The Asheville police bravely assaulted a first-aid station. It was clearly marked, it was staffed by doctors, nurses, EMTs and such people, and no one in the group was participating in the protests. They were just there to help people. Yet the police charged in, knifed all the water bottles, looted bandages and sutures, trashed everything in sight, and harassed the medical staff.

The excuses given: they were only supposed to confiscate medical supplies (why?). They had to search for explosives (in a med station?). They had to get rid of the water bottles, because protesters had thrown them at the police.

Take a closer look at those police.

Holy crap. They’re armored up like storm troopers from Star Wars. And they’re afraid of thrown water bottles? Did they watch Return of the Jedi, think it was a documentary, and worry that there were Ewoks among the protesters?

I also have to point out that they chose to fight medical assistants who have been struggling to get proper PPE for months, and who in this bold assault were wearing t-shirts and handkerchiefs tied over their faces, and were volunteers who weren’t getting paid. How much overtime did Asheville sink into depriving its citizens of medical assistance?

FTP.

We’re in a time of crisis, when a sense of injustice is acute, when communities are in flames and people march in protest, when white supremacists run the country and the police have willingly become a tool of fascism. What we really need right now is some clueless dweeb from Harvard to come along and reassure us that it’s all an illusion, the country is really becoming less racist, therefore all you white bigots out there can relax and not feel guilty because the statistics say you are all becoming better angels, even if you’ve institutionalized social norms that allow black concerns to be minimized even as you’re throwing huge numbers of them into an inhumane prison complex. That dweeb is the self-appointed guru of white denial, Steven Pinker. You can always count on him to show up at a cataclysmic failure of the system to let us know that this terrible event doesn’t really expose an ugly reality. Everything is getting better, don’t you know. So he takes to twitter to make his usual Pollyannaish pronouncement.

Harvard Social Science Dean Lawrence Bobo did the research I've cited on the decline of overt racism in the US. Here he reflects (w cautious optimism) on race relations in the the context of police killings of black men https://t.co/LAJeFjtCey via @Harvard pic.twitter.com/zXdejdBv3q

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) June 3, 2020

Good god. He’s a psychologist. He has to know that people are really good at rationalization, making self-reported attitudes difficult to trust. Look at this one graph he shows (as if a graph is more powerful than one photo of a cop with his knee on a black man’s neck):

What, exactly, is that supposed to demonstrate? That white people have become less racist since the 1970s, or that racists have been shifting their rationalizations since the 1970s? Are “Inequality is due to lower motivation among blacks” and “Inequality is due to lower ability among blacks” the only two excuses white people give for discrimination, so those two responses encompass the totality of the rationalizations? Has he even considered that both responses are pretty damned racist and are centered on explaining the othering of black people? Has he considered that a shift in what is socially acceptable to say in public doesn’t necessarily imply a shift in underlying attitudes?

Also, wow, over half the white respondents are making those two equally racist arguments. I don’t find this at all reassuring.

Pinker is referencing a black social psychologist (also a big shot at Harvard, which ought to be a caution to anyone reading their work — he’s black, but also in a highly privileged position) who is also cautiously optimistic about the future, but isn’t trying to bury the lede in happy-clappy noise.

We had all thought, of course, that we made phenomenal strides. We inhabit an era in which there are certainly more rank-and-file minority police officers than ever before, more African American and minority and female police chiefs and leaders. But inhabiting a world where the poor and our deeply poor communities are still heavily disproportionately people of color, where we had a war on drugs that was racially biased in both its origins and its profoundly troubling execution over many years, that has bred a level of distrust and antagonism between police and black communities that should worry us all. There’s clearly an enormous amount of work to be done to undo those circumstances and to heal those wounds.

Pinker really is the Norman Vincent Peale of our generation. We don’t need some racist-leaning, evo-psych-loving, IDW-associated professor telling us that everything will just get better gradually over time if we’re patient and wait for white people to become more tolerant. Action is the agent of change. Every incremental shift is the result of people standing up, speaking out, shoving reality in the face of the complacent and demanding change. There is no magic internal trend towards less racism, especially not among the people who hold all the power.

All of you prophets out there — who among you predicted that in the final (we hope) year of Trump’s presidency, the country would be crippled by a pandemic, the police state would run wild, our cities would be on fire, protesters would overrun the White House lawn, and Trump would be hiding in a bunker? Anyone?

Over four centuries of slavery, colonialism, and exploitation are finally coming home to roost and we’re going through a well-earned paroxysm of pain. The only questions are how much worse is it going to get, and will the nation survive it? We know already that it’s going to get much worse if Trump is left in charge.

As cities burned night after night and images of violence dominated television coverage, Trump’s advisers discussed the prospect of an Oval Office address in an attempt to ease tensions. The notion was quickly scrapped for lack of policy proposals and the president’s own seeming disinterest in delivering a message of unity.

Trump did not appear in public on Sunday. Instead, a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the plans ahead of time said Trump was expected in the coming days to draw distinctions between the legitimate anger of peaceful protesters and the unacceptable actions of violent agitators.

On Sunday, Trump retweeted a message from a conservative commentator encouraging authorities to respond with greater force.

This is precisely what we don’t need. The American police have effectively delegitimized themselves with their brute force tactics and their alignment with white supremacy, and American justice has compromised itself with decades of oppressive laws that mean that 2½ million citizens are now imprisoned, mostly for drug-related crimes, and the law is unequally applied to black and white people. Money has poured into law enforcement to the point where they’re buying army surplus armored cars.

What we need to do is defund the police.

If Congressional lawmakers are serious about reining in abusive policing, there are things they can do at the federal level. They can start by eliminating the Community Oriented Police Services (COPS) office. Created by the 1994 Crime Bill, it has been the central conduit for funds to hire tens of thousands of new police and equip them with a range of surveillance technology and militarized equipment.

One of the projects they currently administer is Operation Relentless Pursuit, the Trump administration’s signature crime fighting initiative, that is set to flood seven major cities with scores of federal agents in partnership with local police to go after his favorite bugaboos of gangs and drug cartels. Congress approved $61 million dollars to pay for it, and that money should be taken out of any future appropriations. They can also take more steps to undo the damage done by the 1994 Crime Bill, like defunding school policing in favor of providing more counselors and restorative justice programs; investing in harm reduction strategies, like safe injection facilities and needle exchanges as well as high quality medically based drug treatment on demand; and rethinking the use of the criminal justice system to manage the epidemic of domestic violence.

It is time for the federal government, major foundations, and local governments to stop trying to manage problems of poverty and racial discrimination by wasting millions of dollars on pointless and ineffective procedural reforms that merely provide cover for the expanded use of policing. It’s time for everyone to quit thinking that jailing one more killer cop will do anything to change the nature of American policing. We must move instead, to significantly defund the police and redirect the resources into community-based initiatives that can produce real safety and security without the violence and racism inherent in the criminal justice system.

Take away their toys. Stop rewarding cowboy cops. End the us-vs-them attitude, don’t attack communities with paramilitary thugs, but do engage with them as fellow citizens. Unfortunately, if you turn on your TV or go to the movies, you’ll discover that the renegade macho cop is valorized, that car chases and crashes are routine, and that every conflict is resolved with a gun. Cops are somehow above the law, and their job involves getting the bad guy even if it means turning a neighborhood into a burning wasteland.

Does this look like “protect and serve” to you?

It’s not like I expect change to happen. Trump is fulminating in his bunker, raving about sending the army to take care of his enemies, and the Democrats are little better — note that the 1994 crime bill, mentioned above, was written by Joe Biden and signed into law by Bill Clinton. The instinctive response of the establishment politician is alway to crack down hard on any threat to their power. We’re going to have to tear it all down first.

We should start at the top and work our way down.

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You want to see the problem?

HEY LA:

The LA city budget is due tomorrow (6/1). $3 billion — a full 54% — of the budget is going to LAPD. We've seen the cops the past two days. They have enough money. Call and email council members and implore they have an emergency meeting to redistribute.

— Kelly Diamond (@KellyDiamond_) June 1, 2020

The police are seeing this as an excuse to demand more money to do their job poorly.

The Washington Post headline this morning was “Chaotic Minneapolis protests spread amid emotional calls for justice, peace”, and it’s illustrated with this photo:

I ask, where’s the chaos? I see a small group of calm people standing victorious before the ruins of a criminal enterprise. The people speaking for the community clearly see where the chaos was coming from.

“There are folks reacting to a violent system,” McDowell said. “You can replace property, you can replace businesses, you can replace material things, but you can’t replace a life. That man is gone forever because some cop felt like he had the right to take his life. A lot of folks are tired of that. They’re not going to take it anymore.”

That’s why, he said, “Minneapolis is burning.”

Chaos is when the people delegated to preserve the peace are murdering people in the street for non-violent offenses. Chaos is heavily armed cops oppressing the communities they’re supposed to safeguard. Chaos is the district attorney waffling over whether to charge a cop for murder when they have video of the man slowly throttling another to death in public. Chaos is the absence of justice.

This is Minneapolis, a pleasant city full of good people trying to get by. It’s not Gotham City, and it never needed a crew of Batman-wannabes to keep the peace.