Last night, Wednesday the 22nd, was an important night for the Portland protests, yet I left earlier than other nights when I’ve stayed at least 3.5 hours. “What accounts for this, friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke?” you might ask. It comes down to this: I wimped out.
You’ve likely already read the thread I posted about the personal experience of being exposed to tear gas, how your body responds, how your mind panics. But of course that doesn’t tell people much about what actually happened – the narrative that one might get in a newspaper. This post is more about that: the story of late July 21st and the earliest bit of July 22nd and the rally that happened in front of the Federal Services Building [Correction:] Justice Center and the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse in downtown Portland.
The nightly protests themselves are a sort of jamboree. There are people who take it upon themselves to be leaders. They speak and initiate chanting. But they’re mostly limited to use of bullhorns, which simply aren’t loud enough to reach the whole crowd. So if you don’t work your way to the front, it takes you several rounds of a chant before you can pick it up – except the obvious and most frequent chant, “Black Lives Matter”. That one gets started a lot.
Okay, folks.
This is 2:42 seconds of a critical time in last night’s protests, taken around 11:30pm Pacific time on the night of July 21st in front of the Hatfield courthouse. My BFF and I are in the front rank, the only people in front of us are a couple of press people who walk briefly in front of us. You won’t see it, but about halfway through someone with a shield comes up and kneels in front of me to protect me (though I didn’t want it or ask for it). I didn’t tell the shield carrier to buzz off and find someone who actually wanted protection, but if this is ever you, please ask permission before you actually touch someone’s body. My shield carrier actually grabbed my arthritic knees in what they thought was a reassuring gesture just before the tear gas was fired. Don’t be that person, okay? Okay.
Now the video:
RawStory is saying that Maher did a segment on police brutality tonight (Friday). In it he said:
“We need to stop saying most cops are good like we know that to be true,” Maher said. “I hope that’s true, but I need some evidence—unlike cops.”
I think that the most troubling thing about this is how few of these incidents come to light through police body cams. With so many interactions recorded on body cam, how is it that the majority of brutality incidents reach the public eye through the video taken by some witness pulling out a cell phone?
I don’t think that the majority of cops have committed unnecessary and illegal violence. I think the majority have certainly committed unnecessary violence, though, and I think that the ratio of bystander videos to body cam videos in these situations shows that law enforcement as an institution is engaged in a massive coverup. What does it mean to be a “good cop” when so many of these incidents are covered up by cops? Can you still be a “good cop” while ignoring the problems too big to change by yourself? How would that square with arresting a murderer when you know you don’t have the skills to prosecute them?
The definition of “good cop” is going to vary from person to person, but from testilying to state certification boards to allowing corrupt cops to resign to avoid investigation & punishment so they can hop over to a job in the next jurisdiction, I think there’s more than enough evidence that a huge percentage of cops are corruptly ignoring the problems in their own departments even if they are decent and trying to do good when they go out on the streets. Some of those cops *might* be good if we didn’t ask them to work in corrupt agencies. But how many? It’s impossible to tell.
So, yeah: maybe most cops are good, but at this point they’re going to need to step up with some evidence.
Some cops in Virginia just made life harder for a huge number of other cops … by doing the right thing. WTVR has an account up of a Black woman’s interaction with an unidentified Brunswick County Sheriff’s deputy. It seems the woman, Dawn Hilton-Williams, created a facebook post with a video describing the encounter, and characterizing it as a lynching.
“I was just bullied by a racist cop, who threatened to pull me out of the car,” said Hilton-Williams in the 11-minute long Facebook video.
“This is where we got lynched. This is where we got lynched, even in today’s day.”
She goes on to explain that the cop threatened to drag her out of the car, not to kill her, but that in these times, if you’re black, when you get dragged out of a car anything might happen next:
… you get shot or you get Tased, or you get Sandra Blanded
But the cops, perhaps not realizing the consequences, immediately released the body cam video of the traffic stop to defend themselves against charges of racism. Sheriff Brian Roberts explained the thinking behind releasing the video: