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wvParticipantSeems to me, Adolph Reed is just pointing to the idea that there’s two layers of ‘reform’ we can ‘see’ (not see, if we have ideological blinders).
One layer has to do with all the changes in actual police polices, regulations, and discipline reforms that liberals want to see.
The deeper layer though, has to do with Class. Ie, this is more than an ‘police’ problem its a Capitalism Problem. The police are just the tool, Capitalism uses to protect wealthy-privilege, etc. I think Reed is just saying, if we just focus on race, we are always going to be dealing with layer1 and not layer2.
Layer1 is very important, though. Layer2 — the invisible layer — is unlikely to be dealt with.w
vJune 11, 2020 at 8:27 am in reply to: Police v. Demonstrators Protesting Killing of George Floyd #116198wvParticipantNYT:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/arts/television/protests-fictional-cops.html
Critic’s Notebook
The Protests Come for ‘Paw Patrol’A backlash is mounting against depictions of “good cops,” on television and in the street.
It was only a matter of time before the protests came for “Paw Patrol.”
“Paw Patrol” is a children’s cartoon about a squad of canine helpers. It is basically a pretense for placing household pets in a variety of cool trucks. The team includes Marshall, a firefighting Dalmatian; Rubble, a bulldog construction worker; and Chase, a German shepherd who is also a cop. In the world of “Paw Patrol,” Chase is drawn to be a very good boy who barks stuff like “Chase is on the case!” and “All in a police pup’s day!” as he rescues kittens in his tricked-out S.U.V.
But last week, when the show’s official Twitter account put out a bland call for “Black voices to be heard,” commenters came after Chase. “Euthanize the police dog,” they said. “Defund the paw patrol.” “All dogs go to heaven, except the class traitors in the Paw Patrol.”
It’s a joke, but it’s also not. As the protests against racist police violence enter their third week, the charges are mounting against fictional cops, too. Even big-hearted cartoon police dogs — or maybe especially big-hearted cartoon police dogs — are on notice. The effort to publicize police brutality also means banishing the good-cop archetype, which reigns on both television and in viral videos of the protests themselves. “Paw Patrol” seems harmless enough, and that’s the point: The movement rests on understanding that cops do plenty of harm.
The protests arrived in the midst of a pandemic that has alienated Americans from their social ties, family lives and workplaces. New and intense relationships with content have filled the gap, and now our quarantine consumptions are being reviewed with an urgently political eye. The reckoning has come for newspapers, food magazines, Bravo reality shows and police procedurals.
Last week, Tom Scharpling, an executive producer of “Monk,” criticized his own show on Twitter: “If you — as I have — worked on a TV show or movie in which police are portrayed as lovable goofballs, you have contributed to the larger acceptance that cops are implicitly the good guys.” Griffin Newman, an actor who appeared in two episodes of “Blue Bloods” as a detective, donated his $11,000 in earnings to a bail fund, inspiring other actors who have played cops to do the same. LEGO has halted marketing on its “LEGO City Police Station” and “Police Highway Arrest” sets. A&E has pulled its reality show “Live PD” from the schedule. On Tuesday night, “Cops,” the show that branded suspects as “bad boys” and spawned the whole genre of crime reality television, was canceled after 32 seasons.
Cops are not just television stars; they are television’s biggest stars. Crime shows are TV’s most popular genre, now making up more than 60 percent of prime-time drama programming on the big four broadcast networks. The tropes of the genre are so predictable that a whole workplace sitcom, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” is layered atop them. “A police station was a shortcut,” Dan Goor, the show’s co-creator, has said, “because people are very aware of how police television works. You know instantly who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.”
That shortcut now feels like a cheat: After images of a very special episode where Terry Crews is racially profiled were passed around as evidence of responsible police TV, others marked the show as “copaganda.”
Even on television, the good guys are not always so good. In a recent report, the racial justice organization Color of Change assessed depictions of the police across television and found that modern cop shows “make heroes out of people who violate our rights.” Many of them, it argued, show the good guys committing more violations than the bad guys, making police misbehavior feel “relatable, forgivable, acceptable and ultimately good.”
On television, the hero itself is a concept under review. Just a few years ago, at the height of the antihero craze, a prestige drama could seem a little fluffy if its protagonist was not an actual murderer. There is an artistic justification for humanizing bad people and complicating good ones. It’s hard to argue that a show like “Watchmen” (in which a black policewoman brutally beats suspected white supremacist terrorists) or “Unbelievable” (in which two female detectives repeatedly collar the wrong guys) would make for better television if their star cops acted more like German shepherd puppies.
After Inkoo Kang, a critic for The Hollywood Reporter, described “The Wire” as painting police with a “heroic gloss,” Wendell Pierce, who played Detective Bunk Moreland on the show, pushed back. “How can anyone watch ‘The Wire’ and the dysfunction of the police & the war on drugs and say that we were depicted as heroic,” he tweeted. “We demonstrated moral ambiguities and the pathology that leads to the abuses.”
The more salient critique of the crime genre is not how it depicts the police, but just how obsessively it privileges their ambiguities and pathologies over all other players in the criminal justice system — namely, the people cops target as suspects. “As TV viewers we are locked inside a police perspective,” Kathryn VanArendonk wrote recently on Vulture. Color of Change notes that defense attorneys, like Perry Mason and Matlock, “once embodied the character of the American hero,” defending the American people “against the many police officers, prosecutors and judges who jumped to conclusions too quickly and stood as symbols of a deeply flawed system.”
But a sea change led by Dick Wolf’s mammoth “Law & Order” franchise has realigned the crime genre under the perspective of prosecutors and cops. “Our sympathies have generally been with victims,” Warren Leight, the showrunner of “Law & Order: SVU,” said last week on the Hollywood Reporter podcast “TV’s Top 5,” in a conversation about rethinking the show. He added: “Cops behaving illegally, that’s not part of Dick’s brand.”
Cops and Hollywood enjoy a symbiotic relationship, as Alyssa Rosenberg detailed in a Washington Post series in 2016 on policing in popular culture. Cops consult on movies and series, helping mold the characters to their self-conception, and then they take cues from those characters in their own police work.Police officers in Detroit have been spotted wearing the skull insignia of the Marvel antihero the Punisher, and squads in Minnesota have watched Disney’s “Zootopia” as part of their anti-bias training. “LAW & ORDER” has become President Trump’s preferred call-to-arms as the government dispatches police forces and National Guard soldiers against the protesters.
…see link
wvParticipant
wvParticipantAgainst the Grain has some nice podcasts sometimes:https://www.facebook.com/Against-the-Grain-Radio-194529027376
wvParticipantHas Kronky said a word? Has any ‘owner’?
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June 10, 2020 at 7:39 pm in reply to: the one-shot tweets thread (diff'rent stuff, funny angry interesting) #116173wvParticipant
wvParticipantHow about the cops just take a knee for a few minutes, and promise that they will be more careful in the future?
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How bout Jared Goff taking a knee, more often this year.
w
vwvParticipantWe’re one news cycle away from Fox News labeling Elmo’s dad an Antifa terrorist https://t.co/vSr6ORnLQ3
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 10, 2020
wvParticipantA biker gang brutally beat these protesters in Philly today. pic.twitter.com/r1TzXrOpNW
— Morgan J. Freeman (@mjfree) June 5, 2020
wvParticipantOR, at least it would be a good discipline level. If a cop has complaints against him but they are not big-complaints, he has to wear a body-cam. Like a form of probation. Just a thot.
w
vwvParticipantMaybe there should be a law that sez, No-Body-Cam, No Arrest. Ya know.
Take the money the police use on tanks and bazookas and shit,
and invest in body-cams, and make it a requirement for an arrest — everything has to be on camera or its an invalid arrest.w
vwvParticipantWell, of course, this possibility jumped straight to mind when it was revealed that they knew each other, and worked together. Any proof of friction between them, and I would think that would not go well for Chauvin in court.
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It would be interesting to know more about the video, or videos. Why is the whole-entire incident not shown, from beginning to end? And what exactly was going on in the car? And how did he go from the car to on the ground exactly? Maybe i just havent seen the whole video, I dunno.
But if there’s ‘gaps’, the cop is going to argue Floyd was ‘resisting’ of course.
And did the cop know he was on camera? Who had the camera?
Third degree is a slam-dunk, but the battle will be over what exactly was in this cops mind. Oh, and good luck picking a Jury. Who is going to be open-minded on this thing.
w
vwvParticipantI listened to this a couple of days ago while doing yardwork. I need more podcasts to listen to. I just listened to 1619 last week. All six episodes combined are probably shorter than one Rogan. I also re-listened to the Graham Hancock Rogan podcast which is very interesting. They should use that underground digital imaging thingie in the Amazon that you mentioned in the Italy post.
I need more podcasts. Give me recommendations.
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Well, I’m all about plants this summer. Plant Lives Matter.
I got nuthin else.
But if i think of somethin, I’ll pass it on.w
vwvParticipantstatues:https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/colston-has-fallen-whos-next/?
openDemocracyUK
Colston has fallen. Who’s next?The UK has honoured many slavers, plunderers and perpetrators of massacres. Here’s a list of some more candidates for de-plinthing.
ritish history is a story of empire, slavery and plunder. And so it’s not surprising that the statues, street names and buildings in our cities so often commemorate slavers, plunderers and the genocidal.
This weekend, a statue of the slaver Edward Colston in the centre of Bristol was pulled down and thrown into the harbour, symbolically reflecting the thousands of people thrown into the sea from his slave ships when they got sick on the crossing from their kidnap in Africa.
The statue of Colston, though, isn’t unique, or even unusual. Across the UK, many of our most famous buildings, streets and monuments are named after people deeply implicated in the worst crimes of empire. Here is a small sample of some of the most controversial memorials – please add more, from the UK and beyond, in the comments below.
Edinburgh: Henry Dundas….see link
wvParticipantStatue of slave owner Robert Milligan brought down in east London
9 June 2020
wvParticipantstanding rock:https://www.thedailybeast.com/standing-rock-protester-shot-in-face-with-tear-gas-canister-may-go-blind
Standing Rock Protester Shot in Face With Tear Gas Canister May Go Blind
SAVAGEVanessa Dundon and others are suing North Dakota police for the brutal crackdown last month that they say began when they tried to clear the way for ambulances.
June 9, 2020 at 11:51 am in reply to: Police v. Demonstrators Protesting Killing of George Floyd #116107wvParticipantSaw Krystal Ball tweeted about this:
Police are at this journalist’s house right now in Portland, Maine threatening to arrest him for tweeting about cops. Not good. pic.twitter.com/uKxeuQvsyP
— Nathan Bernard (@nathanTbernard) June 9, 2020
wvParticipantHmmmm. I honestly can’t think of one.
Its all poor-people buying drugs.
Poor-people selling drugs.
Poor people taking drugs.
Poor people stealing to get money to buy drugs.There are no good solutions, because the system either
Sends the poor-people to jail/prison.
Or,
The system sends poor-people back out into corporate-capitalism.I’m not being facetious. I have no stories that have a happy-ending.
Oh, and Every reflective person in the system is burned out, btw.
w
v
“Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, ‘I’m going to hang you up and burn you.’ Once you get that F, you’re on fire.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
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“The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
——-“Although crack cocaine had not yet hit the streets when the War on Drugs was declared in 1982, its appearance a few years later created the perfect opportunity for the Reagan administration to build support for its new war. Drug use, once considered a private, public-health matter, was reframed through political rhetoric and media imagery as a grave threat to the national order.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of ColorblindnesswvParticipantunions:https://portside.org/2020-06-07/protests-grow-big-labor-sides-police-unions
labor As Protests grow, Big Labor Sides with Police Unions
The latest in an historically fraught relationship among police, labor and civil rights movement
Labor unions exist to protect workers, but most workers aren’t authorized to use deadly force as part of their jobs.
Police unions have written labor contracts that bar law enforcement agencies across the country from immediately interrogating or firing officers after egregious acts of misconduct.
Leaders of the country’s other labor unions are tiptoeing around the subject as their members join protests in hundreds of U.S. cities this week over the killing of George Floyd. Labor leaders have strongly denounced police officers’ actions in that case and called on lawmakers to address systemic racism. But they’re suggesting that collective bargaining agreements shouldn’t be on the table. They’ve been careful not to blame police unions for the problem, choosing to embrace them instead.
Police union contracts are not normal collective bargaining agreements. Police unions have crafted a complex web of disciplinary rules that critics say makes it impossible to hold police accountable for killing unarmed Black citizens. After a Minneapolis police officer pinned Floyd’s neck to the ground for more than 8 minutes while fellow officers stood by and watched, many want to see these union contract rules reformed or dismantled.
“The short answer is not to disengage and just condemn,” Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO labor federation, said Wednesday on a press call about racial justice. “The answer is to totally re-engage and educate.”
(Editor’s note: The author of this article is a member of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which is affiliated with the Communication Workers of America, a member union of the AFL-CIO.)
Public Integrity reached out to leaders of 10 major unions and labor groups. None were willing to talk about police unions. Trumka, of the AFL-CIO, was too busy to chat. The president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union couldn’t fit a call into his schedule. Teamsters President James Hoffa declined to comment.
Silence from the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, United Auto Workers, Communication Workers of America, Unite Here and the American Federation of Teachers.
Labor leaders briefly talked about police unions in response to a reporter’s question Wednesday. They seemed uncomfortable.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said no union contracts should shield employee misconduct, but that focusing on collective bargaining is a “false choice.”
“I think we have to do something nationally about the demilitarization of policing,” she said.
Joshua Freeman, a labor historian at City University of New York, said he’s not surprised that the labor movement doesn’t want to focus on police unions. It wasn’t until the police killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 that the labor movement began to acknowledge racism in policing, he said. But more existential questions about reforming police unions are still taboo.
“It’s a very delicate subject, it’s rarely discussed openly and out loud,” Freeman said.
The labor movement’s quiet support for police unions comes at a critical moment. News outlets have described how Derek Chauvin, the officer who tackled Floyd, had at least 17 complaints filed against him but never got more than a written reprimand. That has led some criminal justice reform advocates to call for changes that would curtail — or outright abolish — the power of police unions. The labor movement’s silence on the subject so far suggests that it won’t be an ally in that fight.
POLICE UNION TENSION WITH LABOR MOVEMENTPolice unions have a fraught relationship with the wider U.S. labor movement.
Labor historians trace the tension back to the late 1800s, before police unions even existed. City officials would dispatch cops to break up frequent labor strikes, and they often arrested union leaders and beat workers with batons.
“Police were seen as tools for repressing unions,” Freeman said.
The most infamous example is the Haymarket massacre of 1886. Chicago police officers killed a worker, and injured seven others, who were on strike to demand an eight-hour work day.
At the time, only workers in the private sector would organize. It wasn’t until the 1920s when that started to change. Government employees, such as schoolteachers and sanitation workers, began organizing to demand better pay and benefits. Police officers wanted that, too.
The American Federation of Labor, which later would become the AFL-CIO, started letting police into its ranks in 1919. By the 1950s and 60s, police unions were common.
While the power of public-sector unions was growing, so was the civil rights movement, and racial tensions ended up driving a wedge between police unions and organized labor.
Newspapers across the U.S. shocked readers with images of police violence against Black protestors in the South during the 1960s. Instead of siding with police, the labor movement aligned itself with the civil rights movement (though Martin Luther King Jr. would describe that support as “conditional”). For example, the Los Angeles labor council fought for justice for the family of 17-year-old Augustín Salcido, who was shot and killed when a LAPD officer was trying to arrest him for allegedly selling stolen watches. The council immediately put out a statement, according to Jacobin magazine.
“Mexican-American members of our union in the thousands can testify to the beatings, intimidations, shake-downs, uncalled for arrests and terrorism carried on by the police in the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles,” they wrote. The police officer was charged with murder and later acquitted.
That was a rare rebuke of police by labor unions. To this day, the national labor movement works hard to avoid angering police unions.
POST-FERGUSON SHIFTThe police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri., in 2014 of an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, shifted the conversation. Street riots highlighted the strain between Black communities and militarized police.
The AFL-CIO began to talk more openly about racism in the police force. But Trumka, head of the powerful labor federation, still took care not to alienate the police union that represented the police officer, Darren Wilson.
“Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother who works in a grocery store, is our sister, an AFL-CIO union member, and Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown, is a union member, too, and he is our brother,” Trumka said at the time. “Our brother killed our sister’s son and we do not have to wait for the judgment of prosecutors or courts to tell us how terrible this is.”
The AFL-CIO was fielding calls and emails from local union leaders about how to support Black members and take part in the fight for racial justice. So that same year, the AFL-CIO created the Commission on Racial and Economic Justice, to address what the federation called “police-on-black crime,” among other problems facing Black communities.
In 2017, the commission published a report with a long list of recommendations for unions, such as urging lawmakers to mandate racial bias training for cops and to abolish the for-profit prison system. Yet the report barely mentioned the role of police unions in the racial justice movement, merely noting that “police unions resent when outsiders question their judgment or actions in the line of duty.” The report suggested that local unions and labor councils should host forums between police unions and community members.
Nowhere did the report mention how police union contracts typically include language to hide complaints against police officers from the public. It didn’t describe the arbitration clauses that often force police departments to rehire fire, misbehaving cops. Or how police unions have successfully lobbied for state laws granting police officers far more job security than the average U.S. worker.
“These are armed, trained people who are totally not accountable to the community they are policing,” said Sam Mitrani, a labor historian at College of DuPage in Ilinois.
Labor leaders are probably hesitant to take on police unions because many of them represent law enforcement officers through their local affiliates. SEIU, CWA and AFSCME all do. The AFL-CIO also represents one of the largest police unions, the International Union of Police Associations, which has more than 15,000 members.
Tensions between the IUPA and the broader labor movement spilled into the public after the police choking of an unarmed Black man named Eric Garner in New York City.
Trumka and other national union leaders co-signed an open letter to then President Barack Obama regarding police reform and the “long list of black men and boys who have died under eerily similar circumstances.”
Sam Cabral, president of the IUPA (which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO), was not happy about it.
“In the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the death of Eric Garner in New York, the International Union of Police Associations withheld comment until facts were known,” wrote its president, Sam Cabral, according to Al Jazeera. “We wish the administration as well as the president of the AFL-CIO had been as thoughtful. I believe that anyone making pronouncements before knowing the facts has an agenda, not a position.”
Two local union affiliates in California urged the AFL-CIO to kick the IUPA out of the federation. That didn’t happen.
In December, Public Integrity reported that IUPA’s charitable arm, which says it raises money to help the families of police officers killed or injured in the line of duty, spends most of its money on telemarketing services. IUPA’s charitable arm also claimed to be supported by several high-profile corporations — claims that Public Integrity in January revealed to be untrue.
Now, after Floyd’s death, Trumka is careful not to rile up the IUPA, even as he calls for the president of the local police union in Minneapolis to step down. (That union is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO.) And so far, the IUPA has said nothing about Floyd’s death or the officer who killed him.
Public Integrity reached out to the IUPA and other major police unions, such as the Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Benevolent Association. None of them responded.
Our mission is to protect democracy and inspire change using investigative reporting that exposes betrayals of the public trust by powerful interests.
wvParticipantTrump numbers down about seven percent. Trump now 14 points behind Biden.
Can we trust polls when it comes to Trump?wvParticipantwvParticipantDemocrats doing their bit to make the country better.
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Man o Man. They must have crunched the algebra before they all did that.
They are really counting on Black Voters now.w
vwvParticipantGoogle Maps updated.
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LoL.
Someday there will be statues of Trump, you know. In the South, i would think.
w
vJune 8, 2020 at 7:03 am in reply to: defunding the police … & other legislative responses to the protests #116048wvParticipantI love the fact that defunding is on the table in some places. Not because i think it will happen, but because its a nice card to play. The Unions might be willing to budge a little more on reforms, if they think the alternative might be defunding.
“Disbanding” police forces make no sense to me, anymore than completely eliminating prisons. Rapists need to be arrested, and prisons are needed for some people. I dont believe in a human utopia.
Maybe this will also push more states towards legalizing marijuana. Police should be doing less bullshit.
w
vJune 8, 2020 at 6:52 am in reply to: BT & others–simple things on the “spam” issue–mods please read #116046wvParticipantJust curious. Why did the spam-thing start doing this? It didnt used to.
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vwvParticipantwinston:https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/black-lives-matter-protest-london-winston-churchill-statue-a4462086.html
The memorial to Winston Churchill in Westminster has been defaced during London’s Black Lives Matter protests.Demonstrators scrawled “was a racist” on the statue of the wartime British Prime Minister in Parliament Square this afternoon as thousands descended on London for another protest over George Floyd’s death.
Activists surrounded the monument and jeered “Churchill was a racist”, despite others intervening to protect it from further defacement.
June 7, 2020 at 10:37 pm in reply to: Police v. Demonstrators Protesting Killing of George Floyd #116025wvParticipantwvParticipantwvParticipant…Still wish he would die though.
Because he didn’t “turn on” Trump; he just disagrees with him on the way he’s handling this one particular issue. Robertson is still fully on board the Trump train, and will throw his full support behind his re-election.
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Yeah, well when he dies he gets to go straight to Heaven. Where are YOU gonna go when you die, Mr Atheist.
Oh, and be careful of gay San Franciscans with Rings.
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v
wvParticipantI don’t get why they think it can’t be both. Yes Churchill was a great war leader, but he was also an appallingly racist man, and his policies reflected it.
Sometimes some people forget that the minute the war was over, the Brits dumped him.
From the wiki:
The final result of the [1945 post-war] election showed Labour to have won a landslide victory, making a net gain of 239 seats and winning 47.7%, thus allowing Attlee to be appointed Prime Minister. For the Conservatives, the Labour victory was a shock, as they suffered a net loss of 189 seats despite winning 36.2% of the vote, having campaigned on the mistaken belief that Churchill would win on his post-wartime status. The election was the first in which Labour won a majority, and allowed Attlee to begin implementing the party’s postwar reforms for the country. The national swing to their party from the Conservatives of 10.7% is the largest ever seen in a general election within the United Kingdom.
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Agree, he was both. But the media dont want to hear about both. Only half.
Like the Flag. Ya know, like it can mean Imperialism, Ethnic Cleansing, Wage-Slavery…and Pie.
w
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