America Is Not For Black People

[PeaceNikki]

Michael Brown is not special. In all its specificity, the 18-year old's death remains just the most recent example of police officers killing unarmed black men.

Part of the reason we're seeing so many black men killed is that police officers are now best understood less as members of communities, dedicated to keeping peace within them, than as domestic soldiers. The drug war has long functioned as a full-employment act for arms dealers looking to sell every town and village in the country on the need for military-grade hardware, and 9/11 made things vastly worse, with local police departments throughout America grabbing for cash to better defend against any and all terrorist threats. War had reached our shores, we were told, and police officers needed weaponry to fight it.

Officers have tanks now. They have drones. They have automatic rifles, and planes, and helicopters, and they go through military-style boot camp training. It's a constant complaint from what remains of this country's civil liberties caucus. Just this last June, the ACLU issued a report on how police departments now possess arsenals in need of a use. Few paid attention, as usually happens.

The worst part of outfitting our police officers as soldiers has been psychological. Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he'll reasonably think that his job isn't simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger. Instead of protecting and serving, police are searching and destroying.

If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they're working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.

Much more at link: http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/america-is-not-for-black-people-1620169913

[Faux pas]

1. Every new incident

brings me to tears.

[antiquie]

2. Another one, here.

[link:http://|Police Fatally Shoot Man in South L.A.; Family Members Say He Was Lying Down When Shot]http://ktla.com/2014/08/12/man-hospitalized-after-being-shot-by-police-in-south-l-a/

Family members said Tuesday that a 25-year-old man was complying with police orders when he was fatally shot by LAPD officers in the Florence neighborhood South Los Angeles.

Patrol officers had “conducted an investigative stop” in the 200 block of 65th Street, and “during the stop a struggle ensued” and police opened fire, an LAPD news release issued midmorning Tuesday stated.

My heart is so heavy,” Tritobia Ford said in an interview Tuesday evening. “My son was a good kid. He didn’t deserve to die the way he did.”

Her son was lying on the ground and complying with the officers’ commands when he was shot three times, Tritobia Ford said. In the aftermath of the shooting, she said, police refused to inform her of where Ezell Ford was hospitalized.

[PeaceNikki]

3. .

Horrifying.

[Not Me]

4. Truly horrifying and outright blatant disregard for the rights of the people living in Ferguson.

I was livid last evening watching the news when they said the Ferguson police department has refused to disclose the name of the officer involved, has imposed a no-fly zone over the city in an attempt to keep news copters out of the sky, and has set curfew limits on news reporters covering the story.

[TheKentuckian]

10. Too much license to create bad out of nothing, ban the "Terry stops".

If you don't have an articulable actual reasonable suspicion then you don't have a stop.

If you don't have an actual reason to think a specific crime is being committed then citizens should not be interfered with.

End the drug war.

[HipChick]

5. War has been declared on young black males in America..

[PeaceNikki]

7. Yeah. Awful. It's rare I attribute the word "powerful" to a Gawker Media piece, but this is one

of those times

[n2doc]

6. ...

[PeaceNikki]

8. Amen.

[onehandle]

9. If you are going to riot after senseless violence, take it to the source...

[IMG][/IMG]

[DesertDiamond]

11. These horrors are the dark before the dawn. That's because they will cause enough people to wake up

to the need to find a way to truly change all of this from the inside out. It has to start from within each individual, that is, each individual courageous enough to fight their own darkness and help the world overcome the darkness that is trying to own it. Then we will be able to create a world where we can all live happily, based on respect for all life. It's coming! Let's hang in there and keep fighting!

[noiretextatique]

12. nope...laws need to change

For a start, get rid of racial profiling and end the stupid war on drugs. And stop criminalizing people because of race or clothing or tattoos. Stop making people enemies...stop making money from doing that. In essence, you are right. But as long as some feel being black and male means you are guilty of some crime...

[freshwest]

13. ^^^this^^^

[AverageJoe90]

15. Yep, very true. Very true.

[uponit7771]

14. AMEN AND AMEN!!! I said same thing on another thread! Current LEOs are occupying forces vs people

... who have a vested interest in seeing the neighborhood thrive not just be crime reduced

[Comrade Grumpy]

16. Black people are America's Palestinians.

[reflection]

17. Darn. Just posted this, but I self-deleted.

Sorry for the dupe. I checked, but not well enough. I thought this piece was just spot on.