode there with them, someone we knew who was wandering around looking for them, a ride home, since she no longer had one.
[exhale]
thank you everyone who checked in throughout the day, offered advice and prayers and sent protective woo. it was helpful knowing there were lots of you out there tracking us.
ok. now i try to go to sleep.
While I was very afraid for the health and safety of folks that I knew attended the protest, I was even more concerned about this black woman who gave permission for about 100 people to stand on her property. Their first amendment rights were violated. Her fourth amendments rights were decimated.
This woman had her constitutional rights violated — her “right to pursue happiness” in her own home was violated by out-of-control police officers, who appeared as if they were conducting urban warfare in Fallujah, Iraq.
And, let’s be clear, the homeowner was committing no crimes.
Can you imagine this kind of police response to an out-of-control pool party in a wealthy white suburb — with underage drinking, weed smoking and coke snorting, and prodigious noise violations? Nope!
I want to be crystal clear: American police officers are absolutely out-of-control.
Even when hundreds — thousands? — of people were engaging in violent behavior in Marseille, France following a football game, the French police showed more restraint than American police — in Ferguson, Baton Rouge, and New York City — show when confronted by a peaceful protest, where the only “crime” committed is blocking traffic for a few hours.
I truly believe, having traveled all over the world, including in a number of post-conflict countries, that American police are some of the world’s least restrained.
And, in communities like Baton Rouge with a history of social exclusion, racism, segregation and slavery, I suspect the police response is pathological: racist officers triggered to commit acts of violence against black people refusing to “know their place.”
Ironically, though, it’s American police officers that must “know their place.” Until the Justice Department starts dropping the hammer on local police departments, we’ll continue to see the basic constitutional rights of minority citizens violated, and we’ll continue to see execution-style deaths of black men and women, boys and girls.
The job of a police officer is to protect the constitutional rights of citizens — life, free speech, property. The job of a police officer is not to demand obedience. I truly believe many, many American officers fail to understand this crucial distinction.
NYDN Cover taken by my very talented friend Megan Braden-Perry. Please go read the story on the Alton Sterling shooting.
This is getting long and it’s not as cogent as I really wanted it to be because there are so many more things to write about and say here including the experience of DeRay and others. I’m going to just let some of this soak in for awhile as I work. I did want to get the post up. I did want to do some of this while my shock, awe, grief, worry and frustration was raw and evident.
We should never take anything for granted here because there are folks that really don’t know what they’re doing out there in positions of authority. Just as women need to be warned not to do things to invite rape, black children are warned not to do things to attract police attention. This is similar but not quite the same because black parents are teaching black children to be afraid of their own government and the people they pay to protect them.
I can relate to this on the level that I adjust my behavior and dress to avoid sexual assault, harassment, etc. but that’s by one man or a group of men and at worst they’re colleagues or bosses or part of a social group. It’s not a huge group of people that are part of our government hired to serve and protect. It’s highly systemic. It’s not just one or two bad actors. How can any one think that having to teach your kids to behave differently because of your own government’s unconstitutional behavior is anything but the repressive effects of pernicious institutional racism?
No black person is safe or immune. Not one. (H/T to Lester Perryman.) Abhorrent treatment and disrespect doesn’t depend on their profession, their education, their job status or anything other than pigmentation. That is the ultimate message and impact of the statement we should all feel deeply: BLACK LIVES MATTER!
We divided our lives between a house in a liberal New York suburb and an apartment on Park Avenue, sent our three kids to a diverse New York City private school, and outfitted them with the accoutrements of success: preppy clothes, perfect diction and that air of quiet graciousness. We convinced ourselves that the economic privilege we bestowed on them could buffer these adolescents against what so many black and Latino children face while living in mostly white settings: being profiled by neighbors, followed in stores and stopped by police simply because their race makes them suspect.
But it happened nevertheless in July, when I was 100 miles away.
It was a Tuesday afternoon when my 15-year-old son called from his academic summer program at a leafy New England boarding school and told me that as he was walking across campus, a gray Acura with a broken rear taillight pulled up beside him. Two men leaned out of the car and glared at him.
“Are you the only nigger at Mellon Academy*?” one shouted.
Certain that he had not heard them correctly, my son moved closer to the curb, and asked politely, “I’m sorry; I didn’t hear you.”
But he had heard correctly. And this time the man spoke more clearly. “Only …nigger,” he said with added emphasis.
My son froze. He dropped his backpack in alarm and stepped back from the idling car. The men honked the horn loudly and drove off, their laughter echoing behind them.
Black Lives Matter. ALL of them!! No American should experience this level of civil rights violations let alone an entire class of people.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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