=By= Michael Roberts
Thank you Michael Roberts for speaking the truth – actually several truths – in this slushy time of “let’s cover over any ‘little’ blemishes that the ‘few bad apples’ are placing on our otherwise sterling police.” And thank you for pointing out that frequently over looked truth regarding the reason for police forces in this country from their inception: “So why is there seemingly no way ever to curb the violence of the police? The fact is that the police were founded, formed and created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism.” -rw
Guns. Americans are addicted to them. It’s not about the fabled Second Amendment crafted at a time when there were no cops on the streets and America was a relatively young nation with a small population. And it sure as hell is not about the so-called “right to bear arms,” as patently stupid as that sounds in a modern, presumably “civilized nation.” America today, in 2016, is an armed camp with over 340 million guns in private hands, a nation dotted with military camps, anti-government militias armed to the teeth, criminals with all kinds of military style hardware, and street punks with illegal handguns. There is also the police, the group that’s supposed to “protect and serve” the public but who routinely dish out brutal and often fatal violence against the very citizens that they supposedly protect.
So when President Obama told the world in the bloody aftermath of five cops gunned down in Dallas, Texas by a former army reservist, that “that’s not who we are,” I beg to respectfully differ. It’s EXACTLY who we are. The president should know that when he was reelected for a second term national gun sales soared out of the ballpark because his haters felt that a race war was eminent. Stoked and jacked up on the National Rifle Association’s Armageddon gun hyperbole and fear-mongering, a people addicted to firearms could not wait to get their next gun fix. They genuinely think that a race war is coming. That’s EXACTLY what former congressman Joe Walsh tweeted as the carnage unfolded in Texas — “race war. Bring it on. We’re coming for you Obama.” You’d think that he was talking about “Gunfight At The OK Corral.” It’s the way many among us think — they need guns to “defend” themselves from the “others” and the government.
And why that’s EXACTLY who we are as Americans? Well, we LOVE violence. This nation was founded on violence and children are fed a steady, sustained diet of violence EVEN BEFORE they can talk or walk. From Bugs Bunny cartoons that send out subliminal messages of violence, and the gory details of other cartoons, children, at an early age, see violence as fun and play. When they get older they’re exposed to wrestling, violent trash talk, and video games that are built on violence. They play games that simulate real life combat further reinforcing this addiction to guns and violence.
By the time children reach their teens, especially boys, they are hooked on violence and guns. In school they play ultra-violent games like football (not to be confused with soccer) and ice hockey where violence is not only a feature of the games but is expected and anticipated by adoring fans. The best part of baseball is when there is a free-for-all dust up and even in games like basketball there are many, many violent incidents that get fans – and the opportunistic media -excitedly talking for days on end. You hear language like “he took down so and so” for saying something; he or she: “kicked his ass” for so and so etc. etc. The United States government routinely says on TV that they will “kill or capture” some enemy. We’ve become desensitized to violence, death and killing. It’s the new normal.
Then there is the romanticizing of “our men and women in uniform.” Many are the flowers of youth taken from their homes, trained to kill, and packed off to fight wars that presumably “defend our interests.” They are supposed to have “served our country well ” fighting in wars that they do not understand but are fed a diet rich in self-righteous rhetoric, deceptiveness, and hypocrisy. Sun Tzu said in the Art of War “ALL war is deception.” He was right — the deception goes two ways: from those making, conducting and waging war and their enemies.
And the sad thing is that after they’ve killed for America in her wars, these “broken vessels,” and traumatized “wounded warriors,” are discarded, kicked to the curb, as so much useless garbage. You can find them selling used books or hot dogs on street corners in New York or begging for pittances in subways, many still proudly displaying their medals, tokens of their “service” to their country. These discarded former soldiers possess no other marketable skill that’s of use in the civilian economy. So they become low wage security guards and others still end up homeless, broken, disillusioned and the frequent guests at soup kitchens and food pantries. They are one day away from snapping and killing.
So you’re wondering why people are angry? And why anger is so prevalent today in American society?
But let’s talk about how police violence is an integral part of American society. Every time a white cop guns down an unarmed Black man the narrative is the same: the whorish mainstream media jazz up the story and then start telling viewers that the Black man “had a record.” He smoked marijuana, was arrested for not paying child support, he was accused of domestic violence, he was a petty thief. This demonizing of the victim sends a loud dog whistle to white America that “he got what he deserved” and we should support the cops. This narrative further enhances the belief that “Black lives do not matter.”
Don’t get enraged and incensed when the Black community says that for police and law enforcement “Black lives do not matter” — they don’t. There are no Black person’s rights that a white cop is bound to respect. That’s why you hear the cops say in the wake of a shooting that the Black man or woman “disrespected him.” That real or perceived disrespect coming from a person that he consciously or unconsciously “see as a sub-human” was therefore the justification for gunning down this Black sub-human, this slave prodigy, this rude n***er, this criminal in Black skin. Most white cops (not all) see Black skin and they think “criminal,” “lazy, raper of white women” and “talking monkeys.” To them Blacks should “know their place” and don’t get uppity, especially when speaking to them at a traffic stop or any other minor encounter. There are two American justice systems: one privileged, tolerant, fair, sometimes benign, white and exclusive; the other black, bigoted, unjust, racist and violent.
It is this culture of violence and its historic targeting of Black people that’s at issue here. No amount of prayers, church vigils, marches, songs, platitudes from politicians, calls for calm by Black sellouts doing their masters’ biddings will cause things to change between cops and the Black community. Power concedes NOTHING without a fight. Racism and violence go hand in hand because racism sees the “other” as inferior and of no value; expendable and not worthy of respect. And America, still living in, and experiencing the Peter Pan syndrome, has NEVER grown up and matured enough to accept responsibility for 400 years of state-sanctioned violence, brutality and mayhem, visited on a defenseless Black community, the end-result of which we’re reaping and experiencing today.
To fix this problem and find answers we must go back to the origin’s of America’s police and why its fundamental nature and behavior are driven by age-old prejudices and inculcated violence. The oft cited “To protect and serve” begs the question: but whom? That’s where a history lesson offered by Professor Sam Mitrani of the College of Dupage comes in. Let’s start with a time in the U.S. before we had organized city-run police forces.
The True History of the Origins of Police — Protecting and Serving the Masters of Society By Professor Sam Mitrani.
The liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police.
“… Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols.” [Underline mine]
Exactly what happened to change this? United States capitalism and its dependence on the low-paid physical labor of immigrants, and later of Blacks moving north after the Civil War — up the Mississippi through St. Louis to Kansas City and Chicago, and up the eastern seaboard to Washington, New York and Boston, among other places.
Mitrani states:
“Then, as 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.
Class conflict roiled late-19th 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. 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. …”
Of course, the ruling class did not get everything it wanted. It had to yield on many points to the immigrant workers it sought to control — this is why, for instance, municipal governments backed away from trying to stop Sunday drinking and why they hired so many immigrant police officers, especially the Irish. But despite these concessions, businessmen organized themselves to make sure the police were increasingly isolated from democratic control.
The police, meanwhile, increasingly set themselves off from the population by donning uniforms; establishing their own rules for hiring, promotion and firing; working to build a unique esprit de corps; and identifying themselves with order. And despite complaints about corruption and inefficiency, they gained more and more support from the ruling class, to the extent that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen donated money to buy the police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns and buildings and to establish a police pension out of their own pockets.” [www.Alternet.org] It’s the “identifying with order” that would morph into the modern day authoritarian personality and arrogant behavior of most cops today.
Listen to one of their own:
I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me. By Sunil Dutta. August 19, 2014
Sunil Dutta, Ph.D., is a 17-year-veteran police officer in Los Angeles.
“… Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.”
Because, he goes on to explain, “Officers are rarely at fault. When they use force, they are defending their, or the public’s, safety.”
You see the problem? It that attitude and the fact and the presumption that “officers are rarely at fault” that allows them to kill with impunity. If you are “rarely at fault” then using excessive violence becomes routine and second nature, especially against people that you do not feel compelled to respect. Not my words — those of a 17-year veteran of one of the most brutal police departments in the United States. The cop arrogance shines through with every word in that preceding quote dripping with belligerence, violence and aggression.
Here’s Professor Mitrani again on a key point — what this implies about rule of law:
“There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced “the law” — nor, for that matter, a time when the law itself was neutral. Throughout the 19th century in the North, the police mostly arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and vagrancy, which meant that they could target anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labor systems.
The violence the police carried out and their moral separation from those they patrolled were not the consequences of the brutality of individual officers, but of policies carefully designed to mold the police into a force that could use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the development of a wage-labor economy. …
Though some patrolmen tried to be kind and others were openly brutal, police violence in the 1880s was not a case of a few bad apples — and neither is it today.” [Underline mine].
So why is there seemingly no way ever to curb the violence of the police? The fact is that the police were founded, formed and created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism. Today, in 2016, they are just one part of the “criminal justice” system that plays the same role. Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system — in our society today, disproportionately among poor Black people.
MICHAEL D. ROBERTS is a top Political Strategist and Business, Management and Communications Specialist in New York City’s Black community. He is an experienced writer whose specialty is socio-political and economic analysis and local community relations. He has covered the United Nations, the Caribbean and Africa in a career that spans over 32 years in journalism. As Editor of New York CARIB NEWS, a position that he’s held since 1990, he is in a unique position to have his hands on the pulse of the over 800,000 Caribbean-American community in Brooklyn, and the over 2.5 million members resident in the wider New York State community.
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