at least ostensibly for the police murders of Garner and Brown has ignited a frenzy. The murderer, Brinsley, was a violent man who had committed other crimes.
I will simply note that such tragic events are the inevitable result of systemic injustice. Those who wish less murders, should work for justice.
That includes police.
Everythings Jake
Yes, where is that internal movement for reform? Still, murdering police won’t help. If you’re prepared to kill yourself, take a banker, an arms manufacturer, or a Burston-Marsteller executive out instead.
V. Arnold
There is a very interesting dichotomy going on in NYC.
DeBlasio, on the one hand, recognizes the problem (having a black son) and is trying to mitigate the police violence.
On the other hand there is an intransigent police monolith challenging DeBlasio’s authority. They are openly hostile to his policies and actually blame him for this shooting.
Getting beyond the emotion, it’s clear the police want absolute power with no oversight.
Dangerous, very dangerous, and foreshadows the national struggle for dominance of the population through brute force, if necessary.
If this is allowed, starting on local levels, and is successful; we’re fucked!!! Truly fucked.
But then, I’ve thought this for a very long time…
jump
One incident does not a revolution make, but it may point to the potential ugliness that could be. We now have an example of what guerrilla warfare against the face of injustice could look like. Others may emulate that example.
The news cycles are dominated by police militarization and immunity to the use of terror, and the protests against that injustice, so the police are the obvious targets of our rage. But very few want to pull back the curtain and look at the ‘systemic injustice’. There is little rage against the politicians and justices–the ones that make the laws and enforce the laws. There is even less rage against the ones they are serving, the 1% in today’s language.
The debate needs a new language to frame it, as per Noam Chomsky. ‘1%’ or ‘.1%’ serves to point out the inequality of wealth distribution and some are outraged by that. But for many I think it still serves to keep the American dream alive–‘you too want to be part of that 1% don’t you?’–so inequality is OK and let’s not pull back that curtain and just learn how to work harder and play the game better.
I don’t think systemic injustice will be seriously confronted until we address the ethics of greed and collectively conclude that greed does not work in creating a functional society.
Monster from the Id
Assuming these murders were intended as a revolutionary act, they were foolish.
At the end of the day, the cops are not the enemies of the common citizens.
They, and the armed forces, are the slaves of the Enemies, the 1%, the Malefactors Of Great Wealth.
Warrior-slaves (janissaries), but still slaves.
The Enemies can always get more slaves where those came from.
Likewise, if the 9/11 attacks were a genuine act of rebellion against Global Capital (no false flags), the rebels didn’t kill any of their true enemies–the Malefactors Of Great Wealth who want to own and plunder the whole planet. The rebels merely killed a few thousand slaves of their enemies, who can get millions, even billions, more slaves where those came from.
I do not recommend revolution. I don’t know of any “successful” revolution which did more than replace the old oligarchy of glorified criminals with a new oligarchy of glorified criminals. (See every Communist revolution ever for details.) Why bring on all that pain and death for nothing?
“Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss”–the Who
However, if one wants to ignore me and try it anyway, then Jake is right–go for the lords and barons, not their men-at-arms.
JustPlainDave
Primary requirement for revolutionary logistics officer candidates in the Internet-mediated age: Can you make a good latté?
MartyH
Shoot people, get off, get good press, get lionized. People will decide they qualify for similar treatment. If our cop (governance, legal) culture rewards one side, what should we expect from the other? Meek compliance and deference? I doubt it.
Chris
Unfortuantly there are good and bad people living all around us each being formed by the circumstances that they grew up with. And it is true that we are in essence all slaves to the top 1% who basically control and own everything. It is sad to see that 2 cops were assinated in NYC, but truly didn’t anyone see this as a logical outcome to the behavior of what is now becoming a national epidemic of police basically thinking of themselves as judge, jury, and executioner. I myself do respect the position of being a cop but I am beginning to fear that if I am ever stopped for “something” what ‘s to prevent me being shot or “roughed up” simply by making the wrong comment to a cop.
BlizzardOfOz
I don’t think the evidence supports this notion. It should be almost self-evident that the national Democrats’ and mass media’s purpose, in hyping the Brown and Garner shootings, was not any concrete reform to the justice system, but rather whipping up blacks vote for Democrats. (If the purpose was really reform, then the media would not have focused exclusively on cases of white cops killing blacks, and not exclusively just prior to national elections.) Therefore, it is not the behavior or policies of police departments that provoked these attacks. The cops are just pawns — and the two cops shot collateral damage — of the national Democrats’ GOTBV tactics.
@Chris,
You can’t be serious. Are you not aware that each of the recent victim/martyrs precipitated the incident by committing a crime and then resisting arrest? It should be: “what’s to prevent me from being shot for simply burglarizing a convenience store and then trying to wrest a cop’s gun away from him”. That’s incredibly risky behavior, and obviously cops too have to fear for their lives in such confrontations.
Formerly T-Bear
Angry people don’t make good decisions, neither do those filled with fear, nor those desiccated by ignorance. Justice, when in service, acts to assuage anger, diminish fear and enlighten the darkness of ignorance. Justice has gone missing. It is not to be found in the courts nor in the street where fear, violence and vengeance now reign; division stills the discourse of compromise that defeats conflict. The path being followed cannot but end with an ocean of tears; wisdom and compassion fail. If that is to be your world, such is the life within that world.
Ian Welsh
The incidents in question were a bit more complicated than indicated, especially Garner’s, which is on tape, so it’s not a question of he said, she said. Indeed, the coroner considered Garner’s death murder. Proportional use of force is part of justice, and the use of force against Garner was disproportionate. American cops kill a lot more Americans than European cops kill Europeans and it’s not proportional to the crime rate differences.
Police in the US are currently tools of repression. If you want to use the slave-soldier metaphor, remember that slave-soldiers often wound up running their societies (Egypt, for example) and even when they didn’t generally wound up treated very very well despite their ostensible slave status. Those who control violence reap rewards, the first of which is the license to be violent without being subject to the same penalties as others.
JustPlainDave
The ME ruled Garner’s death homicide, but in that context it’s actually different from “murder”. All murders are homicides, but not all homicides are murders. Even unambiguously lawful applications of force resulting in death will always be classified as homicides.
BlizzardOfOz
I would defer to the grand jury rather than assume that their decision was based on racial animus, but granted that it may have been the wrong decision. I could see the repression angle in a case like Occupy Wall Street, but in this Garner case? It is awful that he died, but he was still out there breaking the law and resisting arrest.
When you have the metropolitan elite (via their media and political party the Democrats) inciting black mobs over what are more-or-less fabricated or borderline cases of police excess — while at the same time moving underclass blacks out of their urban backyard via gentrification and Section 8 housing — it would make as much sense to say that black mob violence is a tool of repression.
Mary McCurnin
“It is awful that he died, but he was still out there breaking the law and resisting arrest.”
He was allegedly selling single cigarettes. This is a misdemeanor offense. Resisting arrest? Why wasn’t he simply ticketed? Why were four or five police officers there to make sure he was “taken down”? Why are we criminalizing behavior that really hurts no one? Why do we have more people in jail per capita than any other country? Our crime rate doesn’t justify this. Of course, Garner pushed back and argued about being arrested. It made NO sense.
We live in a police state that is becoming more and more militarized. It is not justified by crime stats.
Tony Wikrent
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that TPTB reached a decision to crush Occupy after OccupyMarines appeared in Zuccotti Park and interposed themselves between the encampment and the NYPD. TPTB know full well that when the police and the military refuse to continue defending the status quo, the revolutionaries win. I would, in fact, argue that the revolutionaries NEVER win unless and until the police and military begin refusing their orders to suppress and repress.
I believe it was soon afterwards – just weeks or months – that Chris Hedges spoke to OccupyHarvard and said pretty much the same thing, and tried to convince people to be respectful to the police, who are, afterall, working class.
Both OccupyMarines and Hedges at Harvard probably set off the alarm bells for TPTB. They have a genuine protest movement on their hands, with obvious and forthright grass-roots support (the food available at OccupyWallStreet was incredible, at least the day I was there, thanks to area chefs and restaurants, I was told), and now the instruments of state power, are showing signs of siding with the protest movement. What to do? How do you go about driving a wedge between the police on one hand, and the population – being driven to incipient revolt by the austerity demanded by the financial kingpins like Peter Peterson – on the other hand?
I don’t know what happened; I don’t know what conversations took place, among which people; I don’t know what decisions were considered and rejected or adopted, and by whom. I don’t even know if any such conversations and considerations even occurred. But it seems to me awfully “convenient” – convenient to TPTB, that is – that the breach between the police and the population is forced wider by a series of police murders of African-American citizens.
Of course, there are also the cultural / ideological forces at work, which no one has talked about much. The police are generally conservative – and the conservatives in USA I think have gone beyond the point of sanity with their hatred of the black man in the White House. They don’t even see that Obama’s policies are basically conservative – hell, Obamacare is basically the Heritage Foundation proposal from the 1990s, right? What has been the effect of all the vitriol and the hatred directed toward liberals and progressives the past two decades? I have never cared to study closely what happened in Germany in the 1930s, but I would bet that the cultural / ideological forces at work, and their effects, are very similar.
Everythings Jake
@Tony
Making a comparison with the Weimar Republic seems essential, and the failure to do seems terrifying.
jeff the handsome troll
I recommend those of you who are intent on condemning the CIA, FBI and depraved American society check crime statistics before throwing the police on the giant burning pile of old car tires with the others. Violence in this country, both white on black, police on black, police on everyone is at an all time low…historically speaking. Especially under Rudy Guliani, New York City reached all time low in violent crime, murder. William Willhelm said and did the wrong things in the aftermath of the Garner GJ finding, now he has to face the music. The truth is a bitter pill to swallow for those who are dedicated to practice emasculating America.
Everythings Jake
@ Jeff
Much of the decline in violence perpetrated by civilians is directly correlated to the reduction of lead in gasoline. Is there some statistic that proves a concurrent reduction by the military and the increasingly militarized pollice? Again, who collects and reports these statistics and how do you define violence (physical, psychological)? Your comments lack broader acquaintance with critical scholarship.
Ian Welsh
Oh please, grand juries almost never do anything but what the prosecutor wants them to do. This is widely, widely acknowledged. Rogue grand juries are incredibly rare.
This was a prosecutorial decision.
jeff the handsome troll
The grand jury listens to evidence. Eye & ear witnesses, in the Gardner case dozens, in the Ferguson case about 20. Mike Brown was a bully who knocked over a convenience store, then walked down the middle of the street and assaulted a cop. “Hands up don’t shoot”? Sharpton and his crew should be charged for inciting a riot. Gardner? We all saw the tape. He was breaking the law, for at least the 32nd time in his life and resisting arrest. The tape was much longer and showed more aggressive behavior on Gardner’s part, but I still believe the cop over reacted and should have been tried, most likely guilty of IM.
Just curious Ian, if the GJ found both the cops guilty, or decided to pursue charges, would you still condemn the GJ rigged system, or is it only inneffective, racist and rigged if you don’t agree with the outcome?
@Jake, apparentlt I’m not the only one who doesn’t apply critical scholarship to this short blog. If you don’t believe that violent crime in America of every kind isn’t at an all time low, then you clearly know not what you say (or maybe you are Canadian?). Any cursory search on any number of sites, from the FBI to the lips of President Obama himself will confirm. The difference is the ultra-liberal media is hell bent on promoting the race baiting agenda. Seems it is working.
Mary McCurnin
ultra-liberal media
Mary McCurnin
who knew?
BlizzardOfOz
I take your word for it. Out of curiosity I looked up the prosecutor in question, who is apparently this guy. He happens to be a Democrat … and black. I don’t even know what do say. I will go ahead and speculate that Al Sharpton left that part out of his stump speech.
Everythings Jake
@Jeff
I don’t disagree with you, violent crime is down, and there’s a direct correlation with the reduction of lead in gasoline. It’s not due to policing. So why are the police far more militarized than they ever have been and why do they keep on savagely murdering poor brown people? Also, why are so many incarcerated?
jump
I would suggest incarceration rates have direct correlation with the privatization of prisons rate, but I do not have any stats to back that up. Call it a hunch.
Healthcare, education and penal systems belong to the commons. Privatization opens the door to abuses and is further symptomatic of the systemic injustice. Private prisons is just a really stupid idea. Private prisons have no vested interest in the welfare of prisoners (except maybe just keeping them alive) nor of any rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is a poor business model for them.
Full circle back to the logic and ethic of greed over any sense of the commons.
jeff the handsome troll
@Jake,
I do not believe that cops are savagely murdering blacks, there are no statistics to back that assertion up whatsoever. For every black name you roll out there I could roll out 3 white names who were killed in America by cops in 2013. There have been accidents, there have been cases of mistaken identity and there are some, but very few, incompetent cops. That said, the black incarceration rate is driven largely by the breakdown of the family unit (70% of all black children are born out of wedlock) and the subsequent lack of a father figure, the astronomically high high school drop out rates among inner city blacks and the proliferation of illicit drugs that follows. Without basic education or a skill, without parental guidance or a way to earn a living, you end up in prison. The unemployment rate among young black men is in the 25% range, and I believe this can all be attributed in part to the three critical factors I mentioned.
JustPlainDave
If one wishes to explain the incarceration rate patterning, one needs to address the phase shift that occurred in 1980 (see the graph on the post “In light of Eric Garner” currently on the front page). A far better causal case can be made around mandatory minimums, MHO. Nine of the ten most populous states in the United States passed or enacted some form of mandatory minimum legislation in 1979 and the trend continued with enthusiasm through the 80’s (and beyond in other sub-forms such as “three strikes” laws).
JustPlainDave
BofOz, unless things work very differently in New York than I think they do, I think there’s something off with your ID. The individual pictured is Kenneth Thompson, the Brooklyn District Attorney – the grand jury was in Staten Island, which has its District Attorney Daniel M. Johnson Jr.
Having looked at the tape, it looks to me like Mr Garner likely died from a form of positional asphyxia (I don’t recall at present whether “pure” positional asphyxia includes the “three coppers on your back” sub-variant), very significantly aggravated by the subject’s poor health. This is actually quite different from asphyxia via choke-hold. Obviously none of us are privy to the Grand Jury’s thinking, but I’d actually bet that the contents of the tape likely worked against indictment rather than favouring it. Based on what I saw, I’d say the maximum case that one could potentially make would be based on negligence (i.e., poor technique in arresting the subject, failure to immediately render effective aid, etc.) but practically that would be a high bar to hurdle.
jump
I am not suggesting private prisons are the only cause for higher incarceration rates, just that the prison-industrial complex does have an impact. The privatization of prisons also started in the 80’s. Coincidence? There is good money to be made.
“ALEC has been a major force behind both privatizing state prison space and keeping prisons filled. It put forward bills providing for mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes sentencing requirements. About 40 states passed versions of ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing model bill, which requires prisoners convicted of violent crimes to serve most of their sentences without chance of parole.” Greenblatt, Alan (October 2003). “What Makes Alec Smart?”. Governing.
Prison privatization was a ‘solution’ to prison over-crowding as a result of the war on drugs.
Although private prisons hold around 8% of the total prison population in the US, that number is higher (almost 20%) for the federal prison population.
Monster from the Id
Shorter Jeff: “Help! Big Brother! Save me from the scary n***ers!” 😛
mike
O’Reilly’s and Hannity’s parrots have gotten loose in here.
http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2014/11/26/bill-oreilly-reaction-to-michael-brown-grand-jury-decision/
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/sean-hannity-is-angry-about-eric-garner-case-for-all-the-wrong-reasons/
Jeff Wegerson
Chickens Home Roost
Ian Welsh
Jeff the troll,
I’d appreciate it if you didn’t comment here any more.
Thanks.
BlizzardOfOz
mike, was that supposed to be an argument of some kind? I suppose you were going for guilt by association, where 1. all goodthinkers know that Fox engages in crimethink, 2. some commenters appear to be on the same side as some Fox pundits, and so 3. those commenters are crimethinkers. It looks even lamer when you spell it out like that, but then, too many people think that point ‘n sputter is a clever or effective form of advocacy.
(By the way, I never watch Fox or any cable news, but I don’t see how that pertains to any discussion here.)
jeff the handsome troll
Ian,
No problem.
I am wondering why, I was only sharing my opinion, wasn’t being a troll…..
Either way, Happy Holidays to all and thanks for the dialogue, sorry to have upset anyone.
Tom Halle
When NYC Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Pat Lynch said on Saturday that the New York Police Department has “become a ‘wartime’ police department”, this is different from a normal day how, exactly?
All snark aside, could you imagine the reaction if a spokesman for the various protests around the country said something along these lines – that they were “at war” with the police? I imagine that the gloves (already half off) would come off completely, and citizens’ blood would soak the streets.
These guys really, truly don’t get it. These murders of policemen are not the work of “DiBlasio, Obangi, and those race hustlers Holder and Sharpton” as Fox News-inistas like to assert (read the comments on any Yahoo news story about the protests and police and citizen murders if you’d like to see for yourself what passes for rational thought among half of your “fellow Americans”), but of a lone psycho who latched on to the story of the day to commit two (of three) heinous crimes.
If it is legitimate to hang this lunatic’s crimes around the neck of the entire protest movement, then can we do the same to the Right for the Las Vegas murders of two police officers committed by two armed militants fresh from the protest at the Cliven Bundy ranch? No, I didn’t think so – funny how to the Right all morality is relative (see the public’s reaction to the Senate Torture Report for more moral relativism like this).
Regarding the legitimacy of the protesters’ complaints, let’s take a closer look. In neighborhoods like Bed-Sty (where these two officers were murdered), Ferguson, MO, Cleveland, OH, Oakland, Los Angeles, and on and on, violent and degrading over-policing is rampant. These random “stop and frisk” encounters are nothing like the “license and registration, please” police encounters that most of us are familiar with – police are trained to immediately take control of street encounters through hard-ass tactics designed to intimidate the citizen into limp submission.
Although it could be argued that this is a legitimate tactic that saves lives, could you imagine having this done to you? How about not once, but week after week after week (some citizens have been stopped scores of times)? Would you not be humiliated? Would you not grow to resent police and start to see them as an occupying force?
How about if, when encountered by police, if you hesitated even slightly, or God forbid asked the policeman why you were being stopped, you were immediately charged with resisting arrest? How about the recent case of the guy who was charged with destruction of Government property for getting blood on the uniforms of the officers who beat the crap out of him in a street encounter?
Would this not grind down a community? Would this not sow the seeds of resentment toward the police? And, when combined with the plentiful use of baseless “resisting” charges (a felony in most jurisdictions), would this not serve to jack up the crime statistics for the communities being targeted with this over-policing – resulting in even more officers, with even more weapons, descending on these communities, and providing “justification” of these tactics for all those Yahoo yahoos?
Enough, already. And as for PBA President Pat Lynch, although I generally support unionization as a way to balance the scales between Capital and Labor, police unions around the country (see Cleveland for another example) are making this position a little less universal for me.
IIIXXXIII
Japan in the ’30s is a much better precedent than Weimar, in that there was a de-facto coup d’etat by the security state against parliamentary rule that left the institutions and ideology of representative government superficially intact. The turning point in Japan was a series of assassinations that cowed the representatives from challenging the security state, in the USA the anthrax letters seem to have done the job though as chance would have it no congressmen were killed in the process.
The main point of difference is that in Japan the driving force behind the coup came from within the ranks of the uniformed military, in the USA it came from within the civilian security agencies with the regular military acting as something of a brake at least in the early stages.
ks
Blizzard,
Wow…..
“I could see the repression angle in a case like Occupy Wall Street, but in this Garner case? It is awful that he died, but he was still out there breaking the law and resisting arrest.
When you have the metropolitan elite (via their media and political party the Democrats) inciting black mobs over what are more-or-less fabricated or borderline cases of police excess
Therein the bold lies one of your many problems on issues like this one. You have a rather odd racial and insular intellectual blindness. You can’t see the repression because it doesn’t affect you. What to you is “more-or-less fabricated or borderline cases of police excess” is, in reality, another in a long line of tipping points for the people who deal with it on a regular basis. I guess we’ve sort of answered the age old question of the tree falling in the forrest because clearly for you many, many, many trees have to fall in certain forrests before you even deign to take notice and even then, it’s just to denigrate them for sullying your beautiful mind with “identity politics” and “mere distractions from the “real issues”.
You also seem bizzarely annoyed that the folks who it does affect won’t shut up about it, or suffer politely in silence, and let you get on with your empty “bigger picture” intellectual posturing. How dare they put their actual suffering above your pontifications. The nerve of them!
I mean really, a guy is choked to death by the cops in broad daylight on video and is left to die on the sidewalk by the cops and EMS and to you that’s apparently just a “borderline case of police “excess!?” being used by the “metropolitian elite” to whip up “black mobs!?”. Seriously, wtf?
In fact, Garner was not breaking the law. The police were called to the scene by the shop owner because of a fight that occurred in front of her store. A fight that Garner broke up. So the police come to the scene, saw that nobody was hurt, were told that Garner broke up the fight and what do they do? Ignore all that and pull the “usual suspects” routine and harrass Garner which led directly to his death.
But don’t worry, the easily riled and duped “black mobs” will go home soon and you can go back to ignoring the issue as usual.
Joe
Hi Ian
Was going to donate but you seem not to want any open or honest conversation. Bring back the troll and engage. Nothing he has said is inflammatory, or even controversial. Suggest you look at a post like the one above – Tom Halle – and ban them as well.
Open and honest dialogue means other people are allowed to have other views and not get called names. You have some good things to say Ian but open minded you are not.
Monster from the Id
My, Mr. Sunstein is a persistent little nudger, isn’t he?
ks
Tom Halle,
Snark alert! How dare you be rational and look at the actual relevant facts when the “real issues” are cultural Marxism, Orwellian crimethink and other assorted intellectual wankery!? We all know that Eric Garner committed a crime and resisted arrest by first breaking up a fight and then, when the cops arrived, having the nerve to complain about being harassed by them. That’s all that matters. Who even cares that the Brooklyn DA and the Staten Island DA are not the same person?
We also all know that gun pointing and violence spouting Cliven Bundy posse and his ongoing enablers are not the slightest bit responsible for the two loons who were at his compound and later went out and hunted and killed two cops and covered their bodies with a Gadsden flag and swastikas but meanwhile, Al Sharpton, who has consistently called for peaceful protests, is totally responsible for an unconnected stray loon who used the overwhelmingly peaceful protests nationwide as cover for his rampage. Because..derp..liberal media…hurr…liberal framing…reasons.
Finally, we all know that police brutality against blacks doesn’t exist and blacks don’t have any genuine long standing concerns about it. But if it does exist, it’s really more or less fabricated as a tool the metropolitan elites uses to keep blacks in line.
Of course….
Tom Halle
Noted.
hangauthoritarians
Joe, you are full of shit, you were never going to donate a cent to Ian. What’s the point of engaging a dishonest racist who openly admits they are trolling.
FACT: There were tens of thousands of instances of NYPD planting evidence on innocent people in the past decade, and not a single one of them went to prison for doing so.
FACT: Thousands of instances of torture by Chicago PD, and only one goes to prison. He gets out after a few months.
JustPlainDave
@hangauthoritarians Sources?