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."

Cops Addicted to Violence: According to Whistleblower, LA Sheriff's Deputy Killed Teen to Join Sheriff Department Murder Gang

Tattoo alleged to identify a murderous band of Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who many in the community "see as a criminal gang within law enforcement" (source; photo: Sweeney Firm / Glickman & Glickman)

by Thomas Neuburger

It's not news that a subset of almost every police and sheriff's department in the country is not just racist, but more than that, addicted to violence against the marginalized, the "safely murderable," whichever group of citizens in their jurisdiction happens to fit that description. They murder the "safely murderable."

Yes, black citizens are killed at a greater rate proportionately than any other racial demographic. According to noted scholar Adolph Reed, Jr., "the evidence of gross racial disparity is clear: among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than theirs," while Hispanics are killed "at a rate roughly equivalent to their incidence in the general population."

Yet this statistic belies larger realities. For example, according to Dr. Reed, "ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00." In addition, "the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska ... South Dakota ... Arizona ... Wyoming ... and Colorado".

All of this leads writer Benjamin Mateus to conclude (emphasis added):

Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder: in rural areas outside the South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities, disproportionately black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men are killed by police at nearly identical rates. What unites these victims of police violence is not their race, but their class status (as well as, of course, their gender)

In major cities, cops kill black men; the Southwest, they kill Hispanic men; in the rural Midwest and West, they kill poor white men. The poor, the male, the least-cared-about in a given geographic setting — these are the most easily killed, the "safely murderable" — and these are the victims of most police violence in the U.S.

Andres Guardado, Shot in the Back Five Times by LA Sheriff's Deputy

Consider the case of 18-year-old Andres Guardado, a citizen of Compton, a city south of Los Angeles and policed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD). The Hispanic population of Compton is 65%.

According to local news reports, "Guardado was shot in the back five times by Deputy Miguel Vega on June 18 after authorities say they spotted him with a gun and he ran away. ... Family and others who knew Guardado said the teen was working as a security guard for a nearby auto body shop at the time but the LASD said he was not licensed to work as a security guard, was not wearing an identifiable uniform, and was carrying an unregistered weapon."

As another local report puts it: "Officers allegedly saw him with a gun; Guardado then ran away and officers chased him into an alley in the back of a building where he was killed, Capt. Kent Wegener, head of the homicide bureau, said in a press conference in June. While a 40-caliber semiautomatic pistol that hadn't been fired was found at the scene, authorities are unable to clarify whether Guardado ever aimed the gun at deputies."

 Andres Guardado in 2007 (source)

An LA County sheriff's deputy shot Guardado in the back five times after seeing him run away holding a gun that wasn't aimed at them and wasn't ever fired. He was chased into an alley and shot — I repeat, in the back — and killed by Deputy Miguel Vega, who is presumably also Hispanic.

Clearly Guardado is a person that fits the "safely murderable" profile — poor (he worked as an unregistered security guard in a neighborhood body shop in Compton is not a middle-class job); Hispanic in a majority-Hispanic city; male; and young.

Chasing Ink

So why was Guardado killed? It turns out that this is no ordinary police crime, not some random cop-on-the-loose violence, but a killing that acted, according to the sworn testimony of Sheriff's Department whistleblower Austreberto (Art) Gonzalez, like a gang initiation along the lines of the familiar mafia lines: "Kill someone to show us what you're made of."

This time, however, the gang was a subgroup within the LASD — a subset of sheriff's deputies — who called themselves the "Executioners." Membership in this "gang" (I think it's safe to call them that) even sport a gang tattoo, pictured above. According to this LA Times report, that "clique" that "dominates every aspect of life" at the Compton station.

Spectrum News obtained a copy of Gonzales' sworn testimony on this and other gangs within police departments and wrote this in a report of the Guardado shooting:

The deputy who shot and killed 18-year-old Andres Guardado outside a car shop in Gardena was a prospective member of a violent clique inside the Compton Sheriff’s station, according to the sworn testimony of a whistleblower. ...

More than a dozen deputies have matching tattoos and belong to a violent clique called the Executioners at the station, according to Deputy Art Gonzalez, who filed a whistleblower complaint regarding the Executioners in June.

“I now call them a gang because that’s what gangs do – they beat up other people,” Gonzalez said.

His sworn testimony obtained by Spectrum News is for a separate excessive force case filed against Los Angeles County. The deputies in the lawsuit are accused of “chasing ink” – slang for trying to impress the Executioners to join their group.

“There are parties after shootings. They call them ‘998 parties.’ Some people say it’s to celebrate the deputy is alive. Others say it’s to celebrate that they’re going to be ‘inking’ somebody.”

Gonzalez, testifying for nearly six hours under oath, said the existence of the clique was “common knowledge” at the station and that the gang’s so-called shot caller controlled the work schedule and their actions boosted arrest numbers.

It's pretty clear from the name how you get into a gang of sheriff's deputies called the "Executioners" — you need a killing to your name. Gonzales, from the LA Times report noted above:

“Nearly all the CPT [Compton] Deputies who have been involved in high-profile shootings and out-of-policy beatings at CPT in recent years have been ‘inked’ members of The Executioners,” the claim alleges. “‘Inking’ refers to the act of each newly made member of The Executioners receiving a matching tattoo indicating membership in the organization. …

Members become inked as ‘Executioners’ after executing members of the public, or otherwise committing acts of violence in furtherance of the gang.”

Spectrum News says Gonzalez is now on leave from the department and claims to be, correctly I assume, "in fear for his life." Since Gonzales has testified, two more deputies have come forward with similar information.

The Times report is also filled with allegations of other gangs within other policing departments, groups carrying names like the Vikings, Spartans, Regulators, Grim Reapers and Banditos. "Executioners" is a much more on-the-nose name, But Grim Reapers is close.

There's even this gruesome detail: "A top jail official had described exclusive gangs of deputies in Men’s Central Jail who would “earn their ink” by breaking inmates’ bones."

All this we permit in the name of "keeping the peace." The only peace that's kept is that of the safely "unmurderable" — the affluent, the connected, the well-intergrated into society's higher reaches.

The Tale Behind the Tale

There is clearly a larger story, of course, in the encouragement and celebration of violence within America's police and sheriff's departments, a story that our peace-promoting press doesn't report. It's better, in their minds, to "keep the peace" by keeping the violence one-sided — by not reporting the story in a way that would incite retaliation — than by reporting the whole truth, that there are death squads inside many of our policing agencies that are never punished or brought to heel.

But the tale behind the tale is being told by the few, but buried, reports like those from the LA Times and Spectrum News, and by the evidence of our eyes as we watch citizen videos of appalling acts of violence and murder by police — each one unpunished.

That evidence is clear — police, formed to deliver violence to the unwashed and unruly of the 19th century, deliver that same violence to the unwashed and unruly of ours. The worst among them live and love to do it. It's why they get up in the morning. The best among them ... they let the worst run free.

Will this be the year, in our Covid-destroyed economy, when civil unrest tips itself over the edge, no matter which candidate becomes the (violently contested) president in the end?

Are we seeing the start of a "rolling civil war" between our nation's out-of-control police and a citizenry broken by the rich and their absolute refusal to free us from a destruction we cannot ourselves escape?

Are we seeing the start of an era when the "safely murderable" — not just by police, but by the whole of society as it's currently led and run — will rise and say "no more"?

There are worse bets in the world.
 

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.

The Police Weren't Created to 'Protect and Serve.' They Were Created to 'Maintain Order.' A Brief Look at the History of Police in America

One version of the "thin blue line" flag, a symbol used in a variety of ways by American police departments, their most fervent supporters, and other right-wing fellow travelers. The thin blue line represents the wall of protection that separates the orderly "us" from the disorderly, uncivilized "them".

by Thomas Neuburger

"[In the 1800s] the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class."
—Sam Mitrani here

It's a commonplace to say the primary job of police is to "protect and serve," but that's not their goal in the way it's commonly understood — not in the deed, the practice of what they daily do, and not true in the original intention, in why police departments were created in the first place. "Protect and serve" as we understand it is just the cover story.

To understand the true purpose of police, we have to ask, "What's being protected?" and "Who's being served?" 

Urban police forces in America were created for one purpose — to "maintain order" after a waves of immigrants swept into northern U.S. cities, both from abroad and later from the South, immigrants who threatened to disturb that "order." The threat wasn't primarily from crime as we understand it, from violence inflicted by the working poor on the poor or middle class. The threat came from unions, from strikes, and from the suffering, the misery and the anger caused by the rise of rapacious capitalism.

What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. Who's being served? Owners, their property, and the sources of their wealth, the orderly and uninterrupted running of their factories. The goal of police departments, as originally constituted, was to keep the workers in line, in their jobs, and off the streets.

Looking Behind Us

The following comes from an essay published at the blog of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, an academic group for teachers of labor studies, by Sam Mitrani, Associate Professor of History at the College of DuPage and author of The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894.

According to Mitrani, "The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class."

Keep in mind that there were no police departments anywhere in Europe or the U.S. prior to the 19th century — in fact, "anywhere in the world" according to Mitrani. In the U.S., the North had constables, many part-time, and elected sheriffs, while the South had slave patrols. But nascent capitalism soon created a large working class, and a mass of European immigrants, "yearning to be free," ended up working in capitalism's northern factories and living in its cities.

"[A]s Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods." [emphasis added]

America of the early and mid 1800s was still a world without organized police departments. What the Pinkertons were to strikes, these "thousands of armed men" were to the unruly working poor in those cities.

Imagine this situation from two angles. First, from the standpoint of the workers, picture the oppression these armed men must have represented, lawless themselves yet tasked with imposing "order" and violence on the poor and miserable, who were frequently and understandably both angry and drunk. (Pre-Depression drunkenness, under this interpretation, is not just a social phenomenon, but a political one as well.)

Second, consider this situation from the standpoint of the wealthy who hired these men. Given the rapid growth of capitalism during this period, "maintaining order" was a costly undertaking, and likely to become costlier. Pinkertons, for example, were hired at private expense, as were the "thousands of armed men" Mitrani mentions above.

The solution was to offload this burden onto municipal budgets. Thus, between 1840 and 1880, every major northern city in America had created a substantial police force, tasked with a single job, the one originally performed by the armed men paid by the business elites — to keep the workers in line, to "maintain order" as factory owners and the moneyed class understood it.

"Class conflict roiled late nineteenth century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late nineteenth century echoes down to today – except that today, poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers."

That "thin blue line protecting civilization" is the same blue line we're witnessing today. Yes, big-city police are culturally racist as a group; but they're not just racist. They dislike all the "unwashed." A recent study that reviewed "all the data available on police shootings for the year 2017, and analyze[d] it based on geography, income, and poverty levels, as well as race" revealed the following remarkable pattern:

"Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder: in rural areas outside the South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities, disproportionately black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men are killed by police at nearly identical rates."

As they have always been, the police departments in the U.S. are a violent force for maintaining an order that separates and protects society's predator class from its victims — a racist order to be sure, but a class-based order as well.

Looking Ahead

We've seen the violence of the police as visited on society's urban poor (and anyone else, poor or not, who happens to be the same race and color as the poor too often are), and we've witnessed the violent reactions of police to mass protests challenging the racism of that violence.

But we've also seen the violence of police during the mainly white-led Occupy movement (one instance here; note that while the officer involved was fired, he was also compensated $38,000 for “suffering he experienced after the incident”).

So what could we expect from police if there were, say, a national, angry, multiracial rent strike with demonstrations? Or a student debt strike? None of these possibilities are off the table, given the economic damage — most of it still unrealized — caused by the current Covid crisis.

Will police "protect and serve" the protesters, victims of the latest massive transfer of wealth to the already massively wealthy? Or will they, with violence, "maintain order" by maintaining elite control of the current predatory system?

If Mitrani is right, the latter is almost certain. 
 

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?
  

Alan Grayson Wrote Legislation To Demilitarize The Police In 2014... Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn And Their Allies Made Sure It Failed

They were ready to roll the tanks if she got too frisky

Every Member of Congress loves-- or, until this month, used to love-- photo ops of them "delivering" goodies to their local police departments. They never consider that those goodies might one day be used against their own constituents. In August, 2014, garden variety policy brutality and murder brought on the "Ferguson unrest." Two months earlier, Alan Grayson introduced H.R. 4870, an amendment to an appropriations bill that attempted to demilitarize the police. Alan told me at the time that he bent over backwards to make it clear it was not about guns and ammunition. His amendment would have prevented the military-- under Clinton era's disastrous 1033 Program-- from sending local police departments "aircraft (including unmanned aerial vehicles), armored vehicles, grenade launchers, silencers, toxicological agents (including chemical agents, biological agents, and associated equipment), launch vehicles, guided missiles, ballistic missiles, rockets, torpedoes, bombs, mines, or nuclear weapons." So... all the guns they needed but... no tanks, guided missiles or nukes (to use against American civilians). Although Grayson managed to round up 62 supporters, there were 355 no votes, including, I might add, Lacy Clay, who supposedly represents Ferguson, Missouri.

Today Grayson told me that "After it was voted down, two months later, Ferguson happened.  We all saw tanks and militarized police there, on city streets. Two different Members of Congress came over to me and asked me, 'how did you know that was going to happen?'  I was too polite to give them my real answer. My real answer was: 'how did you not know that was going to happen?'... I introduced the Grayson amendment to keep [heavily military weapons] out of the hands of police because I have eyes, and I can see. What I see is endemic and pervasive racism, certainly not only in law enforcement, but in every corner of society, from umbilical cord to tombstone. When you put armored vehicles and drones into the hands of people who already have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, isn’t it obvious in which neighborhoods they will be used? And if that’s not obvious, in which neighborhoods do you actually SEE them used? Neighborhoods of lefthanded people? Neighborhoods of redheads? Neighborhoods of people who prefer paper over plastic? No; you see them used in African-American neighborhoods, treating human beings in ways that we don’t even treat cattle."

After Ferguson, then-President Obama enacted Grayson's amendment by executive order and it was in place... until 2017, when Trump reversed the order and gave the Pentagon the green light to start selling "excess" military equipment to local police forces again. The other day, AOC was wondering aloud on Twitter why the Pentagon has so much "excess." Meanwhile, Trump's tiny pecker gets hard just thinking about scenes like this:

Since 2014, the program has facilitated the transfer of over $5 billion in "excess" military equipment to the police. Many people who are talking about "defunding" the police are specifically talking about that money.

One of the members who happily strutted up to the House well to vote against Grayson's amendment was was Albio Sires, reactionary New Dem of New Jersey. I asked his progressive opponent this cycle, Hector Oseguera, how he and Sires differ on the police problem. "You might wonder why some of these elected officials call themselves Democrats at all," he told me this morning. "My primary opponent was actually a registered Republican until the mid-90's, he regularly votes for Trump's war budgets, and recently voted to let the NSA read your browser history, so it's no surprise he's a fan of militarized policing. I stand as the polar opposite, and recently released a Social Justice platform that includes ending Qualified Immunity, and demilitarizing our local police forces, all things my opponent refuses to fight for. There is no legitimate reason to have a police force armed with chemical weapons, and ballistic missiles, but that's exactly what my primary opponent sought to allow. In a democracy, we should not accept the mixing of our police and military forces. Unfortunately, that's what Democrats like my primary opponent, constantly seek to do."

As long as we're discussing Grayson, I might as well bring up that he endorsed Mike Siegel (TX-10) for Congress. "Mike cares about the right things, which means that he can make a difference. Talk to any number of Democratic Members of Congress or candidates for any length of time, and you’ll realize that there are startling differences in what they say are important to them. Many Democrats neuter themselves, before they even get elected, because they can’t even articulate anything real, realistic and meaningful that they would like to achieve in office. Know what matters matters-- you can’t possibly accomplish anything useful if you don’t even know what you want to do. If you listen to Mike Siegel, you realize quickly that his head’s on straight, he’s got the right attitude, and that gives him a real chance to get good things done."

Pelosi is suddenly leading efforts to reform the way the police do their jobs, but in 2014 she made sure Grayson's amendment failed. I asked her progressive opponent, Shahid Buttar, how he and Pelosi differ on the police problem. "The biggest difference between me and Nancy Pelosi," he told me today, "is that she settles for acts of theater to advance her career dedicated to her corporate donors, whereas I am concerned about our communities-- and have dedicated my career to defending them, not only through legal activism, but with my body in the streets, as well. I’ve been an active participant in the movement for black lives since before the Ferguson  uprising, and announced in 2018 a policy platform including support for demilitarizing police, ending qualified immunity, and creating a national registry of violent police. We’re glad that-- as she has on so many other issues, from labor rights and congressional war powers to executive accountability and election security-- Speaker Pelosi has adopted some of our positions despite her earlier intransigence. Despite her recent shifts, however, she remains well behind the movement’s demands to defund police departments and end the disturbing phenomenon of private prisons, which we have also supported. Our communities need voices in Congress for whom solidarity is not a political stratagem, but rather a reflection of our longstanding commitments." That's why DownWithTyranny's only endorsed candidate so far this cycle is Shahid. You can help support his campaign at this link.

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