The Stonewall MS killing

One of the killings of an unarmed black man by a white policeman under suspicious circumstances that is now in the news occurred in Stonewall MS, in Clarke County, the county where I grew up.

I probably went to high school with some relative of the mayor there, Glenn Cook. Heck, he might even be a distant cousin or something.

But he doesn't come off so smooth in the interview reported by Zachary Oren Smith in Stonewall Mayor Reacts to Sanders Case, NAACP Wants Inquiry Jackson Free Press 07/23/2015.

This comment, for instance, doesn't show a lot of self-awareness:

Cook said, "There is safety and security for everyone in Stonewall," and that he believes his office is approachable. "Most the people in this town know me well enough to think they can approach me to talk about anyone."

He added, "I've not had one person come to my office to sit down with me and speak to me since the incident."

Well, Mister Glenn, if nobody comes to talk to you, then, uh, how do you conclude that everybody thinks you're totally approachable?

He also makes a don't-think-of-an-elephant gaffe: "'If I was an outsider and I just read a story from some of the local news agency and things that people have posted (online), I would think we were back in the '60s—that's not the case in Stonewall,' he told the Jackson Free Press by phone on Wednesday."

Which reminds people that know anything about this that "back in the '60s," Suthun officials basically said the same kind of things. Hey, the whites and the coloreds all git along jus' fine down heah, but you wouldn't know that from the way that the Yankee press talks about us.

Also, this is probably not the picher you want of your mayor out there if you're trying to defend your cops from suspicions of murdering an unarmed black man for no good reason:

Now, Mayor Cook may be a perfectly decent guy. I haven't followed this case closely and I don't know much about him. But, hey, that's a photo that shouts "smug good-ole-boy white guy."

Should people stage protests when police officers are killed in the line of duty?

Adam Johnson addresses that question in the none-too-subtlety titled Dear Idiots On My Facebook Feed: Here's Why Calling for Protests Over Slain Cops Makes No Sense AlterNet 05/10/2015.

This one line from his piece sums it up well: "It’s simple: one doesn't protest something the system already agrees is bad."

As Johnson points out, people who grump about why there are no protests over cops being killed are making a political point, trying to use this to discredit or demean protests over police murdering unarmed black people.

The typical response among white people to such incidents is, at best, one of non-concern, or only momentary concern.

On the other hand, white people are happy to post videos like this celebrating police in general. In this video, a group of white people, mostly women, with a couple of token minorities thrown in, are seen individually writing thank you signs with Sharpies on pieces of brown cardboard (?!) expressing their general thanks to the police for existing. One white cop is seen being adored by a white, blond woman. Another is shown walking around a room with kids' toys.

To all our law enforcement friends around the world - we see you. LIKE and SHARE this amazing video. #weseeyou #thinblueline (Humanizing the Badge)
Posted by 2015 World Police & Fire Games on Tuesday, February 3, 2015

In other words, the lives of police officers matter to white people.

The lives of unarmed black people gunned down by police for no good reason? Not so much.

Two police officers in Hattiesburg MS were shot and killed during a traffic stop this past weekend, one white and one African-American, Benjamin Deen and Liquori Tate. It made nationwide and internationals news. ('I've been praying it's not true' Daily Mail [UK] 05/09/2015) Here's one article from yesterday: Jack Madison, Athens [AL] police chief offers support to Hattiesburg PD WSFA 12 05/12/2015. The article notes, "Coincidentally, this is National Police Week. Thursday at 5 p.m., the public is invited to the Limestone County Courthouse for a memorial service honoring the nine officers killed in the line of duty in the county."

California Gov. Jerry Brown recently attended a ceremony honoring police officers killed in the line of duty: Jeremy White, AM Alert: Jerry Brown and others honor fallen peace officers Sacramento Bee 05/03/2015. White reports:

In the executive branch, Gov. Jerry Brown will be back in Sacramento to honor 13 peace officers slain in the line of duty last year. Family members will meet with Brown before heading to the 11 a.m. ceremony at the California Peace Officers Memorial, where Attorney General Kamala Harris and Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye will also be in attendance.

Also being commemorated are five long-ago deaths. The most recent honoree, a South San Francisco cop, died in 1953; a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy named in the ceremony fell in 1881. That was back when the Brown family was somewhat new to California and the sources of the governor’s beloved history lessons were still unfolding in real time. [my emphasis]

A "fallen police officer" is still being very officially and publicly honored for his service 134 years after his death.

There are very public and very official rituals and ceremonies to acknowledge and mourn the killing of police officers, apart from those held by their own families. No one that I know of criticizes this. Even Westboro Baptist Church hasn't protested as police funerals, not that I've ever heard.

And no public officers cheer the killing of police officers or reflexively defend such killings. Nobody does, except possible career criminals and the occasional active urban guerrilla, if there are any of the later in the US in 2015. Maybe the occasional Sovereign Citizen, some of whom are among the cop-killers.

Here we have a story of a different kind of death, a young black schizophrenic woman, Natasha McKenna, murdered by police with a Taser while in police custody. She "was restrained with handcuffs behind her back, leg shackles and a mask when a sheriff’s deputy shocked her four times." (Tom Jackman and Justin Jouvenal, Fairfax jail inmate in Taser death was shackled Washington Post 04/11/2015)

Here's a report from Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks on that case, Restrained Schizophrenic Black Woman Tazed To Death In Virginia Prison 04/13/2015:

The Hattiesburg police officers who were killed have already had their deaths noted and mourned nationwide. (One of my childhood friends mentioned on Facebook that he had known the father of one of the officers killed.) Two black suspects are in custody. No one doubts that the police officers there will be committed to finding the killers and anyone who may have been criminally involved in it in some other way, like providing weapons illegally. No one doubts that prosecutors will go after the accused hard.

By dramatic contrast, no one familiar with the recent history of police brutality and murders committed by police imagines that the same thing can be automatically assumed about Natasha McKenna.

That's why it often takes protests by the community to force the justice system to act in many of these cases. Or federal intervention, which is more likely to happen if there is active community protest.

Will the Governor of Virginia in the year 2149 be commemorating and mourning the death of Natasha McKenna? Only if the country is considerably improved from what it is in 2015.

Kirsten West Savali was asking last week, When Will We Demand Justice for Natasha McKenna? The Root 05/04/2015.

No one needs to ask that question about Benjamin Deen and Liquori Tate. That process began the instant they were shot.

Conservative propaganda approach to justifying white police murdering black people

Now that Hillary Clinton's new Presidential campaign is officially underway along with the accompanying press dysfuction around it, Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby has something to work on that may be a little constructive.

But even though he's experienced at examining the Clinton Rules of journalism, I no longer trust even his shredding of media irresponsibility over the Clintons.

Because not only has he spent years echoing standard conservative attacks on the Mean Libruls. He's been doing it with the same kind of off-point hairsplitting and nitpicking the right wing uses. He nominally does it in liberal concern-troll terms. But it's pretty clear than on most issues he writes about he's conservative and is willing to employ frivolous conservative methods to smear the Mean Libruls.

And to smear the Bad Negroes and the Mean Libruls who support them. Even bad reporting on the Clintons doesn't inspire the kind of intensity he brings to anyone trying to see that justice in done in cases in which a white cop or cop-wannabe guns down a black person for no good reason. Trayvon Martin (Florida), Michael Brown (Ferguson), Walter Scott (North Charleston), the Howler heaps his scorn on Mean Libruls suggesting there might be anything wrong with those killings.

These are links to three concern-troll posts of his, in which he expresses his contempt for the Mean Libruls and Bad Negroes who suggest that something might be wrong with the North Charleston cop, Michael Slager, now facing criminal charges for his act, in having shot Walter Scott in the back and killing him: Part 1 (04/13/2015); Part 2 (04/14/2015); Part 3 (04/15/2015).

The liberal troll style is tedious. in the case of Scott's murder, the Howler writes, "Everyone on the face of the earth understands that this police conduct is wrong." But that doesn't stop him from pouring contempt on the Mean Libruls and Bad Negroes who go so far as to complain about it.

The content of those linked posts isn't worth much. I just wanted to mention two features of the standard conservative defense of white cops murdering black people for no good reason that those posts bring to mind: the Perfect Case and the elimination of time.

The Perfect Case doesn't exist. Even in the most seemingly clear-cut case of police misconduct, defenders of the action can come up with all sorts of mitigating circumstances and possibilities. We've seen this play out repeatedly in the more prominent cases of the last few years. The dead man had a record. Or he had said something weird recently that might mean he was crazy. Or the officer doing the killing had seen the dead man reach toward his waist. Or why would an innocent person run from the police? Or the black guy had mouthed off to the cop. Or he was selling cigarettes illegally on the street. Or he looked like a demon, as Darren Wilson told the grand jury about Michael Brown in the Ferguson case. And on and on.

The criminal justice system in the US requires the prosecution to prove its case against a defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. Not beyond any possible, conceivable or imaginable doubt. Because if the latter were the case, a person could only be found guilty based on a complete and voluntary confession.

But that is the standard that conservatives implicitly apply to civil rights protests over cases of police killing of black people. And they deride anyone who protests over such incidents for not having a Perfect Case.

In the real world, in places where police misconduct and hostility to the black community is chronic, waiting for the Perfect Case before demanding a proper investigation would mean never protesting at all, no matter how blatant the miscarriages of justice.

It's important to remember here that in the Martin, Brown and Scott deaths, and now with Freddie Gray in Baltimore, that what the organized protesters are normally demanding are a serious and honest criminal investigation, not some kind of summary justice. They are demanding that the legal system be made to work properly on behalf of the victims who can no longer speak for themselves.

But in a place where the justice system is not working properly for black citizens, it takes community pressure to make that happen.

Which brings me to the erasure of time, another conservative propaganda strategy in such cases. As important as the individual case is, the political and social meaning of incidents like the recent ones in Ferguson, in Tulsa, in North Charleston and in Baltimore cannot be understood without knowing something about the relationship of the police to the community in previous years.

In Ferguson, we know from the Justice Department's investigation that the police department there had run for year's as kind of a legal shakedown racket with routine abusive practices directed against the majority black population of that town.

The police in North Charleston had also been acting in an abusive way toward that community for years.

The Baltimore police department's attitudes and practices toward the poor black population seem to have been especially harsh over a long period of time.

In Tulsa, the sheriff's department had a flaky citizen deputies program they had been running for years that allowed the shurff's campaign donors to go out and play cops-and-robbers with loaded guns during actual police actions.

The conservative approach, reflected in part by the Howler's concern-troll versions, is to nitpick at the details of the individual case and to treat it as though the only important facts came within the few seconds around the fatal encounter.

For legal cases around the killings, the facts of those moments are critical. And what protesters and concerned commentators have been consistently demanding is that those facts be properly examined by the legal system and not swept under the rug.

Did Walter Scott in North Charleston have some reasonable, reality-based reason to run from a police officer before the bullet holes in the back of his dead body showed that he did? Did Michael Brown have reason to panic when suddenly approached by a member of the shakedown racket also known as the Ferguson Police Department? Did Freddie Gray have reason to run away from a seemingly random encounter with police before his fatally severed spine showed that he did? Did Eric Harris in Tulsa have some understable reason to run in fear from police before hobbyist cop Robert Bates shot him to death in the back when he was already on the ground under restraint?

But if you can focus on the narrow facts of the encounter between the cop and the now-dead black person and find some protester or commentator saying something that seems even a tiny bit unjustified based on conflicting accounts of the case at a given moment, you can ridicule them as trying to make something out of nothing. Or of being cynically dishonest.

In the practice of staying alive and healthy in an encounter with real existing police in the United States in 2015, it's not a good idea to run from police. It may be legal to do so. But we also know that there are far too many cops who will disregard the law to the point of murder. But Walter Scott, Michael Brown, Eric Harris and Freddie Gray did have rational reasons for running from the police officers who killed them, whether or not they were worried about being charged with something they had actually done. Trayvon Martin had good reason to fear for his life from the creepy armed white thug George Zimmerman who was stalking him. In retrospect, their responses probably weren't their optimal strategy for staying alive, since in all those cases they wound up dead.

But the police actions or lack thereof in all those cases were very legitimate matters for community concern and protest. And the legitimacy of that concern in such cases doesn't stand or fall on nitpicking the seconds before the fatal shot was fired, or the fatal chokehold applied, or the spine-severing blow was struck.

Obama and Hillary Clinton on Baltimore and police violence

I thought the way Hillary addressed the Baltimore situation was pretty good, because she talked about the issue of police brutality directly, although not using that phrase. She comes on at around 1:01:00 in this video, Hillary Clinton Keynotes 18th Annual Dinkins Forum 04/29/2015:

She also talked about the discriminatory effect of the criminal justice system as it actually works. Of course, "police reform" could become the "welfare reform" of the 2010s if it gets processed into some Bipartisan package to provide drones, more armored vehicles and new local surveillance authority to cities and counties. Or if it gets set up like the Republican ideas on immigration reform: better enforcement first (like the next 100 years) and actual reform after (when Hail freezes over).

But for now, it's a start.

I've included the text of President Obama's statement on Baltimore yesterday below. Ben Mathis-Lilley reports on it in Obama Calls Police Violence a “Crisis,” Condemns Mass Neglect of Poor Slate 08/28/2015.

Here are two news reports on Hillary's position:

• Jonathan Allen, Clinton urges criminal justice reform after Baltimore riots Reuters 04/29/2015
• Evan Halper, Hillary Clinton to call for end to 'mass incarceration' Los Angeles Times 04/29/2015

The respective party leaders in the Senate staked out seemingly classic positions (Harry Reid Defends Baltimore Protesters: 'Let's Not Pretend The System Is Fair' Huffington Post 04/28/2015):

"We cannot condone the violence we see in Baltimore, but we must not ignore the despair and hopelessness that gives rise to this kind of violence," Reid said on the Senate floor, condemning the violence in a way that seemed more dutiful than heartfelt. "So let’s condemn the violence, but let’s not ignore the underlying problem."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), meanwhile, was less interested in the root cause of the unrest, instead calling for law enforcement to crack down. "I hope the investigation into illegal behavior will be be concluded soon and those who've been engaged in criminal behavior will be promptly pursued and charged," McConnell said.

McConnell was referring not to the police officers involved in the killing of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody this month from a spinal injury, but rather to those in the streets. Reid, who is retiring at the end of 2016, put the focus on Gray, who was arrested after running from police, allegedly after making eye contact with an officer. "Mr. Gray’s death is the latest in a series of disturbing and unnecessary deaths of young men of color at the hands of police and vigilantes," Reid said.

Reid added that if he were a young boy today facing similar circumstances, he doesn't know how he would respond. "Let’s not pretend the path from poverty like the one I traveled is still available to everyone out there as long as they work hard," he said. "For hard work to bear fruit, there must be opportunity and there must be hope. I can't imagine what direction my life would have taken without the hope of the American dream.

"It doesn’t matter if you live in Searchlight or Las Vegas, in Baltimore or rural Maryland: When there is no hope, anger and despair move in," Reid said. "Let’s not pretend the system is fair. Let’s not pretend everything is okay."

Digby makes an excellent point about the risks in a narrative about underlying problems. And not the risk that the Republicans will channel Spiro Agnew circa 1969. They've been doing that for decades anyway.

In “The law is the enemy”: What RFK can remind America about police brutality Salon 04/29/2015, Digby writes:

Yes, it’s important to deal with poverty and lack of education and opportunity. But this is an issue that relates to a very specific problem: police brutality. It’s not a matter of building better streets and schools. Those things are important, of course. And they contribute to the atmosphere of crime and violence that characterizes many urban neighborhoods. But there is no excuse for authorities to brutalize and kill suspects in their custody. Such outrageous conduct under color of law is a matter first and foremost of official racism and personal sadism. Fixing poverty will not alone fix this problem. [emphasis in original]

The 1968 riots in many cities after the assassination of Martin Luther Kind, Jr. were a special case that arguably represented a real urban uprising in response to that event. But she cites an article by Rick Perlstein reminding us that others of the notorious riots of the 1960s in the US were set off by some instance of police brutality, From Watts to Ferguson In These Times 09/22/2014. He gives these examples:

In July of 1964, barely hours after the close of the Republican National Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater, 15-year-old James “Little Jimmy” Powell was shot to death by an off-duty cop in an apartment building vestibule on East 76th Street in New York. Just as in the shooting of 25-year-old Kajieme Powell this past August 19 in St. Louis, the officer claimed that the victim had charged him with a knife, though eyewitnesses denied that. A bystander cried, “Come on, shoot another nigger!” Within hours, Harlem was ablaze.

That was the first in the wave of apocalyptic racial riots that swept American cities in the 1960s. Later that week, in Rochester, New York, the fires started after cops roughed up the very woman who’d called them in to break up a rowdy, drunken party. The next summer, in Watts, Los Angeles, the most famous of the 1960s riots kicked off after police hit people with batons at the scene of a drunk-driving arrest. In 1966, in Chicago, it began when cops turned off a fire hydrant in which kids were frolicking on the third straight day of 90-degree heat. In 1967, the most tumultuous year, the first riot came after cops in Newark beat a cabdriver because they thought he was a Black Muslim.

Digby comments about Rick's older examples in a way that applies to Baltimore, as well: "This was not about African-American poverty or lack of education. It was about the police."

President Obama's full statement on Baltimore during his 04/28/2015 press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe:

With respect to Baltimore, let me make a couple of points. First, obviously our thoughts continue to be with the family of Freddie Gray. Understandably, they want answers. And DOJ has opened an investigation. It is working with local law enforcement to find out exactly what happened, and I think there should be full transparency and accountability.

Second, my thoughts are with the police officers who were injured in last night’s disturbances. It underscores that that’s a tough job and we have to keep that in mind, and my hope is that they can heal and get back to work as soon as possible.

Point number three, there’s no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. It is counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting, they’re not making a statement -- they’re stealing. When they burn down a building, they’re committing arson. And they’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities that rob jobs and opportunity from people in that area.

So it is entirely appropriate that the mayor of Baltimore, who I spoke to yesterday, and the governor, who I spoke to yesterday, work to stop that kind of senseless violence and destruction. That is not a protest. That is not a statement. It’s people -- a handful of people taking advantage of a situation for their own purposes, and they need to be treated as criminals.

Point number four, the violence that happened yesterday distracted from the fact that you had seen multiple days of peaceful protests that were focused on entirely legitimate concerns of these communities in Baltimore, led by clergy and community leaders. And they were constructive and they were thoughtful, and frankly, didn’t get that much attention. And one burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again, and the thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way I think have been lost in the discussion.

The overwhelming majority of the community in Baltimore I think have handled this appropriately, expressing real concern and outrage over the possibility that our laws were not applied evenly in the case of Mr. Gray, and that accountability needs to exist. And I think we have to give them credit. My understanding is, is you’ve got some of the same organizers now going back into these communities to try to clean up in the aftermath of a handful of criminals and thugs who tore up the place. What they were doing, what those community leaders and clergy and others were doing, that is a statement. That’s the kind of organizing that needs to take place if we’re going to tackle this problem. And they deserve credit for it, and we should be lifting them up.

Point number five -- and I’ve got six, because this is important. Since Ferguson, and the task force that we put together, we have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals -- primarily African American, often poor -- in ways that have raised troubling questions. And it comes up, it seems like, once a week now, or once every couple of weeks. And so I think it’s pretty understandable why the leaders of civil rights organizations but, more importantly, moms and dads across the country, might start saying this is a crisis. What I’d say is this has been a slow-rolling crisis. This has been going on for a long time. This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.

The good news is, is that perhaps there’s some newfound awareness because of social media and video cameras and so forth that there are problems and challenges when it comes to how policing and our laws are applied in certain communities, and we have to pay attention to it and respond.

What’s also good news is the task force that was made up of law enforcement and community activists that we brought together here in the White House have come up with very constructive concrete proposals that, if adopted by local communities and by states and by counties, by law enforcement generally, would make a difference. It wouldn’t solve every problem, but would make a concrete difference in rebuilding trust and making sure that the overwhelming majority of effective, honest and fair law enforcement officers, that they're able to do their job better because it will weed out or retrain or put a stop to those handful who may be not doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Now, the challenge for us as the federal government is, is that we don't run these police forces. I can't federalize every police force in the country and force them to retrain. But what I can do is to start working with them collaboratively so that they can begin this process of change themselves.

And coming out of the task force that we put together, we're now working with local communities. The Department of Justice has just announced a grant program for those jurisdictions that want to purchase body cameras. We are going to be issuing grants for those jurisdictions that are prepared to start trying to implement some of the new training and data collection and other things that can make a difference. And we're going to keep on working with those local jurisdictions so that they can begin to make the changes that are necessary.

I think it’s going to be important for organizations like the Fraternal Order of Police and other police unions and organization to acknowledge that this is not good for police. We have to own up to the fact that occasionally there are going to be problems here, just as there are in every other occupation. There are some bad politicians who are corrupt. There are folks in the business community or on Wall Street who don't do the right thing. Well, there’s some police who aren’t doing the right thing. And rather than close ranks, what we’ve seen is a number of thoughtful police chiefs and commissioners and others recognize they got to get their arms around this thing and work together with the community to solve the problem. And we're committed to facilitating that process.

So the heads of our COPS agency that helps with community policing, they're already out in Baltimore. Our Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division is already out in Baltimore. But we're going to be working systematically with every city and jurisdiction around the country to try to help them implement some solutions that we know work.

And I’ll make my final point -- I’m sorry, Mr. Prime Minister, but this is a pretty important issue for us.

We can't just leave this to the police. I think there are police departments that have to do some soul searching. I think there are some communities that have to do some soul searching. But I think we, as a country, have to do some soul searching. This is not new. It’s been going on for decades.

And without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in these communities, what we also know is that if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty; they’ve got parents -- often because of substance-abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education themselves -- can't do right by their kids; if it’s more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead, than they go to college. In communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men; communities where there’s no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks -- in those environments, if we think that we're just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we're not going to solve this problem. And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual.

If we are serious about solving this problem, then we're going to not only have to help the police, we're going to have to think about what can we do -- the rest of us -- to make sure that we're providing early education to these kids; to make sure that we're reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prisons; so that we're not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a nonviolent drug offense; that we're making investments so that they can get the training they need to find jobs. That's hard. That requires more than just the occasional news report or task force. And there’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now in that.

Now, I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress we're going to get massive investments in urban communities, and so we’ll try to find areas where we can make a difference around school reform and around job training, and around some investments in infrastructure in these communities trying to attract new businesses in.

But if we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant -- and that we don't just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don't just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped. We're paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they're important. And they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence.

That's how I feel. I think there are a lot of good-meaning people around the country that feel that way. But that kind of political mobilization I think we haven’t seen in quite some time. And what I’ve tried to do is to promote those ideas that would make a difference. But I think we all understand that the politics of that are tough because it’s easy to ignore those problems or to treat them just as a law and order issue, as opposed to a broader social issue.

That was a really long answer, but I felt pretty strongly about it. [my emphasis in bold]

Baltimore

Riots are by definition ugly and, unless they are part of some centrally directed "regime change" operation like in Chile in 1973 or (apparently) Ukraine in 2014, their effects politically are diffuse and hard if not impossible to measure.

Still, the Republican Party since 1968 has made one of its central appeals, "Scary black people! Scary black people! Aiii-eeee!!!" And any riot situation like in Baltimore they will be happy to spin along that line.

So people who aren't interested in promoting white racism have an interest in promoting a realistic view of such situations. Remembering that such events don't take place in a vacuum is an important part of that. The Baltimore Sun last recounted several cases vetted through the court system of unjustified violence by city police against black people: Mark Puente, Undue Force 09/28/2014.

The Sun reported on recent events in Baltimore descends into chaos, violence, looting 04/28/2015:

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake ... blamed the mayhem on "thugs who only want to incite violence and destroy our city." She joined a chorus of officials and residents — some of whom fought off rioters to defend their homes and businesses.

"Too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs who, in a very senseless way, are trying to tear down what so many have fought for," Rawlings-Blake said. "It's idiotic to think that by destroying your city, you're going to make life better for anybody."

I watched some of the coverage on MSNBC from Rachel Maddow and Chris Hays Monday evening. I saw a couple of statements from the mayor that seemed to be along the same lines.

I was surprised from the two statements I heard on TV in that she seemed to exclusively exclusively the need for "order" and simply referring to rioters and looters as "criminals" and "thugs."

I would have thought she would have included some appeals to the demonstrators, some of whom appear to be high-school age and even middle-school age kids, to calm down and trust her to see that the police misconduct would be handled right. Maybe she did in other statements. But she sounded to me like someone more interested in running for higher office based on a tough-on-rioters mayoral record than a mayor trying to calm the city down. I'm not sure closing on the schools for Tuesday was necessarily the best move, either, if you want to minimize angry teenagers venting against police.

Also, for those of us who remember COINTELPRO, you can bet that some of those rioters and looters were police provocateurs, though we won't see the evidence for years, unless maybe Wikileaks focuses on it. (Or maybe our Quality Press - sorry, I shouldn't make jokes about something so serious.)

Ritual good-citizen disclaimer: I'm sure most police are good people and serious public servants. It would help things a lot if they would start enforcing the law diligently against the "few bad apple" cops who murder unarmed black people.

As of now (morning of 04/28/2015), the mayor's recent tweets from yesterday and today include these (my emphasis in bold):

Too many people have invested in building up this city to allow thugs to tear it down.

We will not let these deplorable and cowardly acts of violence ruin #OurCity.

Thank you to all law enforcement, emergency management personnel, and medical professionals who continue to bravely respond to the situation

We are already seeing volunteers from across Baltimore joining together to clean up damage.

It will take all of us working in partnership. We will do whatever it takes. Despite the evil we see tonight, this is our home.

Returning to the Sun news article:

At least 15 police officers were injured — six seriously — in the clashes.

Police Capt. Eric Kowalczyk said all were going to recover from their injuries.

Kowalczyk simmered with frustration as he described officers facing a hail of rocks as they tried to bring calm.

"A group of outrageous criminals attacked our officers," Kowalczyk said. "This is not OK." [my emphasis]

Obviously, it's the job of the police chief to defend his officers from real threats. But given the history behind this, I have to wonder if anyone heard anything like this kind of passion from the police chief about guy who neck was mysteriously, fatally broken while he was in police custody.

Church leaders took to the streets to intervene in the violence, to call for calm and pray for peace. Later Monday, more than 75 ministers met with gang members — Bloods and Crips — and representatives of the Nation of Islam leaders to talk about ways to end the violence. ...

Looters casually loaded merchandise into cars and SUVs.

I'll be curious to see what these ministers and other community leaders have to say about the nature of the mayor's response.

Like most people, I know nothing to speak of about Baltimore's gang scene. But I'm guessing that to the extent that the looting is organized, organized gangs are taking advantage of a tense and disorderly situation. But it's also easy to believe that other people got caught up in the moment and just decided to take stuff.

The snippet above about residents who "fought off rioters to defend their homes and businesses" (my emphasis) will play well with the FOXists. White rightwingers love stories about Owners defending their property against black rioters. Although the Sun story specifies several businesses that were targeted for looting, it has no other references to residences being directly targeted by rioters or looters.

I hope people who want to see progress against white racism and for police reform don't succumb to the temptation to join the Republicans in being stuck in the fears of 1969 over the current moment in the US. Two bloggers with whom I'm normally in agreement worry me a bit in that regard. Steve M (Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming No More Mister Nice Blog 04/27/2015):

It's clear that we're just going to keep going through this awful cycle -- an appalling and clearly unjustified black man's death at the hands of cops, followed by publicity and outrage, then a local response in which the rage boils over, blood flows and property gets destroyed. Nobody wins, nothing improves, repeat ad infinitum. Baltimore now; who knows where next.

But to bring this back to the sort of thing I usually write about: Sooner or later, this is going to influence national politics -- and not for the better. Sooner or later, right-wing politicians are going to rediscover the language of "law and order" that elected Richard Nixon twice and that gave us racially divisive politicians, of both parties, such as Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani in my city and Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia. And the new round of "get-tough" pols might be worse than the ones from my younger days -- many of those guys, at least, had some lingering fondness for the New Deal or the Kennedys. The new crop will probably combine "get-tough" attitudes and Koch economics. It's not going to be pleasant.

In fact, I think it's likely that somebody in the 2016 Republican presidential field is going to rediscover the old "law and order" language. It was always politically effective -- but then crime declined dramatically in he last twenty years. It can come back with a vengeance, though, if white Americans regularly turns on the news and sees shop windows smashed and cop cars burning.

Charlie Pierce, who certainly takes the problems of white racism and police violence very seriously (Baltimore Burning: A Bad Night Ahead Esquire Politics Blog 04/27/2015):

Freddie Gray should not be dead. He didn't do anything before his arrest for which he should have been killed. He didn't do anything during his arrest for which he should have been killed. He didn't do anything after his arrest for which he should have been killed. Very few of us live in a place where you can be killed for how you are riding your bicycle or walking down the street. Very few of us understand the frustration of living in a place like that, day after day, petty insult after petty insult. Very few of us understand.

That said, the footage looks like something as savage and mindless as the earthquake in Nepal and the avalanche on Everest. The Panthers used to say that spontaneity is the art of fools. This is fairly organized spontaneity, but it is still foolish. The footage now is a mass surge into a liquor store. Night is falling.

Christ, why doesn't this country ever learn? Nothing good will come of this. [my emphasis]

I would say that both good and bad things will come of this. What the proportion will be depends a lot of the response of voters, activists and the political parties. But Steve M is obviously correct that the Republican Party's response will not be a responsible one. The party is already far too deeply committed to its current segregation program for that.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 13: the Tulsa shooting

I really hate these stories. But they are an important aspect of institutional white racism in the United States.

Ian Millhiser gives an account of the Oklahoma shooting of yet another unarmed black man in the back, with video, ‘Fuck Your Breath’ — Video Shows Cop Mocking Unarmed Man As He Dies From Police Bullet Think Progress 04/12/2015.

Cenk Uygur explains the case here, Elderly Volunteer Thinks Gun Is Taser, Kills Unarmed Black Man 04/13/2015:

One unusual feature of this case is that despite the Tulsa Sheriff's Department supporter the killer cop, the district attorney is charging him with a felony in the killing, as the Tulsa World reports, District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler charges reserve deputy with second-degree manslaughter 04/13/2015:

“Mr. Bates is charged with Second-Degree Manslaughter involving culpable negligence. Oklahoma law defines culpable negligence as ‘the omission to do something which a reasonably careful person would do, or the lack of the usual ordinary care and caution in the performance of an act usually and ordinarily exercised by a person under similar circumstances and conditions,’” District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler said in the statement.

“The defendant is presumed to be innocent under the law, but we will be prepared to present evidence at future court hearings."

Shurff Stanley Glanz, on the other hand, was good buddies with the killer and said, in effect, oh, hail, boy, it was just an accident! With the undertone, of course, that it was just a n*****r who was killed. Black lives really don't seem to matter to Shurff Glanz.

Probably like most people, I'd like to believe that most cops are decent people who are actually committed to following the law. But when a cop stops you, unless you know the cop personally, how can anyone be sure he's not dealing with cops like this? While as a rule it's not a good idea to run from cops in such a situation, it's pretty obvious that the man who was shot genuinely had something to fear from this guy - who wasn't actually a regular cop at all but some wealthy guy playing cop with the city's approval!

An unusual twist in this story is that Bates, the reserve deputy who shot Harris, is not a full-time officer. He is a 73-year-old insurance executive and a wealthy donor to the sheriff’s department. The department includes 130 reserve deputies who are volunteers who donate their time to law enforcement. Bates is classified as "advanced reserve," the highest level of reserve deputy, a position that permits him to "do anything a full-time deputy can do."

For more on Bates' donations, see: Ziva Branstetter, Tulsa County reserve deputy bought cars, equipment for undercover unit Tulsa World 04/13/2015.

As we saw with Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Bates can also expect to receive donations from white supremacist admirers around the country. I haven't heard of a fundraising site being set up for him yet.

And given how the other presumably regular cops respond on the video, I'm not sure they qualify as the Good Cops either. And if the Good Cops aren't willing to enforce the law against the Bad Cops - well, it doesn't exactly generate a lot of trust in the police department.

The I-meant-to-use-my-Taser excuse may be true. That was the excuse for Johannes Mehserle, the BART cop who murdered an unarmed young black man named Oscar Grant in 2009 by shooting him in the back while he was laying face down on the ground. That murder was the basis of the Fruitvale Station film. Mehserle's case was highly unusual in that he actually was tried and convicted of a felony, though he got only two years for an entirely unnecessary murder, and the Taser excuse helped him avoid a longer sentence.

But until the judicial system, including cops, prosecutors, judges and juries actually fix the culture of impunity for killer cops, we'll continue have a big problem. In this Oklahoma case, what kind of responsible officials of any kind let some old fart who donated stuff to the department go out with a loaded gun with the authority of a deputy? His only actual experience as a policeman was supposedly back in 1964-5. I'm also pretty dubious that cops yelling "f**k your breath" to a dying man that a 73-year-old honorary cop just shot in the back should be given the authority to carry a weapon on behalf of law enforcement. I'm guessing that shouting "Taser, Taser" the way this killer cop did may become standard practice for cops about to shoot somebody in the back.

Meyserle in the Oakland BART case did avoid a longer mandatory sentence because the jury thought his claim that he meant to use the Taser constituted reasonable doubt that he intended to murder the black guy he shot in the back while he was lying face down on the ground (also the Meyserle scenario). This blogger explains why there's a good chance that Michael Slager in South Carolina may walk: Why Slager Will Walk Zandar Against the Stupid 04/10/2015.

If trust between the community and the police is any part of a city's or county's goal, I don't see how it can happen in a department that tolerates things like this. And I know from the experience of San Jose and the City of Oakland around here that a department where serious misconduct has become accepted is very difficult for even responsible officials to clean up. Between the War on Drugs, the War or Terrorism and a culture of impunity for white cops who murder unarmed black people for no good reason, these are definitely not easy problems to fix. And, unfortunately, lots of white people see no need to fix them at all.

More from the Tulsa World:

Editorial, Time for a thorough review of Tulsa County reserve deputy program 04/12/2015:

So why was the reserve deputy involved in the first place?

The sheriff’s office says there is nothing odd about that.

Sheriff’s Maj. Shannon Clark said it’s not unusual for a reserve deputy to be on an assignment such as the Violent Crimes Task Force. They’re an important force extender for the department, he said.

Tulsa Police Sgt. Jim Clark, who reviewed the incident independently for the sheriff’s office, said he has looked at the reserve program in the past and that it meets national standards.

Even more scary if that's true!

The reservists are typically unpaid volunteers who work other full-time jobs, but they go through the same although abbreviated training components as a normal deputy and have full powers and authority of a deputy while on duty.

Bates has received hundreds of hours of specialized training, including homicide investigation and meth lab investigation and decontamination. He also was chairman of and a $2,500 donor to Sheriff Stanley Glanz’s 2012 re-election campaign.

We respect Sgt. Clark, but we’re not convinced.

We think the sheriff’s reserve deputy program is a good idea. We encourage civic-minded people interested in helping law enforcement to join.

But reservists should be working in appropriate roles for what they are: concerned, dedicated volunteers.

Clark said TPD has used reservists in undercover operations, but a spokesman for the department said they are mostly used for traffic control and parking lot patrols during “safe shopper” operations.

There’s danger there too, but it’s a far less exposed position than being part of an undercover gun buy from a drug dealer. We want full-time, paid deputies doing the gritty work of policing the county. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 13: ideology of the non-ending white backlash (2 of 2)

I'm continuing here with looking some vintage "white backlash" arguments from Jim Sleeper's 1990 book The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York.

Like today's FOX News and hate radio talk about race-related issues, the villains of Sleeper's piece are consistently the Bad Negroes and Mean Libruls.

Here are some of the still-familiar tropes that he enunciates.

From the “Rights and Reciprocity” chapter:

As their demands [those of the “radical” activists] for immediate school and neighborhood integration engendered fierce resistance, they were drawn into courtroom battles over the law’s ability to shape American society in defiance of the popular will. (p. 159)

This is a favorite segregationist argument, that the evil integrationist Left is going to court to make sure the law and the Constitution is enforced are being anti-democratic in doing so.

Whether the conservative movement that is now also clearly segregationist actually believes in judicial restraint and opposes activist judgments can be reflected upon in light of several major Supreme Court cases such as Bush v. Gore (2000), Citizens United (2010), and Hobby Lobby (2014).

From the “Black Militants’ New End Game” chapter:

What really bothered me was that so many black ministers and civil rights movement veterans had gone along with these obvious offenses against the most elementary principles of morality and good political organizing. (p. 185)

Short version: those Bad Negroes just have no morals and are totally dishonest in politics.

That quote comes from Sleeper's account of the Howard Beach controversy over a racial incident in 1986. History.com, the History Channel’s website, summarizes the incident this way (n/d; accessed 04/09/2015):

On this day [December 20] in 1986, three black men are attacked by a group of white teenagers yelling racial slurs in Howard Beach, a predominately white, middle-class, Italian-American neighborhood in Queens, New York. Earlier that night, the men were driving from Brooklyn to Queens, when their car broke down near Howard Beach. They walked several miles to a pizza parlor in Howard Beach, where they asked to use a phone to call for assistance. After being told there was no phone available, they ordered some pizza. When the men left the pizzeria, they were confronted by the gang of teens. One of the men, Michael Griffith, 23, was chased into traffic on the Belt Parkway and died after being hit by a car. A second man, Cedric Sandiford, was severely beaten, while the third man, Timothy Grimes, outran the assailants and escaped without serious injury.

The attack stoked racial tensions in New York City and garnered national headlines. The two surviving victims, distrustful of police in Queens who they believed were treating them like perpetrators, refused to cooperate further with investigators and the district attorney’s office. Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton led a large group of demonstrators on a protest march through Howard Beach and was met by a smaller band of counter-demonstrators who shouted abuse. Sharpton and other black leaders believed the Queens District Attorney’s office was mishandling the case and called for the appointment of a special state prosecutor. New York Governor Mario Cuomo named Charles Hynes to the position. Sharpton was later accused of using the case to further his own political agenda and increase his national profile. In December 1987, after 12 days of jury deliberations, three teens were convicted of manslaughter in the death of Griffith.

As we’ve seen more recently in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin and Darren Wilson/Michael Brown cases, passions can run high and precise details on the incident in question may be disputed. And humans being who we are, pure pursuit of Truth and Justice may not be driving everyone involved. But Sleeper structures his account in such a way as to leave the impression that African-American activists concerned with the case were largely acting in cynical bad faith.

On the case, see also:

Joseph Friend, Youth Gets 5 to 15 Years For Howard Beach Attack New York Times 02/12/1988

Howard Beach; Not So Simple As A Lynching New York Times 12/28/2015 (This article deals with a controversy over the culpability of Dominick Blum, the driver of the car that actually killed Michael Griffith, which is what Sleeper tries to use to paint advocates for the victims as irresponsible and acting in bad faith.

Danielle Wright, Howard Beach Still Synonymous With Hate Crime 25 Years Later BET 12/19/2011

The chapter title of “Militants, ‘Professional Blacks,’ and the Culture of Schools” gives a very good idea of the tone and content. “Professional Blacks” refers to what conservatives also call names like “poverty pimps” or “race hustlers,” the latter a favorite of rightwing columnist Michelle Malkin. It’s basically a pejorative name for civil rights and antiracism activists.

In that chapter, Sleeper focuses on some controversial black-studies claims. “Principled or not, the [black] militants seem to have a mesmerizing effect not only on many blacks who are angry and afraid of being called system tools and Toms but also on guilt-ridden whites ...” (p. 221)

Translated into WhiteManSpeak: Ethnic studies is a plot by Bad Negroes and white race traitors to undermine the White Man.

A good faith and professional discussion of some of the issues around “Afrocentrism” in education from the same period can be found in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Disuniting of America: Reflections On A Multicultural Society (1991), where he wrote:

The dean of black historians in America today is John Hope Franklin. "While a black scholar," Franklin writes, "has a clear responsibility to join in improving the society in which he lives, he must understand the difference between hard-hitting advocacy on the one hand and the highest standards of scholarship on the other." Serious black scholars like Henry Louis Gates of Duke regard Afrocentricity with skepticism. "I don't see any of those things as being peculiar to African-Americans. They sound like very vague attributes to me, and all kinds of cultures and societies have those same values .... I am certainly not in the same camp as Molefi Asante and all these guys."

"These guys" are advocates not of cultural pluralism but of black ethnocentrism. Nor do they make much effort to disguise political motives. Asa Hilliard deals with scholarly critics not by responding to their criticisms but by calling any attack on the Afrocentric curriculum "an attack on the study of African people generally."

But here again, Sleeper’s account seems less focused on clarifying real issues than on picturing African-American advocates for a position and their supporters as acting dishonestly and in bad faith.

The “Folly on the Left” chapter is basically a polemic against any efforts from the 1930s on to defend African-American civil rights or address economic injustices affecting them as dubious maneuvering by sinister characters. This gives a good idea of the tone: “Neither the left nor the black community has been quite able to let go of the other, then, but, oh, what a bruiser this marriage of class and color, of Marxism and black nationalism, has been, its noisy basement fights sending tremors through the edifice above!” (p. 240, my italics)

Because you know how Those People are.

White backlish, it seems, we have with us always.

And its intensity today is even greater than in 1990.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 12: ideology of the non-ending white backlash (1 of 2)

The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York by Jim Sleeper (1990) is a book from a quarter century ago that uses still-enduring white-backlash arguments against civil rights to defend the ideology and psychology of systematic white racism.

Jim Sleeper’s attitude toward race and opposition to racial discrimination can be quickly ascertained from this piece, Letting Go of Race The Atlantic Online 08/21/1997.

He had given a previous elaboration of his view in The Closest of Strangers. I found it interesting in that it gives an elaboration of what we might as well call “white backlash” position circa 1990.

Violent crime was a major issue at the time. Ari Melber provided this graph in a tweet of 01/14/2015 based on Department of Justice information:

Law and order” had been a racially charged theme in American national politics since 1968. And Sleeper uses it extensively in his book. The fact that violent crime has significantly decreased since then, as the chart shows, has removed some of the national salience of the law-and-order issue. But it certainly has removed it from the political agenda, much less taken the racial-polemic aspect out of it. In some ways, response to crime problems since 1990 have racialized white perspectives on crime to an even greater degree.

Some other themes were coming to be common parts of the mix, including about Democrats who wanted to back away from a commitment to racial equality and justice. For of Sleeper’s chapter titles refer to them:

• “Rights and Reciprocity”
• “Black Militants’ New End Game”
• “Militants, ‘Professional Blacks,’ and the Culture of Schools”
• “Folly on the Left”

The general litany is very familiar to those who follow American politics. African-Americans are getting their rights recognized – an act of generosity rather than justice in the minds of many whites – but they aren’t stepping up to their reciprocal responsibilities. Just one of many ways of saying that black people are irresponsible, which many whites choose to think no matter what.

“Black militants” in Sleeper’s version are not the Black Panthers of the 1960s, or the Black Guerrilla Army of the 1970s. No, the “black militants” of Sleeper’s book are black leaders who protest or organize. Especially those still-iconic villains of the white Republican imagination, “Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.” The “professional blacks” are black people who whine about discrimination. And the “folly on the left” is, of course, the idea by liberals and Democrats that equal rights are worth defending.

One of the interesting things about the book in light of events of 2014-5 in the United States is that it deals with what I call the problem of the perfect case. Sleeper’s method in The Closest of Strangers is to describe events of the more distant past from 1990 as though he’s sympathetic to the struggle for equal rights. In this comment on an event from 1935, he even sounds somewhat sympathetic to Communist activism in that regard:

With the white proletarian majority intransigent on the labor front and the state assuming a greater role in black survival, impoverished Harlem's only recourse in the Depression was protest politics, punctuated by rioting. Overburdened church networks and other community institutions for mutual aid were drawn into the fray and politicized. In March 1935, a rumor swept the community that Lino Rivera, a young Puerto Rican boy, had been killed for shoplifting in a Kress department store. Rivera had been sent home unharmed, but, in what would become yet another familiar pattern in the city's race relations, understandable black suspicion - fanned by a misleading leaflet put out by the Young Communist League - drew angry crowds into the streets. As bottles flew and windows were smashed, police descended and violence escalated. Three people were killed and many wounded, and there was extensive looting of black as well as white stores. [my emphasis] (p. 47)

Despite his seemingly sympathetic tone, Sleeper is here setting up a theme he works heavily in the book: You can't trust black leaders! They lie to get people to protest!

He then goes on to describe how then-Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia’s response was to appoint a commission on race relations. “Reaction to the commission’s report brought the first sustained government funding and regulation to bear upon the plight of blacks.” (p. 48) In other words, something less than a Perfect Case led to constructive developments on the road to defending equal rights for minorities.

But the thrust of his arguments in the book is very different. He conjures up the menace of what FOX News fans and Rush Limbaugh listeners today would recognize as a scary alliance of Bad Negroes and Mean Libruls. Although in this 1990 book he wasn't simultaneously imagining them as allies of Muslim terrorists, too.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, Apri 11: "Color-blind" white racism

I'm returning to Chauncey DeVega and his commentary on the South Carolina "white thug cop Michael Slager" cop who shot a black man, Walter Scott, in the back and killed him. In his post, Colorblind White Racism and the Right-Wing Media's Response to the Killing of Walter Scott WARN 04/10/2015, he discusses some of the ways in which white racism in America is propagated with the pretense of color-blindness.

... white supremacy in the post civil rights era often works via a superficial condemnation of obvious racism and racially motivated violence against people of color as a means of advancing a type of White Racial Logic which deems racism and white supremacy as things of the past, outliers and aberrations in contemporary America.

He discusses this example from FOX News:

On The Five, panelist Greg Gutfeld suggested that when viewing the video recorded murder of Walter Scott by Michael Slager, he "doesn't see race" but rather one person being killed unjustly by another.

Gutfeld is delusional.

Unless he has a problem with his vision, Gutfeld most definitely sees a white cop shooting an unarmed black person in the back.

Here, the White Gaze and White Racial logic refuse to "see" or acknowledge race. In doing so, white supremacy is advanced and sustained because the social and political context of white on black violence and inequality is removed.

Fox News' Greg Gutfeld is also demonstrating a second component of colorblind racism: the theft and misappropriation of anti-racist language. [my emphasis]

This fits in with some of the things I've observed in a book from 1990 that I'll comment on in a couple of following posts in this series.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 8: More on the case of accused killer cop Michael Slager

Yesterday I wrote about the arrest of white police officer Michael Slager in South Carolina on charges of bravely killing an unarmed black man in the back when the guy ran from a traffic stop after being electrocuted (tased), "when I first saw this was, since the accused is white and had on a police uniform when he allegedly bravely shot the guy in the back, he can and likely will collect a small fortune in online donations from white supremacists across the country."

Spocko reports that a fundraising site has gone up (Fundraisers for Officer Slager Go Live, Go Down, Pop Up Again Hullabaloo 04/08/2015):

At first I thought that the existence of the video would make a difference in the fund raising for Slager, but then I read the reasons they give for setting it up, "It's about being innocent until proven guilty." That's smart.

It's very important for the fundraisers to make it clear who is the real victim. Also, some people need an excuse to cover their support of racism, bad policing and out of control individual police officers. On the other hand, some people relish the chance to express their real opinions. Often they make the comment right in the donor page.

I see this new trend like buying a bumper sticker you know will piss off people you don't like.

On the fundraising site, see also: Christopher Zara, Michael Slager, Indiegogo Backlash: Site Says ‘We Don’t Judge’ Amid Criticism Of Fundraiser For Walter Scott’s Shooter International Business Times 04/08/2015. Zara reports:

... the same campaign was removed from GoFundMe, a competing crowdfunding site, which said it violated its terms of service. Last year, GoFundMe came under similar criticism when it allowed campaign organizers to raise more than $400,000 in support of Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer who shot Michael Brown. Wilson, unlike Slager, was not charged with a crime.

Charlie Pierce also weighs in on the charges against accused killer cop Slager (A Death In South Carolina: No Video, No Crime Esquire Politics Blog 04/08/2015):

The country has to decide what the function of its police forces actually is. Is it their function to protect and to serve all citizens, or is it to respond with overwhelming deadly force to placate the fears that one sector of the population nurses toward The Other? Are our police custodians of ordered liberty or some sort of Praetorian Guard of established privilege? I'm sympathetic enough to the average officer to believe that many of them want to be the former, but are trained too thoroughly in the techniques of the latter. I hope the villain of this piece doesn't turn out to be the guy who took the video, but I'm not sure that won't be the case. There shouldn't have to be video, is what I'm saying.

Judd Legum informs us in Everything The Police Said About Walter Scott’s Death Before A Video Showed What Really Happened Think Progress 04/07-08/2015 of how Slager's police department was approaching this murder case before the video surfaced.

But getting him convicted by a South Carolina court and jury may be a tough goal to accomplish. David Slade reports for The Post and Courier (Shocking video of killing, but criminal case more complicated, analysts say 04/08/2015):

“You’ve got eight shots fired at a guy who’s running away,” said Charleston School of Law Professor Miller W. Shealy Jr., a former prosecutor. “It is horrific footage and very difficult to watch, and there doesn’t appear to be any excuses.”

But despite the video, said Shealy, “Based on my experience I wouldn’t say any case is easy, or a slam dunk.”

If the case goes to trial, questions will likely be raised about what happened before the start of the video, he said.

“We don’t see the stop, we don’t see the car,” said Shealy. “For the prosecution, it’s a strong case based just on the video, unless some strange things happened before the video started.”

See also: Andrew Knapp, Day after officer’s arrest, video of shooting death sparks protests, more action The Post and Courier 04/07-08/2015. The shooting victim Walter Scott, "a Coast Guard veteran and father of four" also had legal issues in his life, which accused killer cop Slager's admirers will use to justify Slager's bravely and nobly shooting the 50-year-old Scott in the back:

At the time [of his being shot to death in the back by Slager], [Scott] was wanted for arrest on a Family Court warrant, Charleston County sheriff’s Maj. Eric Watson said Tuesday.

He had a history of arrests related to contempt of court charges for failing to pay child support. The only accusation of violence against Scott during his lifetime came through an assault and battery charge in 1987.

Knapp recounts the killing as it appears on the video:

The three-minute clip of Saturday morning’s shooting starts shaky, but it steadies as Slager and Scott appear to be grabbing at each other’s hands.

Slager has said through his attorney that Scott had wrested his Taser from him during a struggle.

The video appears to show Scott slapping at the officer’s hands as several objects fall to the ground. It’s not clear what the objects are.

Scott starts running away. Wires from Slager’s Taser stretch from Scott’s clothing to the officer’s hands.

With Scott more than 10 feet from Slager, the officer draws his pistol and fires seven times in rapid succession. After a brief pause, the officer fires one last time. Scott’s back bows, and he falls face first to the ground near a tree.

After the gunfire, Slager glances at the person taking the video, then talks into his radio.

The cameraman curses, and Slager yells at Scott as sirens wail.

“Put your hands behind your back,” the officer shouts before he handcuffs Scott as another lawman runs to Scott’s side.

Scott died there.

Slager soon jogs back to where he fired his gun and picks up something from the ground. He walks back to Scott’s body and drops the object.

Through the entire footage, it’s not clear whether Scott ever had control of the Taser.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 7: Man-bites-dog story- white cop kills black man by shooting him in the back, actually gets charged with murder!

It's not a genuine Confederate "Heritage" Month here at Old Hickory's Weblog without a link to Chauncey DeVega.

He's commenting about this headline, which is unfortunately rare considering the very large number of fatal shootings by police in the US, far too many of them being killing of unarmed black men: South Carolina officer charged with murder after shooting man in the back by Oliver Laughland Guardian 04/07/2015.

My own comment on Facebook when I first saw this was, since the accused is white and had on a police uniform when he allegedly bravely shot the guy in the back, he can and likely will collect a small fortune in online donations from white supremacists across the country. This is where we are in 2015.

And I thought about how Chauncey DeVega might process this case.

Fortunately, we don't have to just guess, because he's posted on it in We Black Men are Treated as 'Monsters' Again: How Will White Racist Paranoiacs Defend the Killer Cop Who Shot Walter Scott? WARN 04/07/2015:

I am also finding it difficult to convey my exhaustion with once again having to write about how another unarmed black man has been killed by the police. My hand is moved by a commitment to tell the truth; writing is a small act compared to those who actually suffer the slings and arrows of racist white violence by America's police.

As I have written about and discussed many times in these years of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown, white privilege is the ability to twist and distort reality in the service of the bizarre and self-serving world that the White Gaze conjures forth for the psychological, material, and political benefits of its owners.

In the service to those delusions, White Racist Paranoiac Thinking invents a scenario that justifies the killing of black and brown people (and the homeless, poor, mentally ill, and other "disposable" human beings) by the police and their allies.

Eric Garner screamed "I can't breathe" as the police murdered him. White lynch mobs portrayed themselves as honorable men who were doing unpleasant work in defense of white women's and white civilization's honor and security as they burned alive and dismembered the African-American "imps of the inferno", the monster in the form of a man known as "the black beast rapist".

Walter Scott was stopped for a traffic violation. In fear for his life, Walter Scott ran away from a white South Carolina police officer named Michael Slager.

Slager then shot and killed Walter Scott.

One feature of the Segregation 1.0 system in the South was that the official justice system hardly functioned in cases of any white man killing a black man. Even if the white district attorney brought charges before a white judge, the all-white jury might just let the killer walk. A black accused of killing a white person, even if the evidence was flimsy to the point of non-existent, could not expect nearly such generous consideration.

The national culture of impunity for white policemen killing unarmed black man has become so pervasive that it's a real question whether the US justice system functions in a meaningful way in such cases.

One thought about the online donations killer white cops who gun down unarmed black men can expect to receive if their case becomes nationally publicized. I wouldn't want to see legal defense funds banned, and I assume it would be unconstitutional to do so.

But police are public officials with authority to kill. And the public has to rely to a large degree on their discretion and commitment to the law on when they do so. And in the current culture of impunity, a cop like Darren Wilson in Ferguson who kills an unarmed black man not only can expect the police and the prosecutor to rally to his cause and even cover up incriminating evidence and fudge (or break) the law to get him exonerated. He can also expect donations, even hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, from white admirers who approve of his actions. If he can just count that as ordinary income, that effectively becomes a bounty for killing and unarmed black person.

I have to believe there is a Constitutional way to outlaw that but requiring that donations received under those conditions by a cop who killed someone in the line of duty be restricted to use in an actual legal defense fund. Maybe there are such regulations in place in some states and I'm just not aware of it. But that's just not right for cops to be able to collect de facto bounties for killing people.

Police brutality and criminality, 1938 and today

I was looking through the 1938 book Man Against Himself by psychoanalyst Karl Menninger (1893-1990). He addresses the issue of criminal behavior by cops. A problem which did end in 1938, as The Young Turks remind us here from a Michigan case, Video Catches Cop Planting Drugs, Assaulting Unarmed Black Man 03/31/2015:

Menninger writes (pp. 200-1):

... almost at the same moment that crime prevention agencies are assuring the public that crime never pays, the police departments of many of our largest cities openly proclaim their intention of using criminal methods in handling criminals. The police commissioner of one of our large cities, for example, announced, "There'll be promotions waiting for the men (police) who muss them (gangsters and suspects) up. I'll promote the men who kick these gorillas around and bring them in." In the same week, a lynching was defended by a district attorney in the South and only a few years ago Governor Rolph of California made his celebrated defense of lynchings. The American public is periodically shocked by such frank confessions on the part of prominent individuals that criminal acts are permissible, providing favored individuals commit them. [my emphasis]

James "Sunny Jim" Roth, Jr. (1869–1934) was the longest-serving Mayor of San Francisco (1912–1931), which was famous for its vigilante justice in the 19th century, and the Republican Governor 1931-34. The state site just linked for Governors' biographies says of him:

On November 4, 1930, he was elected Governor of California, and on January 6, 1931, he was sworn into office. Rolph was criticized for many things, including signing legislation that caused taxes to fall unfairly on the poor, endorsing a brutal jailbreak lynching in San Jose, and openly ignoring prohibition laws. During his term as governor, Rolph instituted the California Sales Tax, then known as "Pennies for Jimmy."

Menninger gets into some speculation on particulars of crime in America, some of which seems to rest on dubious national character assumptions. Still, this is thought-provoking social criticism:

This mental reservation that others should not commit crimes but for me it is all right is a characteristic element in American psychology. Indeed, only a little reflection is necessary for us to realize that our country was founded by a group of people who defied and violated the laws of England persistently from the outset. Furthermore, most of the financial fortunes and the so-called economic stability of our country in the early days depended upon a criminal destruction and waste of natural resources, the iniquity and sad results of which we are only now beginning fully to realize. Even yet, there are millions of American citizens who feel it to be their God-given right to destroy timber, to kill and maim wild birds and wild animals, to pollute streams, and to exploit land without any regard to the anti-social consequences of such ruthless destruction.

If I have wandered somewhat afield from the topic, it is because I am somewhat dubious about the possibility of convincing the average American reader that criminality is actually self-destructive. Our whole national ideology disputes it. [my emphasis]

The torture mentality in lawless authorities

Digby has a very good post linking the lawless attitude of way too many of our armed authorities to the CIA-military torture crimes, the use of tasers by police and other forms of police brutality (Dispatch from torture nation, year end wrap up Hullabaloo 12/30/2014):

The problems with this attitude have been well documented here and elsewhere. Elderly people with dementia are being killed with electro-shock. Small children are being disciplined with electro-shock. The mentally ill, the deaf and those suffering from epilepsy are being tortured because they cannot understand, hera or respond to police orders. Average citizens are being tortured on the side of the highway, in their homes, everywhere for failing to understand that when a police officer stops them they are not allowed to speak or react in any way lest they be shot through with electricity.

All these people live under the assumption that their rights exist whether they are talking to a police officer or are in custody. This is not true in any practical sense. When a police officer stops you in America they believe you must submit immediately --- and if you feel your rights were violated you can get a lawyer and take it up with a judge. In that moment they do not exist. (And needless to say, the way police are coddled by the justice system your chances of getting justice in any altercation with them are fairly nil.)

This is the way police are behaving toward citizens of all races throughout America. Police are torturing citizens into compliance.

But too many young black men do not even get the taser. They are just shot dead. And in circumstances where the taser, if it were used for something other than torture, was supposed to be used --- where the alternative would be deadly force.

This has to change. The public either succeeds in rolling this trend back, or it gets worse and does further damage to democracy and the rule of law.

Charlie Pierce also weighed in on this link (The CIA & NYPD: Perilous Insubordination in Our Democracy Esquire Politics Blog 12/22/2014):

For the past two weeks, on two different fronts, we have been confronted with the unpleasant fact that there are people working in the institutions of our self-government who believe themselves not only beyond the control and sanctions of the civil power, but also beyond the control and sanctions of their direct superiors. We also have been confronted with the fact that there are too many people in our political elite who are encouraging this behavior for their own purposes, most of which are cheap and dangerous. In Washington, John Brennan, the head of the CIA, came right up to the edge of insubordination against the president who hired him in the wake of the Senate report on American torture. Meanwhile, in New York, in the aftermath of weeks of protests against the strangulation of Eric Garner by members of the New York Police Department, two patrolmen, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were murdered in their squad car by a career criminal and apparent maniac named Ismaaiyl Brinsley. In response, and at the encouragement of television hucksters like Joe Scarborough, police union blowhards like Patrick Lynch, political zombies like George Pataki, and comical fascists like Rudolph Giuliani, the NYPD is acting in open rebellion against Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, and the civil power he represents over them. This is an incredibly perilous time for democracy at the most basic levels.

Our culture of immunity for murderers in police uniforms. For torturers in any capacity. For high officials and wealthy CEO's who commit crimes that damage the lives of other, sometimes on a large scale.

To me the most serious failure of the Obama Administration has been its decision to give torture perpetrators de facto immunity. I don't care if it was politically inconvenient. It's his duty. And in failing to do it he has become an after-the-fact enabler of the torture crimes of the Cheney Administration.

Torture attacks the rule of law in the most basic way. Even more so than capital punishment.

The torture issue isn't going away.

Media and political malfunction on the police brutality problem

Joan Walsh gets at the point I was trying to make in a post yesterday about how the Republicans are aggressively blaming anti-police-brutality demonstrators and even President Obama himself for the murders of two New York police officers this past weekend. But not only do we see no incitement to murder cops on the part of the protesters or the President. We also don't see a spirited pushback by Democratic politicians on the sleazy and dishonest Republican accusations.

In The right politicizes murders: How it exploited tragedy, told de Blasio how to raise his son Salon 12/22/2014, she writes:

Like Obama, Holder has actually been judicious and cautious in his comments about police-community tension. I was actually surprised by some of his comments about it to MSNBC’s Joy Reid last week. Asked whether he believed black young people should fear the police, he answered:

I don’t think that they should fear the police. But I certainly think that we have to build up a better relationship between young people, people of color, and people in law enforcement. There’s distrust that exists on both sides. There’s misunderstanding that exists on both sides. And we have to come up with ways in which we bridge those gaps, so that people don’t demonize other people; so that people understand, on both sides, that there are people trying to just do the best that they can.

We’re not at a stage yet where I can honestly say that if you’re a person of color, you should not be concerned about any interaction that you have with the police — in the same way that I can’t say to a police officer, “You shouldn’t worry about what community you are being asked to operate in.”

Notice how Holder points to the fear and distrust on “both sides.” His most pointed suggestion for reform in the interview was better collection of statistics – right now there’s no national database on police killings, for instance, and police have resisted establishing one.

What strikes me is how cautious Obama, Holder and de Blasio have been in their remarks about this latest epidemic of police killings, given the grief and rage in the black community over these issues.

This is where Obama's notorious obsession with bipartisanship breaks down. He and Holder are trying to be calm and judicious, while the Republicans demogogue the issue with no meaningful pushback from the leader of the Democratic Party, who is also the sitting President.

And the Republicans know this. So creeps like Rudi Giuliani can set a radical rightwing tone that then tends in the absence of energetic pushback from the Democrats to become the respectable conservative side of the "both sides"of the debate in the eyes of our Pod Pundits and the mainstream media.

Eric Boehlert points out how the treatment of last weekend's murders contrasts with their reporting on the murders committed by far-right terrorists in Fox News' Double Standard For Right-Wing Cop Killers Media Matters 12/22/2014.

Terrance Heath takes up the same theme in Conservative Media And Cop Killers Of A Different Color Our Future 12/22/2014:

Never mind that a majority of cop killers have been white. Conservatives blame police killings of, and violence against blacks, on black lawlessness run amok.

Never mind that [the murdered NYPD officers] the #BlackLivesMatter movement has condemned the murders of officers Liu and Ramos. Conservatives blame the movement collectively for the murder of officers Liu and Ramos.

Never mind that [the murdered] Brinsley had his own run in with NYPD last year. Never mind that Brinsley had a long history of mental illness. Conservatives will blame the #BlackLivesMatter movement for his crimes.

This conservative penchant for collective blaming was absent on June 8, when Jerad and Amanda Miller — both white — shot and killed Las Vegas police officers Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck, as they had lunch at a strip mall. The couple dragged the officers’ bodies from their booth, draped Beck’s body with the yellow “Gasden flag” popular with the tea party movement, and pinned a note to Soldo’s body reading “This is the beginning of the revolution.” The couple stole the officers guns and ammunition, and fled to a local Walmart. Jerad Miller was shot and killed by police. Amanda Miller died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Political violence in the post-Ferguson era

After the murder of two New York police officers assassination-style, the usual suspects treated it as another chapter in the "culture war."

Nancy LeTourneau provides several examples in Flame Throwers and Fire Fighters Political Animal, including Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Union Chief Patrick Lynch.

The Giuliani quote to which she refers continues with the authoritarian, white supremacist stance he has struck lately (Igor Volsky, Rudy Giuliani: 2 NYC Cops Were Killed Because Obama Told Everyone To ‘Hate The Police’ Think Progress 12/21/2014):

“We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”

Giuliani then argued that most of the city’s violence is centered in the black community through so-called “black against black” crime and heralded the police for keeping African Americans safe. “Actually, the people who do the most for the black community in America are the police,” he explained.

LeTourneau contrasts the flame throwers like Giuliani to the "fire fighters" like President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, who condemned the killings without reservation and sought to discourage further violence.

But there is a notable asymmetry between the two positions. The "flame throwers" are encouraging the kind of reaction described by Masoninblue in It’s Just a Shot Away Firedoglake 12/21/2014:

Yesterday’s murders by ambush may freak out many cops who, if not already, will become paranoid hyper vigilant drones with automatic trigger responses.

The ambush was a tragic but predictable and inevitable push-back to the epidemic of murders committed by our militarized police who will in turn increasingly react like a besieged occupation army. The only certainty is an escalating death rate for citizens and police.

White supremacists are seeking to present peaceful protest as a murderous threat to police, surely knowing it will encourage and legitimize the kind of police violence that Masoninblue describes.

When it comes to the murder of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who committed suicide afterward, was it an act of political violence?

Apparently so. But here is where the radically contrasting approaches the press takes to murders of police compared to murders of young black men by police. And also how they treat acts of terrorism.

The press with astonishing consistency treats even blatantly political acts by white rightwing terrorists as deeds committed by the proverbial "lone nut." Brinsley apparently has a history of being in trouble with the law, shot his girlfriend before killing the cops and then killed himself. If this were a white militia guy, the standard "lone nut" narrative would have likely swung into usage right away.

As we see from the statements by Giuliani and the other "flame throwers," they are willing not only to treat this as a political assassination but as one instigated by the President of the United States.

But however great or small a role rational calculation may have played in Brinsley's attack, it still serves as a good example of why political assassination is virtually always counterproductive as a political act.

Obviously to anyone who has paid any attention to the anti-police violence protests knows, they are demanding that the police do their jobs by enforcing the law against rogue cops who murder people for no good reason and by doing their duty to protect the citizens they serve instead of acting like an army of occupation that have to put "force protection" first at all times - including when they are dealing with a child with a toy gun. They are also demanding that police address the painfully obvious white racism that results in disproportionate violence against black citizens, including children.

Anyone who considers those demands to be "anti-police" is not a supporter of the rule of law and certainly has no business being on a police force.

We've seen that when a white cop murders a black man or boy, police are eager to make public any aspects of the dead person's life that make them look threatening. So far, the NYPD doesn't seem to be eager to make the murder victims Liu and Ramos look sinister. Instead, they have seemingly every public figure in the country praising them to the high heavens.

This report by the New York Daily News goes out of its way to link Brinsley's action to the Sixties, which appeals to rightwingers who seem perpetually stuck in 1969 (BY Tina Moore and Bill Hutchinson, Police believe New York City cop killer was a member of the Black Guerrilla Family: sources 12/2ß/2014):

The cold-blooded cop-hater who gunned down two police officers in Brooklyn on Saturday is suspected of being a member of a notorious prison gang that has declared open season on the NYPD.

Detectives were headed to Baltimore on Saturday night to probe Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s ties to the Black Guerrilla Family, sources told the Daily News.

One source said Baltimore police were already investigating Brinsley’s connection to the gang, which started in California’s San Quentin Prison in the 1960s by Black Panther member George Jackson.

As we've seen with the police leaks in the Michael Brown murder, it's worth taking a careful and critical view of such anonymous leaks. Especially when they fit so nicely into the rightwing "culture war" frame.

Chauncey DeVega offers this harsh judgment on the public dialogue on the Liu-Ramos case (The Lives of the Two Police Killed in Brooklyn on Saturday are No More Valuable Than That of Eric Garner WARN 12/21/2014):

Contemporary America is a society that is sick with torture, white victimology, gross wealth inequality, and other illnesses that together have created a culture of delusions and lies. Plain spoken truths by people of conscience are a partial antidote.

I will attempt to offer one here: the lives of the police are no more valuable than those of Eric Garner or any other human being.

Human rights trump the "unique", particular, and somehow imagined as "special" lives of the police. We are all human beings with universal rights. The public good will be much better served when the police as a social institution (many of whose members feel empowered to violate the rights of non-whites, the poor, the mentally ill, and those others who society has marginalized) internalize and act upon such a basic and foundational principle. [emphasis in original]