Just Three Shooting…Um…Shopping Days Until Christmas

I’ve been below the radar and nearly off the grid for the last week.  For what it’s worth, I’m trying to find a way to budget my time in such a way that I can still include the nearly two hours required each day to write this blog, and I’m not quite there yet.  It would help if there could somehow be twenty-six hours each day, but even at that, I’d probably just fall asleep in my recliner an hour earlier and sleep an hour later.  But enough about me.  Site statistics show a total of two page views today, and if I’m successful, I can at least double that within the next five or six hundred words.

My youngest son, Zach, just arrived home from New York yesterday.  He lives in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn and he told me that the site of the murders of two NYPD cops was just a short half mile bike ride from his brownstone.  He and a friend rode by and saw an ocean of police vehicles with strobe lights flashing and yellow tape strung far and wide even a day after the incident.  Like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers and hundreds of thousands of other Americans, Zach was part of the peaceful protests against the most recent wave of police brutality (Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, etc.)  According to Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, and a host of FOX News talking heads, the blame for the murders of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos can be laid squarely at the feet of President Obama, Mayor Bill deBlasio, and pretty much anyone else who spoke out against the sanctioned murders of so many unarmed black men and boys.  At the head of this chorus of finger-pointers was Patrick Lynch, the president of the NYC Policeman’s Benevolent Association.  To translate and paraphrase the sentiments of Lynch regarding the police, “You’re either with us or you’re against us”.

That has been the stance of police across the country since these protests began.  A cop in Mishawaka, Indiana, who printed and distributed hundreds of “Breathe Easy, Don’t Break The Law” t-shirts, is emblematic of the police (and conservative) mindset.  They feel the police are blameless, that there is no racism or profiling involved, and that if every citizen obeyed every law and demonstrated instant obedience to every police command, no one would ever need to be hurt.  For instance, if Eric Garner simply hadn’t committed the heinous offense of selling loose cigarettes on a street corner, and if he had meekly offered his wrists to be cuffed the moment officer Daniel Pantaleo told him to do so, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this today.  And if Tamir Rice, a twelve year-old boy, had only raised his hands and laid prone on the grass…within the less than two seconds of the Cleveland cop diving out of his police cruiser and firing the fatal shots, no one would have anything about which to protest.

Look, the murder of those two NYPD officers whose only crime was wearing the uniform and doing their job is appalling, but it is no more or less appalling than the murders of Brown, Rice, Garner, and hundreds of others whose deaths never made the news.  But while these murders are shocking, they are in no way surprising.  I’ve said this before: There is a huge well of frustration and anger in this country, and the basis is largely income disparity paired with racism.  What is surprising to me is that the frustration and anger haven’t yet boiled into something even more toxic.  The protests of the last few weeks have, in fact, been very restrained, very well-informed, and very peaceful…but there is no reason to believe they will forever remain acts of passive resistance.

There is a perception among a segment of the population, mostly young black men, that their every action, from simply walking down the street wearing a certain kind of clothing to petty crimes like shoplifting, can be treated as a capital offense by the police without any repercussions whatsoever for the cop who carries out the summary execution.  And there is another segment of the population, mainly the police, who see the world in very sharply defined camps of “us” and “them”.  Right now, these two segments are basically at war.  The murders of the two NYPD street cops is only going to add fuel to the fire.  There will undoubtedly be more of the same in other cities, and the police response, rather than restraint, will be justifiable paranoia, with even more black men being gunned down on the slimmest of pretexts.

I don’t have an answer for any of this.  In a perfect world, we’d simply get rid of the means of all these murders, the guns.  But that has the same chance of happening as the Bears winning the Superbowl, the Cubs the World Series, and me being named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.  So we’ll have to deal with the world as it is.  As Bad Santa might say, “Merry freaking Christmas.”

BW

 

Good Guys With Guns, Bad Guys With Guns, And More Inductees To The Cult Of Shamelessness

I wanted to write something light and frothy today, something with a swirl of whipped cream and caramel and cinnamon on top, but I just can’t do it.  I want to run down the street shouting, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” and “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”  I should be joining the protesters in the streets, carrying truth to power, but truth be told, I’m not a protest-in-the-streets kind of guy.  I have an aversion to crowds and a particular distaste for tear gas, and more to the point, I have no confidence whatsoever that some cop in full battle rattle won’t take the opportunity to turn me into a modern-day martyr.  Cowardly?  Perhaps, but I also truly hope that the axiom about the pen being mightier than the sword has some validity even in the age of armored troop carriers and weapons capable of firing 750 rounds per minute.  And as far as courage goes, if the NSA and CIA and FBI don’t have all of my columns stored on a server somewhere, they’re more inept than even I ever imagined.  I anticipate that if they ever start loading those cattle cars and filling those interment camps the yahoos in camo in Idaho are so worried about, I’ll be among the first detainees.  I’ll just wait for that to be my badge of honor.  And I’ll keep shouting from my very low and poorly attended soapbox here in cyberspace, even if it amounts to little more than pounding my head on a completely uncaring and totally immovable brick wall.

Has anyone else been having particularly intense dreams of late?  I have, and while it may simply be a product of too much spicy food consumed too near to my early bedtime, it also makes me wonder about a sixth sense, a sense that something is about to blow.  It’s hard to not look around and feel that something in the world has become unhinged, that the standards of normality are stressed to the limit.  Look, it seems like a small thing, but the Bill Cosby scandal alone is emblematic of a larger disquietude.  Cosby being a rapist is like finding out that Santa is a cat burglar.  Both in a sense are fictional characters who represent attributes we admire, like family, like love, like compassion, like generosity…and to find out that our fantasies are built on stuff no more substantial than gossamer clouds is a shock. What the hell is left to believe in?

In Pennsylvania, we’ve got an ex-Marine who guns down his ex-wife and then takes the time and the effort to go to two more residences to kill five more of her family.  This kind of thing pretty much blows to hell the whole NRA argument of “a good guy with a gun”.  All these fucking so-called good guys tend to kill a lot more wives and children and rivals and bar brawlers than they do invading criminals in their homes.  And let’s be clear on another thing: there’s a hell of a lot of violence involving veterans and cops and other guys who carry a gun for a living.  There’s no way you can send a teenager to a place like Iraq and urge him to kill a whole bunch of people and watch them die and then have him come home and go on with a peaceful suburban existence.  So many of these guys come back irretrievably damaged, and so many of them were angry and violent to begin with, we’ve created a whole generation of potential time-bombs.  And don’t even get me started about the number of police officers with anger-management issues, fascist tendencies, and just generally nasty-assed attitudes.  Case in point: Jeffrey Follmer, president of the Cleveland Police Union, was incensed that Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hopkins had worn a t-shirt reading “Justice For Tamir Rice and John Crawford” in pre-game warm-ups, and had the temerity to demand an apology from the player, which he refused to give.  Both black youths were killed by the Cleveland police while carrying toy guns.  Follmer goes on to arrogantly add, “How about this? Listen to police officers commands, listen to what we tell you, and just stop. I think the nation needs to realize that when we tell you to do something, do it, and if you’re wrong you’re wrong, and if you’re right, then the courts will figure it out.”  By the way, if you watch the tape, Tamir Rice had less than two seconds to comply with whatever command the cop gave while emerging from his cruiser with his service weapon extended…before he fired that weapon into the 12 year-old’s stomach, killing him.  Ask Tamir and ask Eric Garner.  According to Jeffrey Follmer and most of the rest of the cops in this country, failure to instantly comply with any police officer is now a capital offense, especially if you happen to be male, young, and of any color other than pasty white.

In Australia, of all places, you’ve got a self-styled sheik and ISIS wannabe taking over a dozen hostages in a Sydney cafe.  Man Haran Monis was armed with a gun, which is thankfully a rarity in Australia, where gun ownership is severely restricted.  Monis’ siege was ended by an Australian SWAT team, but at the expense of two hostage’s lives, along with the inevitable killing of the hostage-taker.  The number of these guys who are taken alive can be counted on your fingers and toes, and it’s unlikely you’ll need to remove your shoes.  In Pakistan, a reported six to eight heavily armed Taliban guerrillas invaded a military school and killed over 120 children and teenagers before Pakistani troops violently ended the incident.

Worst of all, you can no longer tell the good guys from the bad guys without a program.  When a sitcom icon is revealed a deviant and a president is convicted in absentia as a war criminal, you’ve got a problem.  When you’ve got a justice on the US Supreme Court who says there’s nothing in the constitution banning the use of torture, indicating that the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause applies only to prisoners officially arrested for a crime, you begin to believe that Torquemada has been reincarnated and is wearing a new judicial robe.  But do you know what really worries me?  It’s that there are probably fifty or a hundred million people in this country who think that torture isn’t so bad and that police have every right to shoot down anyone they think deserves shooting and that it’s the rest of us who are living in some sort of left-wing delusional fairyland.  Check out Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who’s now found her niche unsurprisingly on FOX News, who uses the Australian hostage crisis as a platform to defend the CIA’s use of torture…as if we just torture enough of the right people, we can prevent evil.  Yep, that’s the argument…torture prevents evil.  George Orwell is smiling somewhere.

BW

P.S. I couldn’t find a good place to link it, but if you have another ten minutes and you’ve already taken your blood pressure meds, you ought to read

American Torture — Past, Present, and… Future?

 

 

Flash: No Young Unarmed Black Men Shot And Killed By Police Today

But the day’s not over, and to be fair, I haven’t reviewed the news feeds from every major metropolitan area in the country, so I might be missing something.  For the last few weeks, it’s seemed you can’t turn on your TV, radio, or laptop without seeing another story of another kid gunned down somewhere by a policeman “just doing his job”. Here’s the really sad part: None of this is really news.  Not the black teens and pre-teens being brutalized, shot, choked, and otherwise dispatched by bullies in blue, and not the prosecutors, commissions, and grand juries who have a chronic “move along, nothing to see here” attitude about holding the cops accountable for their actions.

Richard Pryor was well before his time both in his comedy and in his social commentary.  In a stand-up routine in 1979, Pryor talked about the police proclivity for “killin’ niggas”, both with their magnums and with a little something called a “chokehold”.  Pryor described it thusly: “Two grab your legs and one grabs your head, and SNAP…hey, check the manual and see if it’s ok to break a nigga…yep, it’s right here.”  And please don’t start with me about the n-word.  I’m quoting Pryor, and nothing he says is anywhere near as offensive as the practice he’s describing, a practice that’s gone on not just for ten months or ten years or even fifty years, but dates back to the 19th century and the KKK, and the centuries prior to that when blacks weren’t real people but real property.  Back then if you “broke” a black man, your main regret was that you couldn’t return him at the slave auction for a refund. Aside from all that, just take another look at the video of Eric Garner’s death and see if it doesn’t conform exactly to Richard Pryor’s prescient description in 1979.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.

If Richard Pryor struck precisely the right tone in his comedy routine, the members of the NYPD are virtually tone-deaf in their response to the Eric Garner killing.  Rank and file cops in NYC feel that they’ve been unfairly demonized in the Eric Garner incident.  They claim that Garner was “overweight and in poor health” and that that somehow contributed to his own death…you know, the one that occurred when Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold that has long been banned by the NYPD, and he and half a dozen officers dropped him to the pavement while Garner repeatedly pleaded that he couldn’t breath.  The cops go on to point out that if he was saying he couldn’t breath, he was clearly breathing…which completely ignores that Garner must have been accurate in his pleas, since he subsequently stopped breathing…forever.  By the way, if you’re wondering what ever became of the video of the brave gentlemen of the police force performing CPR on their breathless prisoner, you’ve got a long wait, because they never attempted to revive Garner.  They left that task for the paramedics, who arrived just in time to confirm that the prisoner was dead.

In a sad reprise of the common lament heard all too often in Nuremberg, the NYPD cops are claiming they were just following orders, abiding by a policy of making “quality of life” arrests on minor non-violent criminals so as to maintain order on the streets.  They say Garner would still be alive today had he not “resisted arrest”…which roughly translates into “he didn’t immediately wet his pants and lay prone on the ground” when officers tried to arrest him for the dangerous crime of selling cigarettes on the sidewalk.  At least Garner was given more of a chance to instantly comply with police orders than Tamir Rice, the 12 year-old gunned down in Cleveland.  Again, in a case of “Who are you going to believe, me…or your lying eyes?” the video shows Rice being shot immediately as the police car speeds onto the grass and an officer emerges, gun out in both hands…and Rice goes down.  It’s really hard to accept the police account of Rice being told to drop his weapon and being shot when he reached for his waistband…especially when the 911 operator had been told by the caller that the suspect in the park probably had a “toy gun”.  I suppose that little piece of essential information wasn’t relayed to the responding officers nearly as quickly as Darren Wilson got the heads-up on the convenience store robbery.

If you’re waiting to see if maybe there will still be some modicum of justice in the Tamir Rice case, don’t hold your breath.  In a recent interview with a couple of civil rights lawyers, Sam Stein of Huffington Post heard that police in these cases don’t “more often than not” fail to be indicted, but it’s more like “never“.  Jason Cherkis of HuffPo summed it up best: Police “are the Harlem Globetrotters.  They never lose.”  I guess that would make the rest of us the Washington Generals.

BW

 

To Serve And Protect…Who?

Eric Garner should not be dead.  He shouldn’t even be arrested, in custody, or have had anything to do with the NYPD.  Much has been made of his murder, clearly depicted on a video with a clearly audible soundtrack, at the hands of half a dozen NYC police officers, but not as much has been made of why the police surrounded him in the first place.  Garner didn’t have a gun or a knife.  He wasn’t fleeing after robbing a liquor store or grabbing an old lady’s purse.  He wasn’t suspected of spousal abuse or pedophilia or drugging and raping a series of women (if you have enough money and fame, you can always get a pass from the police, even if you’re black).  So why did police approach Garner in the first place?  Why was he considered a danger to the public safety?  Let’s let Eric Garner tell us himself.  Here are his last words on earth, from the video: “Get away [garbled] … for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today. Why would you…? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me (garbled) Selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. please please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

Eric Garner’s capital offense was selling loose cigarettes on a sidewalk near the Staten Island Ferry terminal.  That and being a large black man.  Garner is not the exception.  He’s the rule.  Police routinely harass people of color.  It’s been documented a thousand different ways.  Before it was recently discontinued, the NYPD had a “stop and frisk” policy.  They were allowed to stop anyone on the street and demand that they submit to a body search, even if that person was not a suspect in any crime.  The police had complete arbitrary authority to choose their victims based on any criteria they deemed appropriate…and you can bet your 401K and your house in the Hamptons that the main criteria were black, hispanic, and poor…not necessarily in that order.  It exceeds any standard of credulity that Garner was doing anything that should have attracted police attention.  They simply rousted him because he was black and imposing and because they could, and then when he challenged their authority, they reacted exactly like the schoolyard bullies most of them are…they showed Eric Garner who was boss, and now he’s dead.

That racism is alive and well in America and that it has a secure home in police departments from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, is now beyond question.  Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice bear silent witness to that ugly truth.  But it’s not just jackbooted stormtroopers masquerading as peace officers who are to blame.  Think of those grand juries in Missouri and New York.  Those were just a dozen citizens whose identities we’ll never know, who decided that the lives of Garner and Brown didn’t mean as much as maintaining the yoke of police power.  There is little question that the prosecutors in both cases got exactly what they wanted, which was a “no bill” against the killer cops, but that result still depended on the complicity of the jurors.  Irrespective of what evidence was presented or how it was portrayed, especially in the Garner case, it is completely beyond comprehension how a dozen “regular” people could watch the tape of an unarmed and unthreatening man being put in a choke hold, swarmed by half a dozen police, dragged to the ground, and killed as he was begging for his life…and come to the conclusion that absolutely no crime whatsoever had been committed (except of course for the guy who videoed the cops at work, who was arrested and indicted).

It’s not just those grand jurors who bear a portion of the blame.  In the sense that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, we all bear some blame in what is becoming a national travesty of justice.  St. Louis prosecutor Robert McCullough, known for protecting bad cops throughout his career, is an elected official…the voters of St. Louis county chose him, and the same can be said of the prosecutor in NYC.  In recent years, the Supreme Court has made decision after decision favoring police powers over individual liberty.  If it was up to this Supreme Court instead of the Warren Court, it’s unlikely that the Miranda warnings ever would have been mandated.  You do NOT have the right to remain silent (and we have the right to beat a confession out of you if we know you’re guilty…)  We, as a people, elect the officials who make it possible for our own rights and liberties to be subjugated, abrogated, and ignored on a daily basis.  Every time someone pees in a container before a witness in order to keep his or her job, it’s another admission that we don’t take our own Constitution very seriously.  Every time the NSA reads our email or records our phone conversation or uses facial recognition to identify us on a public street, we’re telling the state, “Go ahead and be a police state.  I’d rather be a little safer than a lot more free.” Beyond that, every time we elect another official who stands four square against things like the minimum wage, affordable health care, and equitable taxes, we’re supporting the unconscionable wealth gap in our society, a society where the top one per cent hold over fifty percent of the wealth and the bottom fifty percent live every day from hand to mouth.

It’s that situation, even more than the plague of racism, that is the engine driving the police state.  People are getting angry.  The last time this sort of egregious wealth gap was the norm, it was in France during the reign of Louis XV, and the next thing you saw was a lot of aristocratic heads rolling at the foot of the Bastille.  So when you see buildings aflame in Ferguson and freeways blocked in New York, and the streets filled with protesters who are, for the moment, peaceful, in a dozen other cities, you know there’s a lot of anger simmering.  I, for one, wonder what will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

BW