Back in 1991 Los Angeles US District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr found that sheriffs at the Lynwood substation were, were engaged in what he called 'racial hostility' and 'terrorist tactics' against Latino and Black prisoners. And that the top brass for the Sheriffs department were well aware of this. In 2006 the FBI released a redacted memorandum warning of white nationalists in domestic police departments. Or look up the Joe Burge case in Chicago. In departments in Florida, Texas, and Ohio, there were active Klansmen in police departments.
It is common knowledge that across the country police culture is profoundly racist and reactionary. The educated classes in the U.S. have internalized the Hollywood version of all this. Just think how many hours of cop shows (all them, literally) you have watched and how every single one signs off on a fantasy version of police heroism "the thin blue line metaphor, and how it is only these handsome and beautiful (if slightly flawed, you know, human) public servants are protecting you and your family from the vicious underclass, from drug dealing gangs, all minority, and where all them, literally, portray inner cities are lawless wastelands without culture, brutish and bestial.
This has led to the new narrative archetype of 'taking the wrong off ramp'. These are openly racist stories but the public has come to digest such pseudo storytelling in a sort of pattern recognition manner. And nearly every single cop show features one or more military veterans. Usually special forces, but not always. Service in the military is a signifier for virtue and honour.
Forward to 2019, and Los Angeles again, this time in the incorporated mostly black city of Compton in south LA. The details of the Ryan Twyman killing,
Sam Levine, Guardian, Aug 2019
This is not what you see on the new FOX cop show Deputy. Watch a few episodes and get back to me. But that is hardly a unique phenomenon, there is SWAT, Chicago PD, the various Law & Order franchises, or Criminal Minds. I could go on and on, obviously. The problem is not the violence depicted, for Shakespeare is violent. It is the naked propaganda and the racism. Anti black racism at the very top but today Islamaphobic narratives abound as well, often with pro-Israeli sub plots. Military shows follow the same blueprint.
The point is that you cannot separate the Imperialist wars of aggression across the planet, which serve as recruitment pools for domestic police and private security and you cannot separate the counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Syria, not to mention the covert activities against Venezuela and Bolivia both of which involved at least some uniformed military personnel, from the sadistic actions of America's police. Nor can you separate these aggressions from the jingoistic entertainments (recruitment shows for the military and police) from Hollywood.
These foreign policy actions remain largely accepted and popular. The country may hate Trump, with good reason, but his foreign policy is so far actually less lethal than Obama's or Bush's or Clinton's. In any event every President gets a bump in approval ratings when he kills a dark-skinned foreigner either by drone or my military actions.
The public didn't much care at all about Fallujah, and the architect of that butchery, Jim 'Mad Dog' Mattis, former Sec of State for Trump before being fired, is now a darling of the white educated liberals who are so incensed about the prez' and his failure to lockdown the country even more, harder, and certainly for longer.
They are quite happy to cheer and identify with the FBI and war criminals like Mattis. That exaggerated hatred of Trump contains a number of contradictions. But for the purposes of this discussion the central one is that of soft or disguised racism vs. overt white sheets MAGA racism.
White paternalism knows no bounds. And the inherent tokenism of the educated white American has sort of reached its own, from their perspective, cultural horizon event. Another way of saying it is truly the death of irony epoch.
That Americans approve of military violence against the poor nations of the world suggests why the police in America are so steadfastly racist and white supremacist. They are hugely supported. Now, there is with the murder of Floyd a lot of discussion of defunding the police. The problem being, as many have pointed out, this would only increase privitization of security. The US spent 100 billion on domestic policing last year, give or take. And around 80 billion on prisons.
The US defense budget is four or almost five times that amount. So it would seem critical to defund the military right along with the police. It is clearly a positive to reallocate cop money to mental health and community infrastructure and education. But this is the nefarious aspect of Covid19 and the lockdown. I
n Philadelphia the proposed budget cuts, do the massive effects of the lockdown include cutting nearly all sanitation workers down to almost nothing, cutting stuff like soap in hospitals and upkeep of school and city buses. The Covid lockdown was a tool of the ruling class.
There is much press now given to polls showing American support for the Floyd protests. Except those polls are misleading.
- Five Thirty Eight
Its that last sentence, you see.
Whatever grassroots movements achieve is always going to run up against that last sentence. But I'm not cynical about defunding cops. It is a concrete material step in developing alliances in the working class. The movements for prison abolition and defunding are doing the groundwork for alliance formation. It has to start somewhere. And they are the front edges of suggesting property and capitalism are the source of most all of their problems.
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