The widespread protests against police brutality have revealed clearly what some of us have known all along, that Trump is a paper tiger. After all his bombast demanding that governors use force to crush the demonstrations and that he would send in US troops if they did not, what has happened is that the protestors have largely ignored his threats and continue to demonstrate even in front of the White House and ignoring the curfew. The protests have been largely peaceful and when they were not, much of the violence was caused when police used force to attack demonstrators, as seen in numerous videos captured by bystanders.
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If there is one group that Trump must have thought would always be in his corner, it must be the National Football League. It is essentially a cartel consisting of 32 multimillionaire or billionaire owners of teams, some of whom are personal friends of his, who have no scruples about squeezing money for luxury stadiums and tax breaks from revenue-starved cities by threatening to move their teams elsewhere if they are not bought off. These owners are also almost all white and the football players, who are their employees, are largely black and the idea of white people in charge of black people must appeal to Trump and his fellow racists. Furthermore, the violence in football would appeal to soft, wimpy, bullies like Trump who can pretend to be tough by identifying with the players.
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In an earlier post on the outrageous levels of police brutality in the US, I said that it was not necessary to paint every police officer as a menace because of all these killings, and that all it took was for as few as 10% of the officers to be sociopaths for these abuses to be a regular feature. I just plucked that 10% figure out of thin air but later got curious about whether that was a reasonable estimate and decided to dig deeper.

Because of the highly local nature of US policing, it is not easy to get a figure for the total number of police officers all over the country but this blog says that “In 2008, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 765,246 full-time police officers in the United States — roughly 251 police per 100,000 residents.” Given that there are about 18,000 police departments, that averages out to over 40 police per department, with a wide range depending on the size of the city.
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You would think that with the recent events following the murder of George Floyd, police in the US would be more cautious, at least for a while, about using deadly force. You would be wrong, because in the US, the culture of the police shooting first for the slightest reason is so strong as to be almost an instinct. Look at what happened yesterday in Vallejo, CA.

Police in northern California fatally shot an unarmed 22-year-old who was on his knees with his hands up outside a Walgreens store while responding to a call of alleged looting, officials said.

An officer in the city of Vallejo was inside his car when he shot Sean Monterrosa on Monday night amid local and national protests against police brutality. Police said an officer mistakenly believed Monterrosa had a gun, but later determined he had a hammer in his pocket.
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The video of the NYPD police cruisers running over demonstrators has been viewed over 30 million times. That video only reinforced an image of a police department that has long engaged in lawless behavior with impunity.

Though that sentiment applies nationwide, Adams believes New York stands out as having a “horrible history of police brutality”. It was the NYPD that set the tone, she said, when Daniel Pantaleo, the officer implicated in the 2014 death by chokehold of Eric Garner in Staten Island, avoided prosecution.

“When nothing happened to the police officers who were responsible for the death of Eric Garner, New York set the blueprint for what happened to George Floyd,” she said. “There’s no penalty, no consequence, so it’s OK.”

Adams’s framing of the Garner killing could equally be applied to a long string of notorious episodes of police misconduct that preceded it. In 1997, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was handcuffed by an NYPD officer and sexually assaulted with a broken broomstick.

Two years later, Amadou Diallo was shot near his home in a hail of 41 bullets after officers mistook his wallet for a gun. In an echo of that event, an unarmed Sean Bell was shot 50 times in Queens on the morning of his wedding in 2006 – it took six years for the NYPD detective who opened the fusillade to be chucked off the force while nobody has ever been convicted of any crime.
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