I linked below to Little Light’s post, and I want you to please read it first, before I weigh in on this.

BFP wrote about this as well, and her post is also far better than mine. The two of them are an inspiration in so many ways, and I think more people should be reading them.

Police brutality is a feminist issue. I’ve written about it, oh, a million times. In addition, it is a progressive issue, a liberal issue, an issue for anyone who cares about civil rights and civil liberties.

Our freedoms are NOT granted to us by the state. They are agreed upon with the state, and part of the contract we’ve made with the state is that it will protect us and provide certain things for us.

I posted the First Amendment the other day in regards to Amy Goodman and other journalists’ arrests. It, in addition to the right of a free press, provides that people shall be allowed to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

This State has failed us. Instead of protecting us, it has gotten us into unwarranted wars that have weakened us and diminished our ability to protect ourselves (and that’s even allowing that war may sometimes be necessary, an argument I am not going to have here). Instead of providing for us, it has attempted to control our personal lives and allowed profit to take precedence over silly little things like health and shelter.

Protests at the RNC especially, but at the DNC as well, have every fucking right to go on. There is no need for a “free speech zone” or anything of the kind. As long as the protesters aren’t attacking people in the streets, they have a right to be there and be heard. They certainly don’t deserve being arrested, let alone being brutalized beforehand (and afterward, while in jail).

This is not getting the press it deserves. Which is ironic, considering that the press should be freaking out at its rights being trampled, the way they freaked out at the idea that Judith Miller might have to give up her high and powerful source.

Freedom of speech, in other words, is no longer the concern of the ones who are supposed to fight for it: the media. They are more concerned with access to power. It is up to us to preserve the rights that we handed over control of to some state authority. The police are here to serve, not to coerce and control.

Posted: September 9th, 2008 under Bullshit, Politics.
Comments: 2

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.)

Posted: May 7th, 2008 under Bullshit, Politics.
Comments: none