BBC filled me in on this. Watch the video. It’ll make you angry. Or it damn well should.

This is in my current hometown of Philadelphia. Police are “on edge,” as they say, from the recent killing of an officer. The suspect in that shooting has not been apprehended yet. But it wasn’t him that they pulled from the car.

Philadelphia has a lot of murders, and has had quite a few police officers die in the line of duty recently (as well as the most famous, Officer Daniel Faulkner, supposedly killed by Mumia Abu-Jamal). But that doesn’t excuse multiple officers beating the crap out of suspects.

Mayor Michael Nutter rode a wave of reform into office this year (and then endorsed Hillary Clinton, an irony that was not lost on Philadelphians). One of his planks was “stop and frisk,” which of course set off alarm bells in the minds of civil libertarians like me. See, I don’t like guns. They scare the shit out of me. I don’t like people shooting people. But I also don’t think that creating an antagonistic police culture is the answer, because, you see, it creates situations like this, and the one where Sean Bell was killed.

Stop and frisk is blatant racial profiling, and I’m sorry, but the fact that Mayor Nutter is black doesn’t make it less racist, just as the cops that shot Sean Bell being black doesn’t make race less a motivating factor. How many white men do you think are being stopped on the streets of Philly, or dragged from their cars and beaten, or shot 50 times by police?

And if you don’t see the connection between the police culture and our larger, militaristic, Guantanamo-and-Abu-Ghraib culture, let me make it for you: we make people who look different into the Other, then we make them into monsters, and then we can kill them, beat them, and lock them away without fear. Or execute them. (yes, I know that guy is white.)

I read this brilliant essay by Andrea Smith yesterday (get it at Racialicious) about the different ways racism is used against different groups of people. I’ll write about it more another time, as I will about monsters, but right now I have to say that though fear of black men and fear of Arab men comes from a different place, it’s all added up to dehumanizing them and making them OK to kill. Making their bodies not human, but just more things we can destroy, kick, or punch without retribution, because most people will understand.

One columnist asks “How many more must die before the gun lobby gets the message?” But she misses the mark. See, the police officers’ uncontrollable rage only erupts when one of their own is killed, and columnists like her only write these articles when a (white) police officer is killed. Philadelphia has had around 400 murders a year for the past two years, and the police don’t get to use that number as an excuse to start beating suspects.

I am sad that Officer Liczbinski is dead. But I am also sad that our police department’s response to that is to assault suspects. And I am sad that our mayor’s response was to support policies that widen the divide between the people who matter and whose deaths matter and the people who do not.

(and this is still a feminist issue. because as I said before, women are Otherized and monsterified and made killable and beatable as well, in ways that are related.)