CW: Police violence
this thread is over 260 tweets long, filled almost exclusively with videos of unprovoked violence by police on peaceful protesters https://t.co/TTQH4HNKz6
— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) June 4, 2020
There’s a tendency, among people who claim there’s no problem with police use of violence, and with race-based injustice in the United States, to pretend that any given example of mistreatment is an isolated incident, and no matter how many such incidents occur, they’re never part of a pattern. People who are protesting now, and people who support these protests are those who are willing and able to connect the rather obvious dots, and see the pattern.
I’ve been involved in political activism, in one form or another, since I was a teenager. I was never one of the people “in the thick of it” when things got violent, I have never been arrested, gassed, pepper-sprayed, or otherwise assaulted by police. I have, however, paid attention to those incidents. I’ve watched the footage, talked to people who were targeted by police, and listened to what they have to say. Deaths, injuries, and maimings are not new in America, but as far as I know this is beyond anything that has happened in the United States in my lifetime. I’ve never seen this many people being permanently blinded in one eye, because police are aiming to destroy eyeballs. I’ve never seen this many people with head wounds from “rubber” bullets. I’ve never seen the police being this open about assaulting peaceful crowds, assaulting journalists, and arresting people, on video, who were engaged in nothing more than talking.
This is an effort to criminalize dissent, and it’s coming in coordination with the GOP government using the “antifa” bogeyman to try to criminalize organized action. To me, this looks like a big step in a very bad direction.
Below is a sample from the linked thread. Click through to Twitter if you want to see more.
2️⃣3️⃣2️⃣ Huntsville, AL: police officer gets out of his car and just walks around casually pepper-spraying people
— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) June 4, 2020
2️⃣4️⃣0️⃣ Indianapolis, IN: police teargassing a worship service for sport
— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) June 4, 2020
2️⃣4️⃣1️⃣ Austin, TX: police shot a kid in the head for sport, fracturing his skull. They told fellow protestors to bring them his body so he could get medical care.
Then they opened fire as the protestors were carrying the body over as requested
— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) June 4, 2020
2️⃣5️⃣4️⃣ Las Vegas, NV: this was from one of the first nights, as police just started arresting random people – and targeting journalists
— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) June 4, 2020
2️⃣6️⃣0️⃣ Phoenix, AZ: protestor walking home on Saturday night when police tackle him to the ground and beat the sh*t out of him
You also hear the standard "STOP RESISTING!" yells that cops always yell even when someone is compliant
— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) June 4, 2020
If this ends without real, systemic change, far beyond just arresting a handful of “bad cops”, then it’s going to happen again, and it’s going to get worse.
Unfortunately, life costs money, and my income from this blog has yet to meet minimum wage for the time I put into it. If you can afford to, please consider pledging a couple dollars per month or so through my Patreon. This will help me continue creating and improving this blog by keeping a roof over my head, and food in my carnivorous pets so they don’t eat me. Crowdfunding requires a crowd, so if you can pitch in a little, it would help a great deal!
Yes, but what systemic change do we need? I’ve seen lots of people giving proposals, but most, if not all, of those proposals are not going far enough. I think we need a lot of things, and here’s some of the core (radical) changes that we need to make:
Fix the actual problem: No personal accountability. Remove qualified immunity so that the victims, or close family and friends of the victims, can seek civil damages from cops in their personal capacity in court. Allow victims to seek indictments to appoint any counsel of their choosing as prosecutor, so the victim can see criminal charges in court against individual cops. Alternatively, find some other way to ensure that criminal charges will be brought against cops, but I doubt any alternative will be sufficient. Finally, publish and maintain detailed standards of rules of engagement for cops, to help juries be able to recognize unlawful use of force and find against cops in civil and criminal trials. That’s what it will take to fix this problem, and I am firmly convinced that nothing else will.
For more information, I strongly suggest reading:
https://www.constitution.org/lrev/roots/cops.htm
Most of the solutions proposals I’ve been seeing include ending qualified immunity, shifting a great deal of funding to social services and having medical personnel on call for things like wellness checks, ending “proactive” policing, and ending the concept of “beat” cops – don’t have police just prowling around looking for people to accost.
Unsurprisingly, it seems like you and I tend to move in different informational circles 😛
Well, we shared qualified immunity in common.