seattle:https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/11/seattle_activists_create_autonomous_zone_near
Seattle Activists Create Autonomous Zone Near Abandoned Police Precinct After Days of State Violence
Web Exclusive, June 11, 2020

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is_Democracy Now!_, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Protesters in Seattle, Washington, have taken over several city blocks after a protracted standoff with the police force there, shutting down a police precinct, declaring part of the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood as an autonomous zone, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. A banner on the perimeter of the area reads, “This space is now property of the Seattle people.” Activists took the area after a week of rising tension over the police killing of George Floyd, as police responded with tear gas and force, prompting calls for the resignation of Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan.

Citizen journalist Omari Salisbury live-streamed Seattle police using pepper spray, tear gas and flashbang grenades on demonstrators and reporters, like himself.

OMARI SALISBURY: There’s the spray. There’s the spray. There’s the spray. Now you saw them now. It’s on. East Precinct, they’re losing control. State police are trying to open the barricade. They’re putting the pepper spray in the air. Share the street! Share the street! Share the street! Share the street! This [bleep]! God [bleep], they got me! You [bleep]!

AMY GOODMAN: Facing mounting criticism for its militarized response, the Seattle Police Department abandoned its Capitol Hill precinct this week.

Last night, President Trump tweeted, quote, “Radical Left Governor @JayInslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before. Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stooped IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!” President Trump tweeted, then said, “Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle, run by Radical Left Democrats, of course. LAW & ORDER!” Trump tweeted.

The Seattle mayor, Jenny Durkan, responded by tweeting, quote, “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker. #BlackLivesMatter.” Congressmember Pramila Jayapal tweeted, “Don’t you have a bunker to be in?” She was referencing Trump’s visit to the White House underground bunker when mass protests first broke out in late May. Trump has insisted he went to the bunker for an inspection, a claim his own attorney general contradicts. William Barr has said the move was to protect Trump from the protesters.

Well, for more, we’re going to Seattle to speak with Omari Salisbury, who’s been covering the protests in Seattle since they started, on Twitter and for his website, Converge Media….see link

NYT: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

We’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

OR, 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.

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Zooey wrote:

Well, 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.

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statues: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

standing 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
SAVAGE

Vanessa 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.

Hmmmm. 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.

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“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
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“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 Colorblindness