The Thin Blue Line In the Sand
"I want you to look me in my eye and say you still stand by the police and what they did.”
Hello thank you as always for being here some quick housekeeping…today I am writing about the police and while you can find probably a 100 instances each day of injustice and brutality and the hands of them, I wouldn’t be writing about cops and protesting specifically without mentioning the police murdering of George Floyd. I sat out blogging/writing about the racial implications and the systemic racism against black folk that is alive and well in our country and instead listened, learned, donated what I could and stayed in my lane to speak up when I thought was appropriate. The fight and efforts aren’t finished. Black Lives Matter today, yesterday and tomorrow.
Anyways, I also think/hope I’m going to start publishing on a more often and consistent basis so if you don’t want to miss a post hit that button below.
‘He drew a line in the sand with the toe of his boot, and said, 'It's as though I told you "I can punch you in the nose, but you can't reach across that line to hit me back.”
We’ve seen over the last few weeks that now, more than ever, cops have bridged the divide between friend and foe. Protector and passerby, yada yada yada…
This recent ‘police persecution complex’ in America puts us into the psyche of today’s militarized police force where a culture of escaping punishment and propaganda designed specifically to make police feel like they are always under attack, has led to an incredibly toxic output where a legion of officers are either afraid or just simply hate the people they are tasked with watching over (or both).
This has manifested recently as something so botched and completely outrageous as a false no-knock raid that murdered Breonna Taylor while she slept, to George Floyd’s killing to something of far less consequence like cops accidentally accusing a burger store of purposely lacing their milkshakes with bleach. Whoops!
The NYPD-Shake Shack debacle is a window into the psyche of American police
On Tuesday night, the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York issued an urgent memo describing how three of their officers had "discovered that a toxic substance, believed to be bleach, had been placed in their beverages" while they were eating at a Shack Shack near a protest in downtown Manhattan. "When NYC police officers cannot even take meal without coming under attack, it is clear that environment in which we work has deteriorated to a critical level," the organization breathlessly wrote, going on to warn its members to "carefully inspect" their food before eating — advice seemingly more fitting for a Roman emperor than a humble officer of the law. Sure enough, several hours later, the head of the NYPD's detective bureau admitted that, following an investigation, "there was no criminality by Shake Shack's employees."
Maybe I got the order wrong, but you get the point…
As we see more bouts of brutality and murders of unarmed black folk, we begin to learn the messaging and the immediate cop solidarity that directly helps officers off the hook from facing any accountability, comes from these police unions that serve as a collective mouthpiece and PR wing for cops when they hurt or murder someone in case the big bad scary citizens/politicians/journalists dare ask why they did something wrong.
How Police-Union Power Helped Increase Abuses
A 2018 University of Oxford study of the hundred largest American cities found that the extent of protections in police contracts was directly and positively correlated with police violence and other abuses against citizens. A 2019 University of Chicago study found that extending collective-bargaining rights to Florida sheriffs’ deputies led to a forty per cent statewide increase in cases of violent misconduct.
This is the leader of one of those NYPD police unions and the edit below shows a perfect parallel of his words vs his police’s actions:
The sheer arrogance and offense that this little squeaky baby took takes, that even in a moment when the country and black communities are hurting so deeply, shows the utter disdain that these police have for their own citizens. The police haven’t only gotten more violent in their physical responses, but also their verbal ones.
As we’ve seen a first in our country’s history that all 50 states had held protests, it’s clear that we have reached a boiling point. And after the police keep getting more negative attention for the murders and killings that have enraged our nation, it’s apparent they have reached a boiling point too.
But you have to realize it wasn’t us who got worse, it’s them.
It was always the police who got worse.
The “Warrior Cop” Is a Toxic Mentality. And a Lucrative Industry
While the “warrior” narrative has existed in law enforcement circles for decades, it has intensified in recent years, driven by the flood of funding and surplus military equipment made available to police departments following the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. There is now a cottage industry of police consultants, which charge departments thousands of dollars to teach tactics more suited for war than civil society.
“Are You Prepared to Kill Somebody?” A Day With One of America’s Most Popular Police Trainers.
As Black Lives Matter has exposed the prevalence of police abuses and the confrontational attitude that often sparks them, Grossman continues to insist that cops are the ones under siege and that they must be more, not less, prepared to use force. “The number of dead cops has exploded like nothing we have ever seen,” he tells the armed citizens in Lakeport. (That is not true: The average annual number of police officers intentionally killed while on duty in the past decade is 40 percent lower than it was in the 1980s.) If emergency medicine and body armor hadn’t improved since the 1970s, Grossman claims, “the number of dead cops would be eight times what it is” today. It’s not clear how he arrived at these figures.
Last summer, after a black man named Philando Castile was shot and killed during a traffic stop outside Minneapolis, it was revealed that two years earlier the officer, Jeronimo Yanez, had attended “The Bulletproof Warrior,” a two-day training taught by Grossman and his colleague Jim Glennon.
This one really needed to be moved to the bottom because my god this is so stupid and small and how was this real in the first place but lol anyways here’s that video of that officer accusing McDonalds of possibly messing with her food (edited appropriately of course):
Anyways here’s my quick theory of why cops keep making up shit at the expense of fast food workers + another link on some other hilarious/insane examples:
One more quick and final point from the article I shared before:
The most cynical view of the situation would be that the police benefit from being the victims, and therefore have no interest in changing their mindset. By portraying themselves as constantly under attack, the force maintains legal leeway when things turn violent. "How much latitude are we expected to grant someone because he says that he was scared?" The New Yorker asked in 2016, after Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin were killed by men who later claimed to have been frightened for their lives. "Like most voluntary descriptions of emotional states, the fear defense is useful because it is opaque. It is built to resist scrutiny." The police's victim mentality, then, isn't just one that leads to needless deaths — it's led the public, and the juries they serve on, to be complicit in them, too.
Anyways, I could talk about big city cops all day here but a little more surprisingly, I started to see plenty of police attention coming out of where I would consider my hometown, Fort Wayne, Indiana.
One thing I can tell you about growing up in Fort Wayne is the police force is particularly bastard-filled and made up of a bunch of yokels who live 45 minutes outside the actual city that are addicted to confrontation and end up harnessing that energy 98% of the time into chasing teenagers off skateboards and whatnot.
It’s the type of place where 4 squad cars pull up to the scene for a routine traffic stop or the mildest house call and it makes you wonder “Jesus Christ, don’t these people have anything better to do? Why are there always so many of you? Shouldn’t you be doing something else?”
So when I heard about them macing + tear gassing children, and beating on protesters while dressed up in their 3XL tactical vests, I was disappointed but not surprised that this is how they harnessed their giant-loser energy but when I learned about their successful efforts to effectively end the BLM protests all together and just outright squashed people’s rights to peacefully gather and protest, I thought something was off…no way those morons pulled off something that required actual thought and planning but if FWPD can do it, who knows where they’ll do this next and ah shit of course it was for a Trump rally as seen in Tulsa yesterday:
Back to Fort Wayne:
And some video for context:
There always has been something specially awful about the way this police force can operate because Fort Wayne serves as this nearly perfect example of cops getting way too much funding because yes technically it’s considered a large city by Indiana standards yet has that sort of sleepy-town feel where not only everybody knows each other’s business but that crime is relatively low for a city of almost 300K.
And of course the police budget makes up for more than 60% of the city budget and that even in times of a pandemic and a crashed economy, the money always keeps flowing for the city PD baby! Take a look at that brand new Police Rescue truck in the video above, if it wasn’t being used to take a direct shit on the very first amendment, I would say haha damn that’s pretty cool I wish I had a job where we could spend money fucking recklessly. Anyways here is some more of Fort Wayne’s finest work.
“I want you to look me in my eye and say that you’re sorry”: Man who lost his eye protesting says he demands a response from the mayor.
"I saw the way they were treating the citizens, and I didn't like it," Brake said. “They started firing tear gas, one hit my right foot, and I began to run away and I turned around to see what was happening behind me, and that's when it hit me in my right eye."
When police deployed tear gas on Saturday, May 30th, a tear gas canister hit him in the face and he lost his eye.
"Really my memory is vague of the actual canister,” Brake said. “I just remember turning around and I remember it hitting me, and me flying back. And that's what plays over and over again in my head, I don't have a full description."
As one author from Indiana famously said, ‘So it goes.’
Anyways Brake wasn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last to lose his eye or eyesight from protesting the police. At least for the police unions and all the bootlicking cop apologists out there…they’ve gotten plenty of practice to bark back and tell you why these acts are justified.
Anyways thanks for making it this far, stay safe, take care, don’t call the cops and I promise I’ll try and come back with something a little more fun next time ;)