Full disclosure, in case you are unable to discern the difference between parody and reality in these dire times, this video is an example of the former, which is to say a parody. If you miss it the first time, don’t worry. By the end, you’ll be confident the issue has been addressed.
Very well.
Update: I should probably add that this was made by the BPD. So it is a funny video both about and by the BPD. Okay. That is all.
Over at Gin and Tacos, Ed has a really good post on the changing role of the police officer as forces around the country have become more militarized during the course of the War on Drugs. It’s in response to the Times article the other day that whose headline, “Nearly a Third of Americans Are Arrested by 23, Study Says,” pretty much tells you the whole story (but it’s a scary one, so you should read it anyway). Here’s Ed:
The militarization of law enforcement and thirty years of Zero Tolerance, tough-on-crime politics have created an America in which law enforcement has become, perhaps unwillingly, the Other, the Ministry of State Security types used as anonymous, menacing stock characters in dystopian fiction. And the frightening end result is that most Americans my age or younger – anyone born after Carter, I guess – have never had an interaction with the police except being arrested or being given a ticket. For non-white people in particular, many of us reach middle age now having never had a positive interaction with police. It has all been negative.
This is true. Aside from cops giving me directions (a neutral interaction, at best), I have never had a cop who I’ve wanted to thank. I’ve been pulled over for driving a shitty car in a snazzy neighborhood, though! And arrested for being a minor in possession of alcohol on a camping trip (wiped from my record, though I guess I just outed myself — sorry potential jobs, didn’t need you anyway)! In fact, the one time I’ve ever called the cops was when I was 17, getting a ride back home from a different area of town, and a car sideswiped us while trying to pass us on a two lane road. Big maroon Eurovan, which immediately cut its lights, and floored it out of dodge. We tried to follow him for a second, but he was doing, like, 60 in a 35 mph zone. And so, being all like, “That was whack,” we called the cops from my house so that we could file a police report. And what did the cop do when he got there? He accused us of being drunk! And of being the ones that actually hit something, “from the way the dent looks.” What wildly contradictory notions to occur in your head, Officer! Why of course! It is clear! Two underage youths got drunk, went driving, hit a telephone pole, and decided to create a wild story about getting sideswiped by a van and call the police on themselves! Your detective work makes me proud to pay your salary!
He went on to say that if we admitted we’d been drinking, he’d help us out. When we wouldn’t, he got in his car and drove away. In retrospect, we probably should have filed some sort of complaint, but we were teenagers and, ergo, stupid.
Anecdotal, I guess, but it’s pretty common among most of my friends, this type of experience. Which leads us to Ed’s next point:
I’m a law abiding 33 year old white male with a Ph.D. and an aspiring middle class lifestyle…and I’ve never dealt with a cop who wasn’t an asshole toward me. Not once. If that’s how they treat someone who practically shits white male privilege, I feel safe assuming that they’re not being much friendlier or more helpful to anyone else. The police officer is supposed to be someone we can trust implicitly, and instead the policies of the past three decades have transformed the citizen-police relationship to one of deep, mutual suspicion. They see us as drug holding, law breaking felons-in-waiting, and we see them as an opponent to be avoided at all costs.
There are a lot of white dudes who think cops are after us! Because they kinda are! I cannot even imagine the amount of shit women and people of color have to deal with. There is something fundamentally wrong with a police force that is designed to actively scare you. We’re not talking about passively remind you that they’re there to be the enforcers of state power (which you might sometimes want on your side), we’re talking scare you. “We will beat you down in a hearbeat, motherfucker, and don’t you forget it.” It’s absolutely insane that we live in a society where police don riot gear on the regular, and can disperse crowds with weird sonic noises that headphones can’t block out because the noise is at such a weird, loud pitch that it, like, inhabits your body. That’s fucking insane, dude. We have entered the future, and it’s us versus laser beams, people. Us. Versus. Laser beams.
And yet, we act as though it’s all just normal, the natural order of things. The police have “sound cannons” now. Okay.
My cousin and her husband are both cops, so I understand that they’re regular people paying bills, getting by, raising families, all of it. If one of them pulled me over, I’d say, “Hey, fancy meeting you here,” and they’d let me off with a warning. That’s all fine and good. The point is that knowing cops — having them as family members, even — doesn’t make me any less afraid of them. I only know two. The rest of them think I’m just another criminal waiting to happen.
But this, in case you haven’t seen it (but you have, you have), is… I dunno. I really don’t. How do you describe what happens here? It is probably one of the most interesting displays of power dynamics ever recorded (live, that is) in American history. The police, instigators of an assault on nonviolent protesters, are peacefully shamed and driven out of a public space by that very same group of nonviolent protesters. And it all plays out in less than nine minutes.
Which is what’s perhaps most interesting about the video to me (other than the somewhat cinematic way in which it plays out). In nine minutes you go from a police officer in riot gear flagrantly pepper spraying hippies in a human chain to a group of very pissed off citizens shaming away the offending riot police. You could not write a better script, and if you could no one would believe you. In nine minutes, a group of men and women with face-shields and semiautomatic weapons are reduced to a gang of cowards, slinking away under the threat of a group of unarmed college students — the ultimatum being that if they don’t leave the campus now, they will continue to be followed and publicly shamed.
And then the most amazing thing happens. They leave.
Update by Ben: Couple days later, this is the Chancellor of UC Davis (who arguably sicked campus police on the students) walking to her car….
Ben Update 2: Chancellor Katehi’s just explained that we all have to understand that her priority in sicking campus police on students was protecting their safety. The interview finished before she had an opportunity to argue that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
Skip to 0:45 if you’re in a hurry.
God forbid people protest for lower tuition.
(h/t 2 Wes)
Below is a cautionary tale for anyone trying to smuggle illicit materials out of Brazil. The police will chase your plane as it attempts to take off, smash into the wing, and pull their guns on you.
You’ve been warned.
New ruling, reported in today’s Star:
“The only organized or collective physical aggression at that location that evening was perpetrated by police each time they advanced on demonstrators,” Justice Melvyn Green ruled on Thursday. He was referring to a demonstration at Queen St. and Spadina Ave. on Saturday, June 26, 2010.
This demonstration:
Green found that protesters were “harvested” by the police “punch out” tactic. Police would intermittently charge the crowd of about 300 people to force them west on Queen St. — and those who didn’t move back fast enough were seized, thrown to the ground and bound with plastic flex cuffs.
Consequences? An unjustly arrested protester gets his name cleared. Huh-fucking-zzah.
PS – Personal detail: I generally stayed away from the protests and just tried to live my everyday life. Still, wearing a forest camo T while walking to Union Station got me illegally searched by officer K Hancock, badge # 5793.
Wired has a good round-up of the events that led to the death of Jose Guerena in Arizona this month.
[S]omething went very wrong. And within seconds of ramming in the door, the SWAT team opened fire, killing Jose Guerena, the owner of the house. Guerena, a 26-year-old Marine veteran, reportedly confronted the police with an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle, possibly to protect his wife and kids, who were huddled in rooms behind him.
The SWAT team initially said Guerena shot first; later reports claimed Guerena never fired — indeed, he never took his AR-15 off “safe.” The Medical Examiner counted 22 bullet wounds in Guerena’s body after the raid, CNN reported. Other chilling details can be found in SWAT commander Bob Krygier’s post-operation interview with a Pima County detective.
A man I play trivia with is something of a gun nut, and I imagine that if he were ever subject to a no-knock SWAT raid, he’d be rushing for his guns, too. I mean, this is arguably the linchpin of the NRA’s second amendment advocacy — guns are necessary for protecting yourself in the event of a home invasion. And yet, when it’s the police doing the invading you’re expected to psychically just know that it’s them and not a bad guy, or get shot. 22 times.
The War on Drugs has changed law enforcement in this country so fundamentally that there is no clear way to reverse the damage. Police recruits now enter a culture that has been highly militarized since the late 1970s; even the longest-serving veterans still at work today have never known any other way of doing things. Armored vehicles, military rifles, armor-piercing ammunition, no-knock warrants, tactical gear…it’s just the way things are done. You blaze away at suspects like Bruce Willis in Die Hard because, well, everyone else is doing it and that’s what being a cop is all about – breaking down doors, smashing through windows, and unloading your firearm at the Scum of the Earth on the other side. Sure, innocent people get gunned down every once in a while, but isn’t that a risk we have to take if we have unsubstantiated tips from paid informants suggesting that there might be marijuana in a home?
Here’s what a tragedy looks like.
