The Predictable Start Of
Vigilantism
Reverse Course on Police Militarization or
Reap the Whirlwind
By Dave Lindorff
December 23, 2014 "ICH"
- "This
Can't Be Happening"
- Let me make it clear from the
outset of this article: I’m against violence
and killing, and I’m certainly no advocate
of killing police officers.
But having said that, it must
be stated that the combination of a national
gun culture that makes obtaining guns and
deadly bullets as easy as buying a
newspaper, combined with the increasing
availability of videocam evidence of
infuriating police murders of innocent,
unarmed people, including kids, is a recipe
for the kind of vigilantism that we just
witnessed in New York City, where a
Baltimore man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, took it
upon himself to wreak what he considered
deserved vengeance on the NYPD by randomly
selecting and assassinating two New York
cops sitting in their squad car.
Random acts of retributive
violence like this are only to be expected
when you have police treating the public --
and especially certain segments of the
public, notably people of color -- like
presumptive criminals or a people under
occupation.
This is not a question of
right or wrong. Hell, the two policemen
killed by the apparently mentally distubed
Brinsley, ironically a Chinese and a Latino
cop, had nothing to do with the killing of
Eric Garner, a black man, by white police
officer Daniel Pantaleo. It’s simply a
reality: If the growing murderousness and
thuggishness of some (especially white)
police behavior towards people of color, and
towards the public in general, continues in
this country, it is totally predictable that
such acts of vengeance or vigilantism will
increase, perhaps even becoming more focused
to target the actual perpetrators of
unjustified homicides, such as the recent
killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Garner in New York and 12-year-old Tamir
Rice in Cleveland, should their uniformed
killers be given a free pass by prosecutors.
Eric Garner being strangled
by a NY police officer, and a squad care,
its window blown out by shots that killed
two NYPD cops in what was reportedly a
twisted act of vengeance.
We all know why Darren
Wilson, the Ferguson cop who killed the
unarmed 19-year-old Brown with shots to the
head when he clearly posed no threat to the
officer, has left the department. This was
not a decision based upon concerns about
community relations; if he had tried to
remain a police officer in Ferguson, Wilson
would have had to work every day wearing
full body armor, and backed by an armed
escort.
There may be some hotheads
who would argue that having police think
twice about the potential consequences of
killing unarmed suspects and people being
arrested for minor offenses like the late
Garner, who was simply selling single
cigarettes on the street of his
neighborhood, trying to feed his family when
he was killed by an illegal police
choke-hold, would be all to the good. But
the end result of having citizens killing
police in retaliation for police killing
people would be a state of open war in inner
cities, a war which would just result in
more killing of innocents. Already, police
are reportedly responding to this
assassination of two officers with anger,
with the NYPD police union, the Patrolmen's
Benevolent Assn.,
calling for the adoption of "war policing"
tactics ,
which would mean shooting first and asking
queestions later.
Meanwhile, even from a
practical perspective, vigilantism makes no
sense, because the police will always be
better armed, and able to use violence far
more extensively and effectively than those
who would attack them. We already saw what
happened when the Black Panthers back in the
1960s and early ‘70s attempted to defend
black urban communities against police
violence. The entire repressive apparatus of
not just city police departments but of the
whole national security apparatus came down
on them, and they were crushed as an
organization, with many Panthers murdered
outright by the government.
The problem we face is
that today’s militarized police, and the
philosophy of aggressive policing in
neighborhoods populated by the poor and
especially by people of color, are creating
a situation in which community anger is a
once dormant volcano, now ready to erupt. At
that point logic is going to be overwhelmed
by emotion. We need only think back to the
mid-1960s -- when inner cities across the
country were exploding in revolt and the
government was responding like a nation at
war by sending in the National Guard to
restore some semblance of repressive order
-- to see where things are headed.
So much for the
post-racial society supposedly inaugurated
by the election of President Barack Obama in
2008.
We cannot expect today’s
police to turn this runaway train around.
The police response to such killings as the
recent one in New York is usually to just
clamp down harder. Police who are given a
concrete reason to fear for their lives from
an approaching black male are going to turn
more readily to their Glocks than they
already were, which will inevitably lead to
even more tragic and unjustifiable killings
as people just asking for help or for
directions are likely to end up getting
blown away by paranoid officers. And that
will just lead to a spiral of back-and-forth
violence.
No. The only answer at
this point is a wholesale reversal of course
away from police militarization to a
retraining of police so they see their role
as being peace officers, not
“law-enforcement” officers. There has to be
a major campaign to hire and promote more
minority police officers, and more women
police officers, so that we never see a
situation like in Ferguson where an
essentially white police department is
policing an essentially black or hispanic
neighborhood. Police must reflect, and live
in, the communities they are policing.
Candidates for a police job must be screened
to keep those who are violence prone, racist
or psychopathic, must be rejected. Police
should not and cannot be armed troops who
come in from the suburbs to act as an
occupying army.
www.ThisCantBeHappening.net