Tuesday, June 02, 2020

Police-racist murders and the protests against them: this is what a police state looks like


           The Police murder of George Floyd and of Breonna Taylor, the negligence of not immediately investigating the racist murder of Ahmaud Arbery and arresting the three murderers, in concomitance with the violently excessive police and national guard response to the protests against these documented murders (even shooting paint rounds at people on their own property not participating in any protests, assaulting members of the press clearly identifying themselves as such as well as government officials), along with the fact that the police have more personal protective equipment (ppe) than the nurses and doctors treating the patients sick with Covid-19 during the global pandemic illustrates all too clearly what a police state looks like.   

            The multiple documented videos of police vehicles recklessly driving directly into protestors, in New York, Los Angeles, etc., which is precisely what the white Christian terrorist did to murder Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, is yet more evidence that none of the more recently touted police reforms have actually reformed police brutality and violence as it so clearly and painfully hasn't.  In Louisville (where police murdered Breonna Taylor in her own home) police shot into a crowd which witnesses state were not protesting when the police arrived, and witness testimony is all the evidence there is as the officers hadn’t turned on their body cameras in violation of policy, and by indiscriminately firing into a peaceful crowd not even protesting they murdered David McAtee and left his body where it fell for twelve hours.  This past weekend witnessed a national police riot.  This is what a police state looks like.  

            As the human rights organization Amnesty International stressed Sunday, the police response to the protests across the United States must end its excessive force and militarized police response as heavy-duty riot gear and military-grade weapons are more fit for a battlefield than public areas, such as the use of a Predator drone to surveil Minneapolis, and are more probable to prime the officers’ minds for inevitable conflict and appallingly too frequent in the video documented evidence officers can be visibly seen and audibly heard priming themselves for violence which they then initiate and perpetrate.      

            That police departments in many of the cities experiencing protests and solidarity protests in response to the recent murders committed by police are both better equipped with ppe (ever more military grade ever since the W. Bush administration’s Patriot Act and reframing of the Cold War propaganda to the “war on terrorism” hysteria) than the hospital staff across the states and enjoy fully a third of public funding while educational and medical programs have been defunded illustrates painfully vividly where the ruling class establishment’s priorities are.  These are the deadly realities one would expect to find in a third-rate banana republic police state rather than the richest superpower in the world now sliding ever deeper towards catastrophic failed state

            Protests and solidarity protests will continue as they must and the demilitarization and defunding of the police across the country must be realized immediately.  There is no reason in the world why doctors and nurses are expected to provide their own ppe and to reuse them well past moderately safe use-by timelines during the worst global pandemic within our lifetimes while the police departments across the nation continue to gorge themselves on a full third of public funding and military hand-me-downs.  

            All of the criminal police officers must be arrested and charged, not only Derek Chauvin who killed George Floyd with his knee on his neck, but the other officers who held the rest of Floyd’s body down while Chauvin strangled him to death for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.  They were just as responsible for Floyd’s death as was Chauvin and after being fired can easily move a couple of cities away, reemploy themselves in police work and that is absolutely unacceptable.  This holds not only for the officer accomplices in Floyd’s murder but also for Taylor’s murder as Bakari Sellers explains.  Sellers further observes that the federal civil rights standard ought to be lowered such that it’s not so disgracefully difficult to bring criminal charges against police officers for murdering citizens of color and to limit qualified immunity.  Sellers' fourth suggested reform is to establish a national database for police officers who perpetrate terrible behavior in order to prevent officers being fired in one city for heinous acts only to move somewhere else and be rehired.
           
            The 1% ruling class clearly hopes to completely loot the entire country during the pandemic and continue to exploit foreign states with its imperial hegemony which is marked by 800 military units deployed around the world, and clearly clings in trembling fear to its dogma of white Christian supremacy that Trump, less the commander in chief so much as the racist in chief, has at every moment made shamefully obvious, from referring to the white Christian supremacists who rampaged through Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer as "very fine people" to tweeting a southern segregationist phrase from the sixties that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," and calling the protesters "THUGS," transparently displaying his vulgar and impeachable racism.  It was only last fall when the head of the Minneapolis police union, Bob Kroll, thanked Trump for ending "Obama's oppression" of the police, a white Christian supremacist foot soldier saluting the racist in chief.  

           The empowerment of such white Christian supremacy must be completely dismantled.  Every racist murderer police officer must be fired and arrested and all of the systemic racist policies that allowed their operating in the very first place must be thoroughly exposed and expelled.