Defund The Bullies

We all know them, the school bully or you might even have a bully at your workplace, and if you don't know such a person in your life, you've seen them depicted in movies; who doesn't know Biff from the Back to the Future films?

If America is a school, its inhabitants the students, then the police force is most certainly the school bully. Here's the definition of a bully: "a person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable." Since the police are allowed to carry a gun and have a permit to use it, I guess they see most citizens as vulnerable. We've seen them bullying around the population they're supposed to "protect and serve" during the protests that started with the brutal murder of George Floyd, and they've revealed themselves as the main instigators of violence during those many protests. The Bully in Chief has done nothing to remedy this situation; Trump has in fact done the exact opposite by publicly calling for them to stamp down even harder on the citizens who just want to exercise their right to free speech. As a publicity stunt to further emphasize this hard-line stance against the protesters he organized a photo-shoot in front of a church in Washington; in order to clear a path for the bully, the police attacked protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas. Did you know that the Geneva Convention bans the use of tear gas from war? Despite its illegality in war, police use tear gas to control riots and disperse crowds all over the world, but none so much and so frequently as the American police...

Well, it is considered a less-lethal weapon when it's used outdoors. In general, it could be lethal. In fact, there are incidents where people were killed by these canisters. The problem with tear gas is that it's also an indiscriminate weapon. If you think about the way that it's being deployed, it doesn't really distinguish between young people and elderly, the healthy and the sick, people who are peaceful protesters or those who are using violence. But the idea is that this has become the first trigger — the first thing that law enforcement would use — as if it is going to be the way to de-escalate and end the protest. Most of the time, it's really used to suppress protest and that's really one of the fundamental problems with it.
_{source: The World - July 31, 2019}

I would encourage you to read the entire article that the quote above's taken from. And then watch the below linked video; it's about the aftermath of the more recent shooting of Jacob Blake, another black man who got shot in the back 7 times by a police officer while he was unarmed and returning to his car where his children were waiting for him. Of course this was followed by new protests in the city where it happened, Kenosha. The Kenosha police apparently thought it was fitting for this occasion to return to the good old days of slavery and join forces with white militia to suppress the protests. This has resulted in a 17 year old child shooting several protesters, killing two of them; this boy was able to walk by the police after the shooting without being arrested....

The shooter has been arrested eventually and is in custody now awaiting judgement. But it should be clear by now that America has a giant policing problem, and a giant systemic racism problem as well. In fact, America's police force is historically intimately linked to slavery and racism. American law enforcement is rooted in slavery, something I've written about extensively 3 months ago here: Corporate Police And Slavery. Unfortunately, the school bully never wants to listen to reason, the school bully always thinks he knows best, so American law enforcement agencies are not willing to reckon with this past. Another country with a very troubling history of racism is Germany; contrary to America, Germany demands from their police force that they study in great detail their racist past. They also demand that their police officers have a 4 year college degree, which makes them much more capable of deescalating potentially violent circumstances with just words. This is why I share with you the below linked video today; 70% of American police don't even have a college degree... I guess many of them really are as dumb as they act...

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