Blue Lives Matter?

Do you ever get a call soliciting money for some kind of police benevolent association? I do-- frequently. I always hang up. It's different from the way I treat other phone solicitors who slip through my security net. For the others I either speak in a really low voice so they have to press their ear against the phone to hear me-- and then blow a high-decibel coast guard whistle into the phone-- or I let loose with the most incredibly ugly stream of curses imaginable, so ugly that I unsalted and frighten myself. But when it's an operator-- inevitably an authoritative-sounding male-- identifying himself as from a police organization, I hold off on the whistle and curses. I just hang up. That's because I fear retribution.

No one from my high school academic classes became a cop. That's because in my high school, they divided kids up into "honor" classes, regular classes and "modified" classes. I was in the honor classes. The future cops weren't. And there were future cops at the school. They were in my gym classes and my home room classes and in my shop class. I didn't know for sure they would be cops then; there was always the chance they could be criminals. The future cops and the future mobsters were the same group of guys. At some point, they would go one way or the other-- although a congressman who eventually represented my neighborhood (decades after I had left) never made the choice... He was both a federal law enforcement agent and a mobster at the same time. That would be Michael Grimm (R-NY), who severed a tap on the wrist sentence for cheating on his taxes as part of a deal that didn't get into a long list of criminal activities, including at least one murder, in return for strict silence on his part. Omertà.

As the president of a large company in a small city, I was tight with the local police-- more than cordial relations. When my house was robbed once, I went to these cops from the city where I worked, not the city where my house was. They solved it-- fast-- and had all my stolen stuff back to me and the perps behind bars. More than cordial. Decades apart, I had affairs with two cops. What they had in common was chilling. I'm sure there are good cops like... Harry Bosch.





But not too many. More of them, I suspect, are like the cops/robbers kids in the modified classes, getting off on the power of fear, dominance and terror. This week New York Magazine published a piece by Zak Cheney-Rice worth reading, In L.A. County, Gangs Wear Badges that might help you to grok what the Black Lives Matter movement is fighting. "Much of the recent debate," wrote Cheney-Rice, "about policing’s excesses involves a clash of two viewpoints: one claiming that there is something structurally and culturally wrong with American law enforcement that encourages immoral behavior, and another that attributes their worst conduct to 'bad apples,' rogue individuals whose actions speak for them alone and do not indict their fellow officers or their profession as a whole. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department provides a helpful literalization of the former point: an entire law-enforcement entity whose members regularly join criminal gangs, earn clout by harassing, assaulting, and killing county residents, and retaliate against their colleagues who dare to oppose them." Oh great!

Sworn testimony made in June by a whistleblower, Deputy Art Gonzalez, details a pattern of such behavior inside the Compton sheriff’s station, which exists as part of the Southern California city’s partnership with the county sheriff to provide local law enforcement. Gonzalez claimed that Deputy Miguel Vega, who shot 18-year-old Andres Guardado during a June incident that sparked protests, was a prospective member of the Executioners, a dozen or so deputies who allegedly operate as a gang-- setting illegal arrest quotas, threatening work slowdowns if they don’t get their desired shift assignments, assaulting their fellow deputies, and holding parties to celebrate when their members shoot or kill someone in the line of duty, the Los Angeles Times reports. The existence of the Executioners is “common knowledge” within the department, Gonzalez said, according to Spectrum News 1, which obtained a transcript of his testimony this week. Decades of harassment and violence at the hands of the Compton office-- including one 2019 incident where the city’s mayor, Aja Brown, claims to have been ordered out of her car by more than half a dozen deputies and searched for drugs that she did not possess-- have led the city to propose severing ties with the department altogether, a proposal that the Executioners revelations stand to accelerate. According to the whistleblower complaint, Deputy Vega, who shot Guardado six times in the back, was “chasing ink”-- a term used to describe efforts to impress the Executioners in order to be drafted into their ranks and obtain their signature tattoo: a skeleton backed by flames, brandishing a rifle and wearing a Nazi-style helmet.

Part of what makes this dynamic notable is how ordinary it is. Though the central allegation is that the Executioners “dominate” the Compton sheriff’s office, at least nine other such gangs are known to operate across the department, and have done so for decades. “Vikings, Reapers, Regulators, Little Devils, Cowboys, 2000 Boys and 3000 Boys, Jump Out Boys, and most recently the Banditos and the Executioners,” Matthew Burson, chief of the department’s professional standard division, told KABC last month of the LASD’s gang problem. “I am absolutely sickened by the mere allegation of any deputy hiding behind their badges to hurt anyone.” Sheriff Alex Villanueva has said he intends to fire or suspend more than two dozen deputies involved in a widely covered assault on four non-gang members at an off-duty party in 2018. Villanueva was elected under immense pressure to clean up the department, whose former heads-- Lee Baca and his undersheriff, Paul Tanaka-- were convicted of obstructing a federal probe of abuses in the county’s jail. Tanaka was an alleged member of the Lynwood Vikings, a white supremacist sheriff’s gang. Villanueva has also said that he will implement measures to discourage deputies from joining these cliques at all, but county Inspector General Max Huntsman said last month that he’d seen no evidence of this actually happening. The fallout has been costly on several fronts. Since 2010, misconduct claims linked to these sheriff’s gangs have cost the county $21 million in settlements and associated legal costs, according to the Los Angeles Times.

It’s hard to make sense of this phenomenon without acknowledging that discrete individual malfeasance is insufficient for explaining its scope and longevity. The existence of ten or more gangs operating within the law-enforcement agency that patrols America’s most populous county, and whose members have occupied its highest ranks, indicates a level of tolerance and normalization that cannot be isolated to any one person, and a scale of public danger that cannot be calculated in mere dollar amounts or police shooting statistics. These gangs have been implicated in sustaining an environment of terror, and are regularly celebrated and rewarded for it. Their existence, and seeming intractability, are stark manifestations of the ways that American law-enforcement agencies operate as fraternities the nation over, with less regard for public partnership than for capitalizing upon their own impunity. This is perhaps most evident in the conduct of police unions. But survey any heavily patrolled community and it becomes clear that the existence of police gangs are not necessary to promote illegal arrest quotas, work slowdowns, or internal plaudits for acts of brutality-- though gangs are an especially brazen way of formalizing them. This is simply the reality of policing.

A full year ago-- so long before the Democrats chose a candidate-- the International Union of Police Associations endorsed Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. In doing so, union chief Sam Cabral said "Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims. They seem to take any union’s support for granted. Many of them still refer to the tragedy in Ferguson as a murder, despite the conclusions of every investigative inquiry to the contrary. While his candor ruffles the feathers of the left, I find it honest and refreshing. He stands with America’s law enforcement officer and we will continue to stand with him." Last month the union representing most NYC cops also endorsed Trump. Union president Patrick Lynch, said "Across this country, police officers are under attack. Our neighborhoods are being ripped apart by violence and lawlessness. Most politicians have abandoned us, but we still have one strong voice speaking up in our defense."

A Vote For Trump Is A Vote For Radical Right Terrorism

A new poll by the Military Times of active-duty service members shows Trump job favorability underwater, just 38% saying he's doing a good job. Officers have the most unfavorable view of Trump-- 59.1% disapproving. As for voting... Biden's ahead among all service members by nearly 6 points.

And this was even before it came out that Trump has been knowingly been accepting at least 30 campaign contributions from American Nazi movement leader, Morris Gulett-- and other known Nazis. And before it came out that Trump has been stoking vigilantism and violence in American cities to cause chaos. Washington Post reporters David Nakamura, Matt Viser and Robert Klemko wrote Sunday that Trump spent the weekend fanning the flames of partisan tensions between his supporters and social justice protesters in Portland and Kenosha, underscoring the threat of rising politically motivated violence.

In tweeting a video of the caravan on the move, Trump called the participants “GREAT PATRIOTS!” The reaction marked a sharp contrast to his silence during a large and peaceful civil rights march on Friday in Washington that drew thousands to the Mall, where some speakers denounced his leadership.

In a statement Sunday afternoon, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden “unequivocally” condemned the Portland shooting and accused Trump of “fanning the flames of hate and division in our society and using the politics of fear to whip up his supporters.”

“We must not become a country at war with ourselves; a country that accepts the killing of fellow Americans who do not agree with you; a country that vows vengeance toward one another,” Biden said. “But that is the America that President Trump wants us to be, the America he believes we are.”

The violence has escalated as Trump has seized on the social justice protests as a campaign wedge, attempting to tie Biden to “radical” elements on the left. Eager to shift the political debate from the rising deaths and economic toll of the pandemic, Trump has relentlessly attacked Democratic mayors and governors for failing to quell protests, and he dispatched federal law enforcement authorities into cities to help arrest demonstrators.

...Trump aides, including White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, asserted recently that the violence and chaos will help his reelection bid.

“The only people to blame for the violence and riots in our streets are liberal politicians and their incompetent policies that have failed to get control of these destructive situations,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement. “This President has condemned violence in all its forms. Americans want peace in their streets and for their children to grow up in safe neighborhoods, and only President Trump has shown the courage and leadership to achieve law and order and deliver results.”

Trump’s conservative supporters, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have seized on Rittenhouse as a figure of sympathy, suggesting that he acted legally and in self-defense. The president on Sunday appeared to offer his support by liking a tweet from a self-described former liberal activist who cited Rittenhouse as a reason to vote for Trump.

Conservatives also rallied around the Trump caravan in Portland, where the man who was killed was wearing a hat bearing the words “Patriot Prayer,” the name of a far-right group organized in 2016 to bring pro-Trump rallies to liberal strongholds.

In a tweet, Trump referred to Biden as a “puppet” of “crazed leaders” on the left who envision the Portland chaos as emblematic of “Joe Biden’s America.”

“This is not what our great Country wants,” Trump wrote. “They want Safety & Security, and do NOT want to Defund our Police!”

Biden has stated that he does not support efforts of some liberals to drastically cut funding for local police departments and instead has outlined a proposal that would increase funding for community policing programs by $300 million as long as local departments agree to conditions such as adopting new use-of-force standards and increasing diversity among their ranks.

In recent months, Trump has increasingly used official White House events, along with campaign rallies, to vilify protesters as violent and to fan fears along racial lines.

During his renomination acceptance speech, delivered Thursday on the South Lawn of the White House for the Republican National Convention, Trump attacked Biden for failing to condemn “rioters and criminals spreading mayhem in Democrat-run cities” even though the former vice president had already spoken out against the violence and looting, saying the day before that “violence that endangers lives, violence that guts businesses and shutters businesses that serve the community-- that’s wrong.”

“Trump has been inciting violence for years and with deadly effects,” said author Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies authoritarian regimes. She pointed to a mass shooting in El Paso last summer by a gunman who cited anti-immigrant views with echoes of Trump’s rhetoric in a manifesto.

In 2018, Cesar Sayoc, a Trump supporter, mailed inoperative pipe bombs to Trump’s critics, a crime for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. And in 2017, a white nationalist in Charlottesville drove a car into a crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer as she protested the extremist “Unite the Right” march-- a movement the president failed to condemn unequivocally.

“Now he’s trained his aim on Black Lives Matter protesters and antifa,” said Ben-Ghiat, referring to a loosely connected set of left-wing, anti-fascist groups. “So what is happening now with an escalation of violence is something beneficial to Trump. Strongmen leaders incite crises so they can pose themselves as the law-and-order solution.”

...Homeland security experts said the combustible mix of sharply polarized and ideologically minded agitators mixing on the streets in cities where law enforcement authorities are strained and, in some cases, inadequately trained is a recipe for potential violence.

“It’s important for government leaders at all levels to calm everyone and keep political rallies peaceful,” said Tom Warrick, an Atlantic Council expert who left government service last year after serving as a career official at the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.

“The problem is that things can quickly get out of control and the uncertainty and chaos become weapons in the fight,” Warrick said. “Merely the uncertainty that it will take days, or weeks, to sort out something that’s happening in itself becomes a tool for division of the country, rather than the unity.”

Yesterday, another Post team, Joshua Partlow and Isaac Stanley-Becker, reported that some local police departments-- which don't even try to screen out facsists and racists-- are supporting neo-Nazi Trump supporters, militants and vigilantes. Many people think officers in the Kenosha police department should be charged with abetting and encouraging the Kyle Rittenhouse murders in Kenosha.

The trio wrote that "As protesters march against racism and police violence in cities and towns across the nation, they are being confronted by groups of armed civilians who claim to be assisting and showing support for police battered and overwhelmed by the protests. The confrontations have left at least three people dead in recent days: In addition to the two protesters killed Tuesday in Kenosha, a man thought to be associated with a far-right group called Patriot Prayer was fatally shot late Saturday in Portland, Oregon. Both incidents have drawn complaints that local authorities abetted the violence by tolerating the presence of these self-appointed enforcers with no uniforms, varied training and limited accountability. The stated motives of these vigilante actors, who are virtually indistinguishable from one another once massed on the streets, range from protecting storefronts and free speech to furthering White supremacy and fomenting civil war."

Many sheriffs and police chiefs, including in Kenosha, have disavowed these armed civilians, saying police don’t want their help. Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth said he responded “hell no” when asked to deputize civilians. And Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian said this week, “I don’t need more guns on the streets in this city when we are trying to keep people safe.”

But elsewhere, local authorities have at times appeared to support people who took up arms against protests that have occasionally turned violent and provided cover for vandals and looters. In Snohomish, Washington, the police chief was ousted in June after welcoming dozens of armed men, including one waving a Confederate flag, who responded to false Internet rumors that “antifa” looters planned to ransack the town, referring to a loosely knit movement of far-left activists.

In Hood County, Texas, a constable in May encouraged the Oath Keepers-- an armed group that claims to have thousands of members of current and former law enforcement and military members-- to defend a Dallas hair salon after rumors of possible looting. And in Salem, Oregon, a police officer was captured on video in June advising armed men to “discreetly” stay inside while police began arresting protesters for violating curfew.

On other occasions, police officers have been photographed smiling or fist-bumping with members of far-right armed groups. Even in Kenosha, individual police officers seemed to welcome the help of armed civilians, including Rittenhouse, a member of police and fire cadet training programs who said on video before the shooting that it was “our job” to help people and protect property.

We were welcomed very warmly,” said Kenosha Guard leader Kevin Mathewson, 36, a former city alderman who summoned men with guns to gather in Kenosha on the night of the shooting. “I was at the entrance to my neighborhood. [Police] rolled down their windows and said, ‘Thanks for being here. We can’t be everywhere.’”

Mathewson has said that he does not know Rittenhouse. The teen, from the nearby town of Antioch, Ill., has been charged with first-degree homicide. His attorneys say he acted in self-defense after being “accosted by multiple rioters.”

In a letter last week to Kenosha officials, Mary B. McCord, legal director at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, said “the bloodshed . . . throws into sharp relief the danger posed when private and unaccountable militia groups take the law into their own hands.”

McCord has called on police and prosecutors to enforce laws that prohibit private militias from usurping law enforcement functions. In her letter, she noted that “several provisions of Wisconsin law prohibit private paramilitary and unauthorized law enforcement activity.”

Raul Torrez (D), the district attorney in Bernalillo County, N.M., agrees. In June, one person was shot after members of an armed group that calls itself the New Mexico Civil Guard clashed with protesters trying to tear down a monument to Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate in Albuquerque. Torrez filed suit against the militia, seeking to block it from assuming law enforcement duties.

“I don’t think a lot of Americans understand how fragile democracy is,” Torrez said. “One of the early signs of a troubled democracy is when people decide that they’re no longer going to address their political differences at the ballot box-- or in elected legislatures or in Congress-- but they’re going to do it on the street, and they’re going to do it with guns.”

“Police officers, district attorneys, leaders in law enforcement here and across the country have to make it unambiguously clear to anyone that it is not their job-- it is the role of law enforcement-- to” defend property, Torrez said. Militia groups are “not hearing that message from enough leadership in law enforcement. And this takes us down a very, very dangerous path.”

While racial justice protests typically condemn police behavior and include calls for defunding police departments, militia-style groups are predominantly pro-police and often rally behind slogans such as “Blue Lives Matter” and “Back the Badge.” In Portland and other places, law enforcement has been accused of treating far-right groups more leniently than leftist protesters.

“The vigilantes will come out, and their rally will be ‘Back the Blue,’” said Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right, a London-based group.

Ross has compiled a database of 497 public appearances of militias and far-right groups in about 300 U.S. counties since May, including 56 that he says suggest collaboration with police.

This summer, for instance, a commissioner in Bonner County, Idaho, called on residents to mobilize against a Black Lives Matter protest planned for Sandpoint, the county seat. His Facebook post asked people to “help counter anything that might get out of hand,” drawing a rebuke from Sandpoint Mayor Shelby Rognstad, who called it “grossly irresponsible.”

The commissioner, Dan McDonald, said he stood by his message, despite critics who derided the assemblage as “Dan’s private army.”

“Most of the guys that showed up-- I would bet because I know some of these folks-- are former law enforcement, former military,” he said. “They’re well trained and continue to train just for their own self-defense.”

Elsewhere, local officials have advised civilians to be prepared to use violence to defend themselves. At a June news conference responding to rumors on social media of possible riots, the sheriff in Polk County, Fla., warned would-be lawbreakers that local residents “have guns. I encourage them to own guns. And they’re going to be in their homes tonight, with their guns loaded.”

The sheriff, Grady Judd, also encouraged people to shoot intruders.

“Shoot them so much you can read the Washington Post through them,” he said in an interview last week, adding: “I want people to take matters into their own hands when they’re protecting their homes.”

...“Are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said last week. “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

Let me turn to the student newspaper of Louisiana State University, Reveille and writer Gabrielle Martinez, who had a few things to say over the weekend about Tucker's racism and hate-mongering on Fox. "With an average audience of 4.33 million viewers each night," she wrote, "frozen dinner heir and political pundit Tucker Carlson consistently spews hate through misinformation and misdirection as the host of the highest-rated program in U.S. cable news history, Tucker Carlson Tonight. A defining trait of the millionaire’s TV persona is his hatred for the American 'elite.' He repeatedly discusses his distaste for the 'pompous' rich, like Barack Obama, to an almost anti-capitalist degree; ironically, it’s estimated Tucker Carlson Tonight has sold $108.3 million in commercials alone this year, making up 16 percent of Fox’s billion-dollar ad revenue. Yet Carlson still attempts to portray himself as a figurehead of America’s working class. A supposed patriot, he wants the best for the United States-- or at least enough to relentlessly push Fox’s ultra-conservative narrative on their elderly white viewership."

To Carlson, "maintaining order” apparently means murdering two innocent people, a crime even our current president refuses to condemn. This is the result of Carlson’s inability to distance himself from radical far-right rhetoric in turn for higher ratings and publicity.

It’s becoming more and more clear that Carlson is intentionally pushing a narrative that he himself is writing. While it’s humorous to acknowledge as an outsider, it’s dangerous to the people who actually take his word seriously and believe the liberal left wants to destroy the American way of life.

While the left advocates for race equality and climate change, Carlson somehow twists these movements into what he views as socialist corruption. Instead of acknowledging things as they are, Carlson falsely portrays himself as a heroic character trying to save America from ruin. This tactic only heightens dramatics to further divide the country along race and party lines.

Oh, and John Oliver is... on fucking fire! Please do not miss this clip-- and all the way to the end!

Do Police Have The "Right" To Brutalize-- And Execute-- Citizens? Republicans Tend To Think So

If the election is a referendum on Trump, get ready for President Biden. If it's about Trump's handling of the pandemic, expect an landslide that will see Republicans at every level of government losing their offices. The Republicans know that, of course, and they are working make the election about anything else. They've settled on a bogus "law and order" narrative. Bogus because Trump is the most criminal president in history, presiding over the most criminal regime in American history. This may not be that big a deal compared to Trump's major, daily criminality but last February he pardoned the female Darrell Issa, Angela Stanton-King, who had served 2 years of her sentence for running a car theft ring. A few weeks after Trump pardoned her, she launched an election campaign against John Lewis in Atlanta's 5th congressional district, one of the bluest districts in the country (D+34), where Trump only drew 11% of the vote. With Lewis' death Stanton-King is now running in an open seat (against state Senator Nikema Williams). A gay-bashing, anti-Choice Q-Anon nut case with a flare for getting attention, Stanton-King has no chance of being elected to Congress but every TV appearance and every newspaper article or social media mention brings money into her coffers. She's very much like her hero, Señor Trumpanzee.

"Law and order" is not part of today's Republican Party-- except inasmuch as it can be used to oppress poor people. The Republican campaign theme this cycle is all about painting a picture of Democrat-run cities being overrun by angry mobs and looters. Trump in New Hampshire Friday: "Today's Democratic Party is filled with hate. Just look at Joe Biden supporters on the street screaming and shouting at bystanders with unhinged manic rage... They are not protesters. They are anarchists, they are agitators, they are rioters, they are looters." And actual Trump supporter Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two protesters and wounded a third in Kenosha.

The protests in Kenosha were all about the police shooting Jacob Blake in the back-- 7 times-- last Sunday. Blake lived but is now paralyzed from the waist down. The police responded to protesters by gassing them. Some of the protesters, angry and provoked-- possibly by Trumpist agents provocateurs-- burned businesses. There is a legitimate sense that police are not accountable for their criminal activity and the fascist impulses they act out against citizens.

"I support the protestors, so I am against the police. That’s the lie I hear every single day in America," wrote John Pavlovitz yesterday. "It’s a myth perpetuated by this President and his party and by people like them: white people who don’t want to address the systemic racism embedded in law enforcement or the persistent brutality against people of color on display-- and who attempt to push people to the very opposite of poles in order to avoid talking about it: 'Choose Black Lives or Blue Lives.' they say. 'Those are the options.' This choice is not only unnecessary, it is rooted in a fundamental falsehood: the existence of Blue Lives. There is no such thing as a 'Blue Life.'"

Law enforcement officers are not a race and they are not a monolith, either. They come from every disparate part of this nation; out of many families of origin, religious traditions, sexual orientations, and political affiliations, when they choose this work. It is among the most dangerous and stressful and volatile work on the planet-- but they do choose it.

And when they do, they take an oath to protect and serve humanity in its fullness. That is the job description. It is the very heart of the calling. It is the singular purpose they exist: defense of all life under the Law, a Law they represent and embody.

There are expectations we have for those choosing to put on that badge and that uniform:

• They are expected to defuse combustible situations, not exacerbate them.
• They are expected to use wisdom and restraint instead of emotionally exerting force.
• They are expected to withstand provocation without responding in kind.
• They are expected to be beyond prejudice and above biases that would deny another human being’s inherent worth.
• They are expected to uphold the civil rights of every person in their path equally, without caveat or condition or excuse.
• They are paid by American citizens (including citizens of color) to do this chosen work on behalf of the public who they are accountable to.

And when they are off-duty, members of this diverse community can remove the badge and uniform and they can escape the hazards and the threats of their jobs, and live fully into their other “non-Blue identities”-- that is, except for the black and brown police officers.

They like (all people of color) can’t take off their skin to avoid the taunts that come with it, they can’t be undercover or off-duty or take a break from the demands of their difficult reality. They can’t step out of their pigmentation in order to sidestep the violence it brings every moment of every day. They are not black or brown at some portions of the day or some days of the week or when they clock in, which is why the supposed #BlueLivesMatter movement isn’t an equivalent advocacy of life in response to the call for people of color to be treated with dignity, it is an insult. It is a white excuse to avoid confronting discrimination against people of color, to distract from the difficult conversations, to deny the systemic sickness, and to stop all conversation.

This is something far beyond citizen on citizen violence, this is violence initiated by those with both the power of the Law and weaponry in their hands. That means they are subject to even greater scrutiny because the stakes are higher and the impact on communities is profound.

It is not an attack on law enforcement to name and to condemn police brutality, or to demand that those who comprise its ranks are of the highest standard as human beings-- it is a reiteration of its value as an entity.

And it is not anti-American, but the essence of patriotism to responsibly police the police; to ensure that they are living into their oath with regard to all citizens, because every human life literally depends on them doing so: at traffic stops and in city streets and in public parks and in their homes.

And as citizens of this country, we don’t have to apologize for our standards and our expectations of public servants. That’s part of the gig. Law-abiding, tax-paying Americans are not accountable to violent police officers-- violent police officers are accountable to law-abiding, tax-paying Americans. It is not incumbent on us to avoid criticizing them, it is incumbent on them to listen and to respond to valid criticism.

It’s not asking too much to insist that officers not only protect people of color as passionately as they protect white Americans, but that they not actively harm them.

It’s not unreasonable to expect them not to kneel on a man’s neck for over eight minutes until he expires, not to shoot a man seven times in the back, not break into a woman’s bedroom and murder her, not to beat peaceful protestors, not to knock unarmed old men to the ground, not to allow a young white man with an AR-15 to run past them while being alerted to his murderous presence.

Being furious when police officers do these things is not an act of hatred against law enforcement as an entity-- but against the acts of hateful cowardice committed by some that pervert it and cheapen them all.

I am not for Blue Lives, I am for human lives, and the human lives that continually find themselves brutalized by those entrusted to protect them are black and brown-- and Americans need to name and confront and own this because until we do, we will continue to conflate outrage at inequity, with attacks on the perpetrators of this inequity.

The good people of this country fighting against brutality will not be defined by the calculated lie that to be for Black Lives is to be against the police.

We simply demand that the police be for Black Lives without exception-- or we demand they no longer be police.

Forty Percent of Police Families Experience Domestic Violence, Compared to 10% in the General Population

Police protecting the down-trodden from violence

by Thomas Neuburger

"If there's any job that domestic abuse should disqualify a person from holding, it's the one job that gives you a lethal weapon, trains you to stalk people without their noticing, and relies on your judgment and discretion to protect the abused from abusers."
—Conor Friedersdorf here, slightly paraphrased

Protecting the abused from abusers is an important role in any society — or at least a sane society. It's the role, in fact, of government itself, especially in an exploitive economic system like our own.

Capturing the organs of protection by the abusers themselves is therefore a high priority of the abusing class. This is why Reagan staffed his administration with people who hate the protective role government played, why he put anti-environmentalist James Watt in charge of Interior and the National Parks, and anti-regulationist Ann Gorsuch Burford in charge of the EPA. (Yes, she's related to that other Gorsuch.)

And apparently why we put cops, domestic abusers at a very high rate, in charge of protecting victims of abuse.

Cops being in charge of abuse — delivering it — is a commonplace these days. Putting cops in charge of protecting people from abuse is like putting pedophiles in charge of public safety at a grade school, or pedophile priests in charge of youth ministry (we had one of those in a parish I once lived in).

Pedophiles love those jobs, just as cops love the jobs they've been given. How better to commit violence than to be the only sanctioned dealers of state violence, to be licensed to kill in the name of "protecting" the abused? You even get to parade around as "heroes" for doing it.

Conor Friedorsdorf, in an Atlantic article entitled "Police Have a Much Bigger Domestic-Abuse Problem Than the NFL Does," quotes a heavily footnoted National Center for Women and Policing fact sheet: "Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general [emphasis added]." Friedersdorf's piece is well worth reading in full.

I have anecdotal evidence of this connection. Some years ago a friend of mine was a psychiatric counselor specializing in troubled families. The bulk of her clients were cop families, where the cop was the abuser. She attributes the problem to the pathological (my word) need for control by the cop — reinforced, no doubt, by a job in which "gaining and keeping control" was both an absolute requirement of every cop-involved situation, and by supervisors who encouraged or allowed the worse abuses of that requirement.

We don't hire pedophiles to guard grade school kids. Why do we hire violent cops to keep the peace? Is there something in us that's perpetuating this?
  

Americans May Be Ready For Real Change-- And We're Stuck Choosing Between Two Status Quo Stiffs

What? by Chip Proser

It's been about 2 weeks since several officers from the Minneapolis police department brutally and virtually routinely murdered George Floyd and then lied about it, not knowing they would be exposed by a cell phone tape. Those officers are responsible for a "Defund the Police" movement and more. Yesterday, Axios reported that the ugliness that has been nearly routine for Black America is now being exposed for everyone else in the country. And-- except for hard core Trump fanatics, no one likes it. A brand new poll of Michigan likely voters asked "Are deaths of black individuals isolated incidents, or signs of a bigger problem?" 68% said it was part of a bigger problem. Asked if policing practices need reform, 76% said yes and only 15% said no. When asked if demonstrators should be permitted to carry guns inside the state Capitol, 80% said no and just 13% said yes.

It's no longer the word of a police officer vs. the suspect. Now it's the police officer vs. video cameras, often held by members of the communities they patrol. At least three big police departments have been caught in the act in just the past few weeks because of video footage, AP notes.

• Minneapolis police initially told the public that George Floyd resisted arrest and that he died after a "medical incident during a police interaction." But George Floyd didn't resist arrest, and the Minneapolis police omitted the knee that a former officer placed on his neck for almost 9 minutes.
• Buffalo police said a protester "tripped and fell." Protester Martin Gugino, 75, was pushed by Buffalo police officers and suffered brain damage. President Trump tweeted a conspiracy theory about Gugino today, but you can watch the tape for yourself. The man was shoved to the ground by cops, and no one stopped to help. Even a handful of Republican senators recognize Trump's response as a potential catastrophe for the GOP and are trying to distance themselves from it.
• Philadelphia police alleged that a college student who suffered a serious head wound had assaulted an officer. The Philadelphia officer was seen on video striking a 21-year-old Temple University student in the head and neck with a metal baton. That student was released after prosecutors saw the video and decided to pursue the officer instead.

Civil rights lawyer Michael Avery, who is the board president of the National Police Accountability Project, told the AP that false claims by the police had long been known to inner-city communities. "But what is happening now with video, this is getting out into the larger world, into the media, into white communities, suburban communities, and people outside the affected communities are becoming more aware of what’s going on," he said. "It’s a completely different situation."

A Washington Post poll also found that most people are not all that sympathetic with the police. Dan Balz and Scott Clement wrote that "Americans overwhelmingly support the nationwide protests that have taken place since the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis, and they say police forces have not done enough to ensure that blacks are treated equally to whites... Trump receives negative marks for his handling of the protests, with 61 percent saying they disapprove and 35 percent saying they approve. Much of the opposition to Trump is vehement, as 47 percent of Americans say they strongly disapprove of the way the president has responded to the protests."

The poll highlights how attitudes about police treatment of black Americans are changing dramatically. More than 2 in 3 Americans (69 percent) say the killing of Floyd represents a broader problem within law enforcement, compared with fewer than 1 in 3 (29 percent) who say the Minneapolis killing is an isolated incident.

That finding marks a significant shift when compared with the reactions in 2014 to police killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York. Six years ago, 43 percent described those deaths as indicative of broader problems in policing while 51 percent saw them as isolated incidents.

Overall, 74 percent of Americans say they support the protests that have been carried out in cities and towns across the country since the May 25 killing of Floyd, which occurred after police held him on the ground and one officer pressed his knee to the victim’s neck for nearly nine minutes. “I can’t breathe,” Floyd said as he died.

The recent demonstrations have bipartisan appeal, with 87 percent of Democrats saying they support them, along with 76 percent of independents. Among Republicans, the majority-- 53 percent-- also back the protests.

The widespread support for the protests comes amid mixed views of whether those events have been mostly peaceful or mostly violent. On that question, Americans are evenly divided, with 43 percent saying the protests have been mostly peaceful and an identical percentage describing them as mostly violent. Thirteen percent say the protests have been equally peaceful and violent.

Views on this split along ideological and partisan lines: Most liberals (70 percent) and Democrats (56 percent) say the protests were mostly peaceful, while most conservatives (60 percent) and Republicans (65 percent) say they were largely violent. Independents are split similarly to the country overall, with 44 percent saying the protests were mostly peaceful, 42 percent mostly violent.

But support for the protests is evident regardless of whether they are seen as mostly violent or mainly peaceful.

...Casting ahead to the November election, which pits Trump against former vice president Joe Biden, half of all Americans (50 percent) say they prefer a president who can address the nation’s racial divisions, compared with 37 percent who say they want a president who can restore security by enforcing the law.

...Republicans generally agree with views of the protests expressed by Trump. Last week he called himself “your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters” in a Rose Garden statement, made as police and military troops forcibly cleared a demonstration near the White House. He also said the country was in the grip of “professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, antifa and others.” He told mayors and governors that they needed to dominate the streets to restore order.

More than 7 in 10 Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of the protests, a view shared by just over one-third (35 percent) of the overall population. Republicans also have a more negative view of the protests; while 43 percent of the public says the protests have been “mostly violent,” 65 percent of Republicans hold this view.

Almost half of all Americans (47 percent) say police have not used enough force in responding to episodes of looting and vandalism, a figure that rises to 72 percent among Republicans. And 63 percent of Republicans say they prefer a president who would restore security, when 50 percent of the overall population instead prefers someone who could deal with the country’s racial divisions.

Yesterday, the AFL-CIO's General Board endorsed what they claim is "a sweeping set of policing reforms" proposed by the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, expressed support and solidarity with the Minnesota AFL-CIO's call for the resignation of the President of the Minneapolis Police Union (not affiliated with the AFL-CIO), expressed support for the King County Labor Council (Seattle)'s demands on the Seattle police union that they renounce racist practices of face expulsion, and committed the AFL-CIO to an accelerated and intensified process of internal dialogue and change around race in our own institutions. "The scourge of police violence against black people in America has reached a tipping point," get said in their statement, "and it is critical that we take comprehensive action to end this injustice once and for all. Union members live and work in every state and every community, so when police brutality occurs, it happens in our backyards and to our families. As such, we feel a special responsibility in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to support our civil rights allies and play a leading role in making sure this time is different. Whether it’s banning chokeholds, expanding use of body cameras, ending racial profiling, demilitiarizing our police forces or limiting no-knock warrants, the LCCHR’s recommendations on police reform have the potential to create a fairer, more community-centric policing culture."

Reforming The Police, Part II-- No More Bully-Boy Brutality Towards Citizens

The Tipping Point by Nancy Ohanian

Part I of this series on police reform is here. It was somewhat ironic yesterday when a GOP flack for the NRCC, Michael McAdams, put out a statement for Tom Emmer (R-WI) oil response for Democrats looking at ways to reform out of control police departments. He said "No industry is safe from the Democrats’ abolish culture. First they wanted to abolish private health insurance, then it was capitalism and now it’s the police. What’s next, the fire department?" The irony, of course, that the only party trying to abolish the fire department is the GOP, which has tried in several jurisdictions to privatize it, the same way they're trying to abolish the post office and privatize that.

Politico began their coverage of the bill with a somewhat startling headline: "Black Americans want to stop being killed": Democrats unveil sweeping police reform bill". The bill-- the Justice in Policing Act-- was unveiled by Karen Bass, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with Hoyer and Pelosi. Bass, an L.A. congresswoman and former Speaker of the California Assembly told the media that "The world is witnessing the birth of a new movement in our country. A profession where you have the power to kill should be a profession where you have highly trained officers accountable to the public." As of now, what the bill does is:

• Ban no-knock warrants
• Ban chokeholds
• Require body-cams
• Mandate a national police misconduct database
• Demilitarize police
• End racial profiling
• Limit qualified immunity, making it easier to sue cops who unjustly injure, brutalize or kill citizens
• Make lynching a federal crime (something that has passed both chambers but is being blocking by racist Kentucky Senator Rand Paul)

Just to give you an idea of how hard this is going to be to get to Trump's desk, let's remember that Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy went from this:

to this tweet yesterday:

and is now a puffed-up, liveried Trump butt boy. The clossest any Republican got to helping with writing the bill was ex-Republican Justin Amash (now an independent) who co-wrote a section with Ayanna Pressley that partially repeals qualified immunity but my sources on Capitol Hill tell me not even Amash will vote fo it.

By Washington standards, this is a pretty progressive bill and it will be hard enough to get the Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party to get onboard without trying to gut it, let alone any Republicans. Pelosi and Hoyer appear-- at least for now-- to be on the side of progressives here so who knows? Maybe they can turn it into a freight train that the Blue Dogs and New Dems will either hop on or get splattered by. Still, it's hard to imagine hard core conservative Democrats like Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY), Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ), Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT) or Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK) backing this bill.


Robin Wilt is running for the seat representing Monroe County, New York and she's firmly on the side of reform-- very firmly. Last night she told me that we're in "a pivotal moment in history where those in the future will ask if you were with the dissenters-- who took to the street to unequivocally assert that Black Lives Matter-- or on the sidelines tacitly supporting an unjust status quo. My opponent, Joe Morelle, has chosen to be on the wrong side of history. Despite this transformative legislation being supported by 166 members of the House of Representatives and 35 Senators, as well as a broad coalition of civil rights organizations including: Demand Progress; Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; National Action Network; National African American Clergy Network; NAACP; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; the National Coaliton on Black Civic Participation; Black Millennial Convention; and the National Urban League-- my opponent has remained silent. As Desmond Tutu famously opined: 'If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.' Over the past two weeks, the people of Rochester and Monroe County have taken to the streets to protest by the thousands. Joe Morelle had the nerve to show up at those protests for a photo opportunity. It is craven to be in a position to do something to help address the practices that lead to the unjust taking of Black lives, but then stand idly by when the opportunity is presented to take action. It is particularly cynical to do nothing after signing a toothless resolution that mouths the words that you support police accountability and reform. The people of the 25th Congressional District can’t endure any more of Joe Morelle’s empty promises and self-serving, performative allyship. We need courageous leadership that will allow us all to breathe."

Tomas Ramos is the best suited of all the candidates running in NY-15 to represent the South Bronx. Last night he told me that "'Defund the police’ or 'abolish the police' does not mean that when we wake up tomorrow and there are no law enforcement mechanisms there to protect the population. Rather, defunding the police is a concept which involves community led initiatives and ideas of what 'law enforcement' should look like rather than punitive racist policing measures. It is a multi-tiered plan that involves all community stakeholders and to reinvest police funding into community based entities. These progressive policies are a far cry from where modern American policing is derived from-- the slave patrols of the antebellum period, which ultimately sought to apprehend, and return runaway slaves and to maintain a form of discipline for the enslaved population. These efforts are important because it will lead to community based solutions rather than the traditional bureaucratic gridlock which does not effectively benefit the community and does not tear down the essence of systemic racism. Ruben Diaz Sr. an opponent of mine in this race has been endorsed by the NYPD’s strongest police union the PBA. Needless to say, my opponent does not share the same views as I do when it comes to this concept."

UPDATE: FLORIDA



Adam Christensen is the progressive Democrat running for the open seat in north central Florida in the Gainesville area. Early this morning he told me that he and his volunteers stand with the Black Lives Matter movement "and we want our actions to show that, not just our words. The Republican Party of Florida, including opponent Judson Sapp, have been completely silent on the issue of police brutality and refuse to even have the conversation about any changes we can make in the police system. People in this district and the entire country deserve better, because right now they have Congressman Ted Yoho representing them, who just voted against making lynching a federal crime. The entire system must have a complete overhaul. We first must require demilitarization of the police. Officers do not need to be armed with military-grade equipment for civilian issues. The next necessary task is reallocating funds from police departments to social programs meant to act as first responders rather than police. These social programs would include mental health experts and others meant to de-escalate situations. Police are trained to use a firearm and make an arrest, while also being forced to respond to every call. Imagine calling for help with a mental health issue, and instead of getting help, someone shows up, slaps handcuffs on you and takes you to jail. This could further damage someone’s mental state, rather than help fix the issue. We also must require police training  to expand de-escalation and inclusivity training. There are currently 34 states that do not require this training. The last thing we must do is hold police accountable. 99% of cases of police shootings end with no charges being filed. The majority of police who get fired as punishment for their actions later get re-hired by a different police force. The reason these tragedies keep occurring is because there is no accountability for police officers. It’s time we police the police."

"Don't Shoot!" by Nancy Ohanian

Reforming The Police Has To Include Keeping Racists And Bullies Off The Force-- And Firing The Ones Who Are There Now

Last week, the NYC police union endorsed 3 contemptible candidates for Congress-- "ex"- Republican Michelle Caruso-Cabrera against AOC, anti-Choice/anti-LGBTQ fanatic Rubén Díaz, Sr. against Tomas Ramos and conservative IDC-er David Carlucci against Mondaire Jones. This exactly aligns the police union-- once again-- with the Wall Street banksters. The police union are a bunch of scumbags coast to coast. In fact, there have been increasing demands that the AFL-CIO kick them out of the umbrella union. In Seattle, that's already moving along.

"AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka," wrote Candice Bernd, "has refused to expel the International Union of Police Associations and other law enforcement unions from the U.S.’s largest labor federation. Trumka told Bloomberg Friday that he won’t cut ties with police unions because 'police officers and everyone who works for a living has the right to collective bargaining' and that the 'best way to use our influence on the issue of police misconduct is to engage with our police affiliates rather than isolate them.' He told labor leaders and reporters Wednesday that 'the answer is not to disengage and condemn' police unions, while imploring labor organizers to fight racism. Trumka has praised the Minnesota Federation of Labor’s ousting of the openly racist Minneapolis Police Officers Federation President Bob Kroll. He also said the labor movement must play a leading role in the racial justice movement 'because protesting racial brutality, whether at the hands of a police officer, or a neighbor, or an employer, is not only the right cause. It’s a responsibility.'"

"I Can't Breathe" by Nancy Ohanian

Protesters set the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the AFL-CIO, aflame Sunday night, smashing in its windows and graffitiing its gold 16th Street entrance with 'Black Lives Matter.' While the motivations for the arson remain unclear, the action has put the federation’s partnership and affiliation with police under further scrutiny.

...U.S. police departments remain one of the heaviest unionized sectors in the country, representing hundreds of thousands of cops at the state, federal and local levels. The national largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has more than 340,000 members. Former Minneapolis Police Department officer Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd last month, was a union member.

By continuing to affiliate with police unions, Trumka and other labor leaders are betraying the demands of protesters and some of the federation’s own affiliates, including the United Auto Workers Local 2865, who want the organization to take a stand and let go of hundreds of thousands of unionized officers. Trumka’s reticence comes as the 2018 Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision continues to erode some public-sector union rolls.

Still, racial justice activists say now is exactly the moment to “disengage,” and that the federation has done so before, pointing to the AFL-CIO’s disaffiliation with the Teamsters and other unions.

...[A]ctivists have pointed out that police unions don’t show up regularly in solidarity for the broader labor movement; instead they actively repress working people by routinely beating and murdering them in the streets. Police officers have long been used to break strikes and kill striking workers, as they have done during historic labor uprisings such as the 1897 Lattimer Massacre, the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain and the 1937 Little Steel Strike in Chicago.

Police unions largely work to protect their own. The contracts they bargain keep racist officers who have killed and abused immune from accountability. They maintain policing’s structural system of white supremacy while maintaining wages and benefits that often exceed those of public servants like emergency medical technicians and child care workers.

To be sure, Trumka has called out police-perpetrated violence in the past. After the Ferguson uprising of 2014, Trumka noted that Darren Wilson and Michael Brown’s mother were both union members, saying, “Our brother killed our sister’s son,” last September. “We do not have to wait for the judgment of prosecutors or courts to tell us how terrible this is.” During his tenure as president of the United Mineworkers of America, he criticized police for brutalizing a striking miner during the 1989 Pittston Coal Strike.

Still, amid the historic uprisings of the past two weeks, simple criticisms and affirmations of anti-racism without bold action sound like mere lip service to many in the streets.

If the [Seattle] MLK Labor council votes to disaffiliate the Seattle Police Officers Guild on June 17, it would be the first significant expulsion of a police union from an organized labor council anywhere in the country.

That said, I have very mixed feelings about defunding police departments, likely to be a major losing issue for Democrats. In fact, I think police officers should be paid more-- with grants from the federal government. Why more? Simple: bigger salaries would attract better officers, as in not racists and bullies. These are the average annual salaries for police officers in the 10 states that pay them the least, states where the police departments and the KKK have horrifyingly similar membership:

• Mississippi- $36,290
• Arkansas- $40,570
• Louisiana- $42,470
• South Carolina- $43,520
• West Virginia- $44,450
• Georgia- $44,700
• Tennessee- $45,370
• Alabama- $46,510
• Kentucky- $46,720
• North Carolina- $47,340

Higher pay for police officers (as well as for public school teachers) will be worth the money and, in the case of the police, come with strict enforcement of rules against predatory behavior against civilians. Jail time for "bad apples" must become standard, the way it is for other criminals.

Yesterday, The Atlantic issued a podcast, Would Defunding Police Make Us Safer?, that included Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing. Vitale explained that the central argument of his book is that "policing is an inherently problematic tool for the state. Policing is a tool of violence that has historically been used to facilitate gross inequalities and systems of exploitation like slavery, colonialism, the breaking of unions, and the suppression of workers’ rights movements. And so then to say that that tool is best suited to solve a broad range of community problems is misguided. And further, [the idea] that we can fix that problem with a series of superficial procedural reforms really misunderstands the nature of that institution and the missions that our elected officials have given to it... Racism is baked into the institutional mission set by our political leaders, including President Obama. So this reform cannot possibly give us any relief. Neither can having police-community encounter sessions, which they did in Minneapolis. Or instituting accountability mechanisms that were largely procedural in nature: body cameras, new use-of-force policies, de-escalation training. There’s absolutely no empirical evidence that this makes any more than a superficial difference in the way policing is conducted."

He explained that in NYC, for example, the police budget is $6 billion-- more than the Department of Health, the Department of Homeless Services, the Department of Youth Services, and the Department of Employment Services combined. NYC is attempting to cut the Education Department by over $600 million. But the proposal for the police department is a cut of $23 million.

There’s kind of a continuum for understanding what “defund the police” means, and it doesn’t really mean that tomorrow the police budget is zero. There are actually dozens of campaigns that were underway before the events in Minneapolis that were calling for defunding policing, but [they] took the form of things like we want to halt new hiring, we want to get a handle on overtime, and we want to close down certain problematic programs, like the gang unit, and shift those resources into community needs.

So this is not about: Tomorrow, there are no police. There are folks, though, for whom defund the police is also about thinking about a bigger vision of a kind of world where we don’t rely so heavily on policing and prisons, and that comes out of the prison- and police-abolition movement that’s emerged over the last 20 or so years.

...[J]ust defunding the police by itself is almost never what people are calling for. What they’re calling for is a redistribution of resources, because communities do have problems. They have problems of violence. They have problems of disorder. They need help, but they don’t need help from the police in many of these cases. So it’s got to be about redistribution, not just defunding. It needs to be targeted and specific.

Police unions are a separate problem, one that was well-examined by a team of NY Times writers Saturday in a piece called How Police Unions Became Such Powerful Opponents to Reform Efforts. "Over the past five years, as demands for reform have mounted in the aftermath of police violence in cities like Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and now Minneapolis," they wrote, "police unions have emerged as one of the most significant roadblocks to change. The greater the political pressure for reform, the more defiant the unions often are in resisting it-- with few city officials, including liberal leaders, able to overcome their opposition. They aggressively protect the rights of members accused of misconduct, often in arbitration hearings that they have battled to keep behind closed doors. And they have also been remarkably effective at fending off broader change, using their political clout and influence to derail efforts to increase accountability. While rates of union membership have dropped by half nationally since the early 1980s, to 10 percent, higher membership rates among police unions give them resources they can spend on campaigns and litigation to block reform. A single New York City police union has spent more than $1 million on state and local races since 2014."

With the police union backing Carlucci and Díaz, Sr. against progressive reformers Mondaire Jones and Tomas Ramos and with the union backing Caruso-Cabrera against AOC, it's more important than ever to contribute to Jones and Ramos (here) and to AOC here. Back to The Times:

It remains to be seen how the unions will respond to reform initiatives by cities and states since Mr. Floyd’s death, including a new ban on chokeholds in Minneapolis. But in recent days, unions have continued to show solidarity with officers accused of abusive behavior.

The president of a police union in Buffalo said the union stood “100 percent” behind two officers who were suspended on Thursday after appearing to push an older man who fell and suffered head injuries. The union president said the officers “were simply following orders.”

All 57 officers on the Emergency Response Team, a special squad formed to respond to riots, had resigned from their posts on the team in support of the suspended officers, according to The Buffalo News.

Unions can be so effective at defending their members that cops with a pattern of abuse can be left untouched, with fatal consequences. In Chicago, after the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by officer Jason Van Dyke, it emerged that Mr. Van Dyke had been the subject of multiple complaints already. But a “code of silence” about misconduct was effectively “baked into” the labor agreements between police unions and the city, according to a report conducted by task force.

...When liberal politicians do try to advance reform proposals, union officials have resorted to highly provocative rhetoric and hard-boiled campaign tactics to lash out at them. This past week, the head of the sergeants’ union in New York posted a police report on Twitter revealing personal information about the daughter of Mr. de Blasio, who had been arrested during a protest.

...At times, the strident leadership appears to beget still more strident leadership. In 2017, Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police elected a new president who denounced a federal Justice Department investigation prompted by the shooting of Mr. McDonald as “politically motivated” and pledged to fight the “anti-police movement.” That president was ousted this year by a candidate who had derided the ensuing consent decree as “nonsense” and criticized his predecessor for failing to stand up to City Hall.

While statistics compiled by the group Campaign Zero show that police killings and shootings in Chicago have fallen following a set of reforms enacted after a federal investigation, advocates worry that the union will undermine them in contract negotiations. Police unions have traditionally used their bargaining agreements to create obstacles to disciplining officers. One paper by researchers at the University of Chicago found that incidents of violent misconduct in Florida sheriff’s offices increased by about 40 percent after deputies gained collective bargaining rights.

“By continuing to elect people who stand for those values, it more deeply entrenches the break between the community and the police,” said Karen Sheley, director of the Police Practices Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “It makes it far more difficult for reform efforts to go forward.”