Tag Archives: Police

Political Rants

Doing the wrong thing. Again.

We live in a violent society. I think that’s as close to a truism as anything can be. Mass shootings are a fact of life in America, and they happen with a sickening regularity. Gun violence takes a very heavy toll, and violent crime has spiked since the pandemic – specifically, homicides over the course of 2020. It was, of course, a year of exceptions, though many pundits and prognosticators have claimed that the increase is largely the result of police going into a kind of defensive crouch in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising.

I’ve no doubt that police departments have pulled back. Some made a point of doing so after previous high-profile deaths of people of color in police custody. On the podcast Why Is This Happening?, Patrick Sharkey talks about the various factors behind this rise in violent crime. Less aggressive policing is one, but he makes the point that a lot of community-based services that contribute significantly to reducing crime were shut down during the pandemic.

This, in some ways, reflects the divide between right and left perspectives on how best to address crime. Not surprisingly to anyone who follows this blog, I come down on the left side of this question, and I do so with what I consider to be really good reasons.

Fighting Crime With Crime

The idea that, as a society, we should reduce crime by over-policing disadvantaged communities is cynical beyond belief. Yes, you can marginally depress crime by mass arresting people, throwing them in jail for long terms, harassing people of color, etc., but in so doing you do irreparable violence to entire communities. That in itself is criminal far beyond the level of anything you might hope to prevent.

Other approaches work better, frankly – mutual aid, community-based counseling and mentorship services, nutrition programs, housing support, direct aid to families and individuals, etc. They also build communities, not destroy them.

Dirty Harry Syndrome

The advocates for hyper-aggressive policing work to create the impression that cases like the murder of George Floyd are necessary by-products of the service police provide. Sure, goes the argument, occasionally someone gets killed who probably shouldn’t have died, but that’s the price you pay for having safe streets. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few skulls … I mean, eggs, right?

There’s a visceral appeal to this argument – a kind of cathartic, give-them-what-they-deserve attitude that makes a lot of white people feel right with the world. There’s a reason why movies like Dirty Harry were big hits – it’s a very attractive narrative for people who don’t do a lot of thinking.

The Political Economy of Policing

Of course, we know that political careers are made on hyper-aggressive anti-crime politics. That’s true of everyone from your local DA to the President of the United States. It’s a lot easier to get taxpayers to pay for MRAPs and sophisticated weapons for the cops than it is to get them to fund after-school programs and free breakfast for kids of color. And even though aggressive policing is a bad solution to the problem of crime, it’s an easier sell for politicians than the much more effective and less destructive approach that involves supportive community services.

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of money in expanding the police/prison state, just like there was a lot of money in slavery. That’s why defund causes so much consternation – it hits them where it hurts. Very insightful on the part of BLM to work that out. We need to carry that knowledge with us as we seek real solutions to this dysfunctional system.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

New pilot.

As I write this, the details are still filtering in from Georgia about the shooting at the massage parlors in and near Atlanta. Yet another sickening crime carried out by some dude who bought a gun the same day he decided to use it on a bunch of innocent people. That’ll be $600, young man. Enjoy the pistol! Want bullets with that? Goddamn, what a crazy country we live in. Still, the part of this incident that made me scratch my head was when the police told us that the suspect had said the crime was not racially motivated. (Of course, this was followed up by the officer’s comment that the alleged shooter was having a bad day.) My first reaction to that was …. since when do you care what the suspect says? The answer, of course, is obvious – the suspect is white. Can you picture them coming out and saying something similar about a black person in custody? Neither can I.

I’m listening to a podcast called Resistance, and though I’m not crazy about the corporate advertising (for instance, I now know way more about the latest Mitsubishi compact SUV than I ever needed to know), they do really good work. The episode I’m listening to, entitled “My Somebody”, focuses on a young man from Baltimore who is incarcerated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can tell you, the police didn’t give a damn what this fellow had to say about his guilt or innocence. They shot him in the face and stood guard around his hospital bed. But then … he’s black. As for the white guy who shot up three massage parlors in Georgia this week, well, he was having a bad day, according to some random (white) police captain known for sharing anti-Asian posts on Facebook. I mean, seriously …. they don’t even bother trying to hide it anymore, do they?

This is what underlies the movement for de-funding and even abolishing the police. If you are a white person, and you grew up in, say, a town like my old home town, which was almost entirely white at that time, the police are there to protect you. In other words, they are there to protect you from the nasty, non-white people down the street in Utica or Albany or Rochester or wherever. If, on the other hand, you are a person of color and you live in a community of color, the police are not there to protect you. They are there to contain you, to detain you, to keep you in your place. They are there to watch you like a hawk. That is why so many black families don’t dial up the cops when stuff goes wrong. It doesn’t matter if there are black police officers, or a black police chief, or a black mayor … or hell, a black president. Like the Pentagon, law enforcement is like a big killing machine. You can put a different pilot in there, and they may drive the killing machine more slowly, even nudge it into reverse, but it’s still going to do what it’s designed to do. The abuse is a feature, not a bug.

There’s a lot to be said about criminal justice reform, and we’ve barely even begun to have that conversation. But if we’re ever going to even attempt to fix these problems, we must first acknowledge the nature of the system we have. That is a prerequisite for moving forward.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

First Day.

The dust is settling on election 2020, at least for some of us. The Trump team is still in full-blown denial, and most of the rest of the Republican establishment is rolling right along with them. In the parking lot of a landscaping company in Pennsylvania, presidential lawyer and confidante Rudy Giuliani scoffed at the idea that the networks would project the winner of a presidential election … like they have for my entire life and probably longer. Rudy seems to think only the courts can decide elections, but to be fair, I think his mind might have been on the porn shop next door when he was saying that. Strange, strange man.

Unfortunately, Rudy isn’t the only one smoking crack these days. I found this in my daily briefing from the New York Times (The Morning, November 9):

Democrats are almost certainly fooling themselves if they conclude that America has turned into a left-leaning country that’s ready to get rid of private health insurance, defund the police, abolish immigration enforcement and vote out Republicans because they are filling the courts with anti-abortion judges. Many working-class voters — white, Hispanic, Black and Asian-American — disagree with progressive activists on several of those issues.

First off, the framing of some of these issues is straight out of the GOP election playbook, though I’ve heard conservative Democrats use some of the same language. “Get rid of private health insurance” is their way of saying “single payer” or “Medicare for all,” which in point of fact is a pretty popular policy proposal, and I believe none of the Democrats who supported M4A were defeated at the polls last Tuesday. Now, if the candidates tromped around their district saying only that they wanted to abolish private health insurance, the voters might have reacted differently – hard to say. (If they’ve had the same kind of experience I’ve had with private insurers, they might be tempted.) And “abolish immigration enforcement”? Seriously? That’s in the same category as Trump’s cries of how Democrats want “open borders.” No one on the Democratic debate stage said they want to abolish immigration enforcement.

Generally, though, the New York Times appears to be making the same mistake as these neoliberal Democrats in that they seem to think the electoral challenge they face is an ideological one. The fact is, many of the left’s core policies are pretty popular. The primary problem Democrats have is that they don’t know how to organize their base. Doug Jones, Democratic senator from Alabama and no liberal, complains that the party invests in candidates, not in voters, and that is in essence what AOC has been saying. The House leadership seems obsessed with preserving its own party-internal primacy; their entire electoral strategy is based on serving their big donors and not making a difference for their constituents. My guess is that they’re relieved that there likely will not be a Democratic senate, as that would put them on the spot to actually pass something that would have a good chance of becoming law.

Let’s face it, Democrats. If we keep making this same election post-mortem mistake, we will keep losing. Listen to the younger leaders in your party, for chrissake.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.