Tag Archives: police force

Police unions or Black lives: what kind of Democratic Party will this be?

Trigger warning: anti-Black racism, police violence, gun violence mention

Tonight’s Democratic Presidential Primary debate, which I’ll be liveblogging here, is an opportunity for observation. The three major candidates – former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sitting Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley – have all had various reactions and responses to the many different populist and grassroots political demands made in both the general electorate and within the Democratic Party itself over the past couple of years. While they discuss those and other issues on stage next to each other, something of a contest is unofficially being held, to see what ideas “win” the debate, in terms of both being highly visible and being effectively asserted.

With all three of those candidates having at least once put their foot in their mouth on the current popular discussion around anti-Black racism and police violence, one thing being measured tonight is whether (and if so, how) will they pick apart the increasingly elaborate falsehoods surrounding the police forces in the US as both worryingly vulnerable. The past several months have seen a prominent return of forms of violence sadly familiar to Black communities in this country, with the killings of among others Sandra Bland in police custody.

That violence cuts to the core of the modern Democratic Party, which arguably arose out of Fannie Lou Hamer’s demand for civil rights and political agency at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She recounted a part of her personal history – from facing housing and employment discrimination for attempting to register to vote to its ultimate conclusion of her being violently beaten in a jail cell for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time while Black. Her experiences were sadly typical for her time and have continued into the modern day with deaths like Bland’s. The modern Democratic Party has been profoundly shaped by her testimony, so it is key to ask tonight how each of those candidates carry forward the lessons she asked the people in this country to learn.

Police force members and others aligned with them have sought to obscure that reality, that those specific forms of violence are an on-going problem. Recently, a blatant misinformation campaign of sorts has been launched – misrepresenting the risks of police work and decrying that the police are under excessive surveillance on the job. The numbers are publicly accessible, however, and paint a different picture of slowly but steadily declining non-accidental deaths for officers who are on the job (2003 and 2008 were the only Bush era years with fewer than 50 gunfire deaths, while only 2010 and 2011 have had more than 50 gunfire deaths during the Obama era). The talk surrounding increasing oversight on police conduct has been born out of incidental recordings – sometimes those used to observe other people who are on the job – finding astounding discrepancies between police eyewitness and video testimony.

blm caravan Los AngelesA sign from a Los Angeles #BlackLivesMatter affiliated protest on October 10, from here.

Since Fannie Lou Hamer’s challenge to the Democratic Party, it has become increasingly common outside of Black communities to associate the police and their political pressures with the Republican Party. That’s a mistake, as they are a unionized portion of the public sector workforce. Like most such groups, they do skew towards the Democrats – and donation records (available only in aggregate between police and firefighter groups) show virtually all of their top recipients being Democratic Party members. With the Republican Party making an effort to show that those two unionized groups won’t face the same degree and forms of hostility under their governance as other public sector unions and a large chunk of Democrat-leaning constituencies increasingly critical of the broader system of policing in this country, that is threatening to change. If Democratic candidates want to maintain their edge with that specific type of union, they will likely have to signal their investment in the existing police force tonight. Police force members and organizers will be tuning in and want to see the Democratic candidates side with them over their critics.

In many politically-minded disciplines, it’s increasingly common to find people discussing power as at least in part the ability “to define reality” in the sense of psychologically organizing and labeling the complex world we all share. People with power – which can mean anything from people simply with certain communal or personal identities that are privileged as well as individually empowered people, like major presidential contenders – play a key role in declaring what is real. What the candidates tonight have is inherently a moment in which they have to pick a side in a contest for policy control in the Democratic Party and make it clear how they see the world (and in the process, influence how people like you and me can respond to their rhetoric and their policies). Tonight we will see what choices they make, among other things in terms of embracing, ignoring, or rejecting false ideas that some people are desperate to popularize about the police.


Violence is multifaceted

TW: racist criminalization, cissexism, transmisogyny, forced displacement of indigenous people

I mentioned this late last week, but one of the key things to remember is how violence and inequality can be expressed in so many different ways. This past week was a fairly blunt remind of this with three separate incidents throughout the Americas – which show that a government’s intervention or non-intervention in a situation can be violent, and that violence is by no means the exclusive property of governments.

In New York, a child was handcuffed and subject to police interrogation for multiple hours. You’ve probably already realized it, but the child was, of course, Black. Likewise the alleged crime, which all indications point towards him not having committed, was stealing $5 that a fellow elementary student dropped on the ground. I tag a lot of things as “racist criminalization“, meaning the way a person’s race can make police and other authorities more likely to perceive them as criminal or their actions as more severely criminal than they actually are, but this pretty much takes the cake.

South of there, in Charlottesville, Virginia, the police are refusing to organize searches or assist community efforts to find Sage Smith, who has now been missing for two months. Again, Smith is Black, but beyond that, she’s a transgender woman. While her race might make her seem to be a more plausible culprit, her gender identity is apparently a plausible reason to particularly ignore her likely status as a victim of kidnapping or murder. This sort of refusal to intervene as police and provide services that are expected is common when it comes to violence against transgender women, which has lead to what many are calling an epidemic of transmisogynistic attacks.

Even further South, in Brazil, the government has essentially ceded control over a mega-dam project in the Amazon to private interests, which won’t be held responsible for the ensuing environmental impacts and 40,000 indigenous people who will be forcibly relocated by the dam. The Belo Monte dam threatens the most politically marginal populations in Brazil, and again the government is refusing to intervene with regulations that are already on the books. You can sign a petition asking for Brazilian President Dilma to review the decision to approve the project, here.

(Indigenous protesters against the project in 2011, from here.)

In short, there’s a lot of violence in the world, and only some of the time is the issue that the police or other governmental figures have intervened where they shouldn’t. Much of the time, protections are selectively enforced, primarily to protect the enfranchised, leaving many diverse groups, from transgender women to indigenous peoples, without recourse should private enterprises or actors harm them. Any effort at establishing actual equality between those who are cisgender and transgender or indigenous and non-indigenous needs to acknowledge both of these dimensions of violence.


What are the US and Israel partners in?

TW: excessive use of force by the police, voter suppression, voter disenfranchisement

Why are the United States and Israel allies? As that connection seems increasingly dependent on both nations tolerating blowback for the other’s policies (with the US endangering Israel with the long-term impacts of “regime change” and Israel possibly dragging the US into war with Iran), it seems worth investigating why the United States is still bothering with this. Israel is much more politically isolated, so the answers are much more straightforward.

If you listen to advocates of a close relationship between the two nations, some of whom are even quite liberal, it’s almost impossible to get through the explanation without a certain word coming up: democracy. Now one of the US Senators from Minnesota, former comedian Al Franken wrote during the Bush Administration, “Neo-cons support the Jewish state for the same reasons I do: because it is the only democracy in the region”. You see, the US apparently has to support some threshold number of governments in the region, so we might as well go with supporting the democracies.

This investment in Israel’s democratic bona fides as legitimizing the unique relationship between the United States and Israel is a noticeable media phenomenon in both countries. It’s seemingly reached the point where any uncertainty that the  political system of Israel is as democratic as it should be has come to be labeled as criticizing the positive relations between the two nations. Deriving the good relationship from the shared democracy has grown more difficult as of late.

Anti-Israeli-Arab Police BrutalityPolice Brutality against US student protesters
(Left, Israeli police attacking an Israeli-Arab family during an eviction last year. Right, pepper spray of illegal strength being used on protesting UC Davis students by US police. Photos from here and here.)

If nothing else, the recent realization that several hundred thousand Jerusalem residents and millions of Americans will be effectively disenfranchised should shake this vision of Israel and the United States as partners in democracy.

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