Policing the Police

The police kill with impunity everyday. The very fact that the jury convicted on anything was to some degree an improvement. This was my first reaction to the announcement in the trial of the murderer of Oscar Grant. I had seen the video of the murder when it made the viral scene and added my disgust to the electronic realm and went about my business. It gets to the point that I throw up my hands in disgust. We accept tyranny and call it security. We create wage slavery and call it freedom. When we demand that the rich pay their taxes we are called tyrants. It is a crazy Orwellian world when billionaires buy elections and call it populism.
The reaction from the family was understandable anger. They have a very good lawyer and will get a huge chunk of cash from the city and from BART. It will not ease their pain much and it will further damage the poverty stricken folks in a blighted city. The sad part is that it will do little to help with the problems.
The Jury struck what I am sure they thought was a compromise. The cop was a total fuck-up and the jury wanted to let him go but they were afraid of a riot. The news media that is totally vested in the scary black man trope so they repeated the same video of a shoe store being broken into and robed over and over while they talked about looting. During the hour and a half that I flipped around the news coverage I saw it dozens of times. It was also the dominant feature commented on in my “twitter verse“. My sample size is small only three folks out of 233 commented on the subject but the one retweeted a rather disturbing tweet by a self described christian that was pretty much a long stream of the N word over and over.
Perspective tends to color perception and those folks that step over and around the poor folks in the transit stations fear them. For them the cop was just moving along the “bums” and that is not their affair. It is the same reasoning that has Republicans voting against extending unemployment benefits for the long term unemployed in a recession caused by the banks. Poor people are lazy drug addicts and should pull themselves up and get a job. It feeds back to the welfare queen urban myth started under Ron the Chimp Wrangler.
The people rioting in the Oakland footlocker could have been reacting to the fact that Lebron James chose not to come and play for the Warriors. My theory explains as much as their trope. Angry people get together and shit gets destroyed, it’s axiomatic. Let’s just not look at why they were there in the first place. Never examine the repression. Why was the cop thinking it was ok to torture this guy?
I am sure that my own perspective drew my eye to the multiple instances during the coverage that showed police running up to an unassuming citizen grab them and throw them to the ground and beat them. The most egregious were shown about 10 minutes into the cbs newscast at 10pm.
Here is my problem with the perception. There was no reason to taze this guy in the first place. This cop and his bully partner went out of their way to push around a poor kid. When the poor kid didn’t grovel properly the beat him up and planned on throwing him in jail for the crime of being poor. The jerk had him down and his excuse for killing him was that he screwed up when all he meant to do was torture him. This poor piece of human detritus had dared to talk back to his betters and needed to be made an example of. The jury assumed that the pig felt horrible about his mistake but it was just a mistake.

If some cops got spit on and attacked with rocks and bottles in Oakland they have themselves to blame. There are no good cops as long as they lie every time they murder someone. If the pigs want respect they can go through the news video from last night and identify every one of their number striking a blow against an unarmed civilian and send them to trial. You can bet they will scour the video to try and arrest the shoe thieves. As long as the police feel they have the right to beat citizens I will call them Pigs and show them the contempt they have earned. If there were any good cops they would already be doing this. The burden of proof is on the government to justify the action it has taken not on the citizen freely exercising their right to assemble.
Now there will be some bullshit DOJ double jeopardy civil rights violation horse shit investigation to placate the rabble. Never fix the solution just try to bullshit the outcome. If the rule of law meant anything the DoJ would be embarrassed to look at civil rights violations conducted by anyone if they are going to let crimes against humanity go. The problem stems from an unwillingness to clean up corrupt cops.
Perhaps if we fired all the assholes there wouldn’t be enough people to take the job. I have no desire to be a pig but if they weren’t pigs I might think about it. I was able to serve honorably in the military despite my contempt for the military industrial complex because it does for the most part operate from a position of honor. The prison industrial complex is a powerful lobby and because the 1% wants the populace afraid they have the Overton Window right were they want it.