I asked Laura Too, who lives in the heart of the troubled area in Minneapolis, if she had any thoughts she would like to share with us. For now, this is what she wants to share.
Here is a brilliant post from a local group I belong to. It was written by Jay Escobar, who is part of Stand Up Minnesota. We all have permission to share it. ~Laura
There may be more from Laura as events play out, and Jay Escobar may join us in the comments.
Written by Jay Escobar, with permission to share.
A lot of you are going to scroll past the worst takes by the worst people you know.
HERE ARE SOME FACTS:
When another black man is killed by police, people are going to peacefully protest.
When people peacefully protest, the police deploy all of their resources to confront the protesters.
That creates a vacuum where other people can take advantage of the police not doing their job of stopping actual crimes;
and they can go rob and loot stores knowing that the police have busied themselves trying to handle a peaceful protest.
The protestors are not looting and stealing.
The ones looting and stealing are not doing it in the name of the slain black man.
If the cops didn’t kill someone there wouldn’t be a protest that they then have to use all their resources to maintain.
Therefore the police are much more culpable for the looting and stealing than any protester.
Because, again, the protesters are not the ones looting and stealing.
It’s the people the cops are ignoring that are doing the actual criminal activity.
And that doesn’t mean some of those looting and stealing don’t experience racialized trauma.
They just decided that they’d rather grab some “free” stuff when the cops aren’t watching, than put their lives at risk confronting systems of power and oppression.
Police prefer putting all of their attention on agitating and instigating confrontation from folks peacefully exercising their 1st Amendment rights, and allowing the looting and stealing to happen;
because that can be used to discredit the protest.
Don’t let your QAnon uncles hijack the narrative by conflating protesters and looters.
Even some well meaning people will post “this is not the way….”
Just no. Nope . Bad take.
Because, again, the protestors are not the ones looting.
We can’t just ignore the trolls, we have to stop them in their tracks [and keep them] from winning hearts and minds of the uninformed with more lies..
* I added a few commas, plus a few extra words in the final sentence, for clarity. ~WaterGirl
Chief Oshkosh
Important points. How the police handle peaceful protests adds to the problem. And they know it. The Chicago Democratic Convention. Occupy Wall Street. The current Black Lives Matter protests. Many in between. Where there is violence, there is police instigation. Or worse. They are not only part of the problem. They ARE the problem.
Villago Delenda Est
Very well put. Furthermore, you have violent white supremacist scum (to include some of the cops) who are deliberately rioting in an effort to discredit the peaceful protesters, and the vermin of the Village play right along with them.
Mary G
You only have to look at Portland to see this. The police have been seen opening coordinating with and protecting the Proud Boys who come to town ready to rumble. In Charlottesville they just stood and watched as counter protestors were mobbed and beaten. In LA they bottled up protestors in kettles when there was no way to exit the area, then declared an order to disperse and arrested everyone in the kettle who had no avenue to disperse. And these are just a few I’ve noticed.
Mike in NC
I believe it was Bill Clinton who talked a lot about hiring 100,000 additional police officers. In hindsight, probably as bad an idea as doubling the size of the Border Patrol. Too many poor quality bad actors are brought into the mix. Militarizing police departments during the past 20 or so years made matters worse. Obama slowed that down but Trump was an advocate of police brutality (“Don’t be afraid to rough them up!”).
featheredsprite
Excellent to hear from inside the action. I would love to hear some more from them and/or more of their compadres/
Amir Khalid
@Mike in NC:
I’ve read that a big part of the problem is that bullies and psychopaths managed to get into the police, and once they got senior enough they started recruiting their fellow bullies and psychopaths.
debbie
@Mike in NC:
Also, lower qualification standards, tossing weapons at officers instead of providing effective training, cutting out any involvement of other community partners like social workers, and, worst of all, the continued existence of fucking police unions. You have to start at the beginning and reform every single facet of policing in this country.
Mike in NC
Tonight at 10:00 EST, Frontline on PBS will broadcast a follow-on program to “Trump’s American Carnage”, called “American Insurrection”. No doubt it will touch on the involvement of ex-military, current military, and police in the January 6 attack on the Capitol building. Those groups represent a lot of the Proud Boys and Oathkeeper extremists.
debbie
@Amir Khalid:
Also, sad to say, veterans.
WaterGirl
So what do we do to get from the totally unacceptable current status quo to something that’s better?
Laura Too
@WaterGirl: That is what I keep thinking about. How do we solve this. I don’t want my community or any other to have to keep going through this. I do not want to hear the anguished cries of another mother or think of another 9 year old having to witness unspeakable horrors at the hands of people payed to “protect” us.
StringOnAStick
@Amir Khalid: Adam commented yesterday about the type of outside training police get now from people who teach them that every interaction potentially leads to the cops getting killed, so they should escalate immediately to always be in the control position. These training firms are creating fascist forces. I read a month or so ago that some of the training materials include actual quotes from Hitler’s My Struggle.
My late BIL wanted to be a cop his whole life but was colorblind, so no deal. He was chief of store security for years and had a 95% confession rate because he was excellent at calming the situation and getting people to realize that telling the truth would go better for them. Then he became a prison guard, and I watched him change from an empathetic guy who could de-escalate situations as his second nature, into an angry suspicious guy from the tribe of “us vs. them”. It was so disheartening to watch it happen, and then he died at age 56 from cancer but until his dying day he said he loved his job and the sense of belonging it gave him to be part of the law enforcement fraternity. I’ll never understand it.
StringOnAStick
@WaterGirl: First end those outside training groups that Adam talked about yesterday. They are radicalizing the US police forces. Next make the legal settlements come out of their pension funds instead of increasingly poorer city governments.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
For all the flexing and harassing, real crime clearance rates suck ass. You’d think that the main job of law enforcement is about policing window tinting, expired registration stickers and broken taillights/brakelights, rather than dealing with the serious issues of burglary, assault, identity theft, rape and murder.
pat
These discussions bring to mind what happened after 9-11. Police departments receiving military hardware and vehicles, etc. Is that when they all started wearing bullet-proof vests?
I can see where the police might be cautious in situations where they might encounter someone armed with AK15 or whatever, but it seems that never happens. They encounter people who are not armed and pose no threat, and shoot them anyway. Just a nasty coincidence, I’m sure, that those people are not white..//
Laura Too
@StringOnAStick: 71 million dollars in the last 20 years is what MPD has cost us. And sadly, that is only a fraction of what should have been paid out. So many cases of mostly black boys and men who haven’t been heard. I would love to see it come out of their pensions. It would stop in a hurry. Right now there is no punishment so no incentive to stop.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Were anyone stupid enough to hire me as a city manager or director of public safety, I’d sit my commanders down and have a genuine heart to heart about the value of “broken window” stops. Do they make our community a better place to live?
A couple of years ago, I went to the KBA convention and watched Kentucky’s Chief Justice beg rural judges and prosecutors to quit their emphasis on penalty and incarceration, particularly for addicts. He flat out told them they were making their communities worse. Of course, the message fell flat, because their constituencies consist of raging assholes.
Kelly
When I read accounts military rules of engagement and discipline from military folks such as Stonekettle it leaves me thinking we didn’t militarize our police forces. We just gave police military weapons. Operational doctrine in combat zones with seriously dangerous opponents seems much different from police “dominate or die” doctrine.
Jay
@WaterGirl:
Step One, defund the Police. As Camden NJ discovered after multiple tries, you cannot reform the Police.
Step Two, build an Office of Public Safety, around trained professionals dispatched appropriately to incidents.
Step Three, have minimum requirements for an appropriate 4 year Degree for “Peace Officer Candidates” along with 18 months to two years specialized training in your own Academy.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
I think this explanation is too pat and does too much to absolve the public for their role in police abuses. Bullies and psychopaths didn’t secretly infiltrate our police departments; the public hired them because they were seen as the best people to enforce our racist social order. We will never be able to reform our police without first reforming the laws they’re supposed to enforce.
Benw
Solid words from Escobar. I’ve been going to protests since GWB’s wars and even taken civil disobedience and deescalation training. The only violence I’ve ever seen was initiated and escalated by the fucking cops and the agitators egged on by them. Defund them all
raven
@Jay: rosta ruck
karen marie
This. There are few things that will get the attention of people faster than losing their retirement to “a few bad apples.”
Laura Too
@Jay: I’m on board. We have got to start getting our political leaders who will follow through with that. I plan on getting way more involved with city government and I was pretty active before. I worked on Angela Conley (Google the most brilliant woman I hope one day becomes mayor) and Ray Dehn’s campaigns last time. I will doorknock & phonebank even though both scare the living hell out of me. I went to 15 mayoral debates last time, 3 of which I helped run. Still feels like not enough.
Spanky
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Which offences bring money into the jurisdiction through fines? Decouple the income-producing from the policing and maybe we’ll get somewhere
ETA: For-profit prisons also too.
Spanky
@Spanky: ETA2: I see I have killed this thread. Yay me.
(Kamala is the real thread-killer!)
TheWesson
Here in Portland the non-peaceful protestors seem to be the same chronic group of “anarchist” black-bloc protestors who attach themselves to every protest about anything, and then peel off after dark to vandalize, break things, light fires, and pick fights with the police.
In that case, I’m rooting for the police, sadly … although the police perform their share of malbehavior as well, truth be told.
Another Scott
@Jay: It looks like Camden’s experience is more complicated than the slogan would suggest.
Governing.com (from a year after the city police department was disbanded).
Wired (from 2020):
tl;dr – Beware the slogan.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jay
@raven:
worked in Camden, and a number of other Towns and Cities in the US and elsewhere.
Legally as well, it’s the only way to get rid of Police Unions,
And sadly, the only way to deal with the rotten apples, is to get rid of the whole barrel.
Social Media detectives identified 2 members of the 4co/RMR’s as members of both the OathKeepers and the Proud Boys. CIS investigated, confirmed it, classified and did not report on the several “troubling incidents”, just that there were “several”. One of the two was a “Patrol Leader”. ( Platoon Leader)
So they “cleared” the rest of the 4co/RCR’s, with out ever combing their social media.
So the two are in the process of being kicked out of the Army, the CO of the 4co/RCR’s is going into expedited “retirement”,
and Social Media detectives have in just three days, identified 34 other members of the 4co/RCR’s who love them some extremist websites, memes and groups.
Theses are mostly white guys who run “Security and Intelligence Patrols” in the northern Rockies, which is mostly populated by Indigenous Peoples who have not ceded their lands, rights or territories.
Get rid of the barrel. The contents are rotted.
Chip Daniels
I saw this play out here in Los Angeles during the Floyd protests.
On tv you could see helicopter footage of the marches, then following them were a few young men on bikes, , breaking off from the main group to circle drug stores; then cars would swoop in and start looting, while the march was happening a few blocks away.
It was obvious that the second group was only scavenging parasitically off the marchers, but of course no one bothered to point that out, only that the “George Floyd protests were marred with looting”.
Jay
@Another Scott:
never said it would be easy. You can see where Camden blew it.
At a minimum, the Police who enforce the Laws, should have as much legal training as Lawyers.
Jay
@Chip Daniels:
Stanley Cup Riots in Vancouver.
While the Cops were busy dealing with drunken, pissed off Hockey Fans on Robson St, groups of Organized Criminals looted out Granville Street.
Mart
@Chip Daniels: when I watched NYC “looters” last summer it looked to me to be very organized crime. The stores were picked clean, contents dumped in vans. The cops were a block away. Asked my wife if she thought the police were getting in on the action.
Laura Too
@Mart: Last year when Minneapolis burned they were very targeted as well. Pharmacies especially. They weren’t opportunistic, they were organized. (Not the ones who hit Target & such)
Mary G
@Laura Too: You have done a LOT lot. It boggles my mind how stupid so many voters can be and how they react to the lies about the “scary black men who will loot your business and rape your daughters” so many Republicans and police organizations are still peddling. We need nothing more than a third Reconstruction that gets White people to just see it and there is so much irrational resistance.
I know so fucking many “good” Democrats who were thrilled with Obama and now Biden and their diverse hirings and hated TFG and his minions with the heat of a thousand suns, but just refuse to acknowledge even the existence of or their participation in structural racism. They have gone blank on me when I try to engage them, changed the subject abruptly, and even just gotten up and physically left.
They have lived their whole lives only interacting with the officers who go by job names like “Community Relations” or “School Resource Officer” or “Neighborhood Watch Coordinator.” These are all polite, deferential, often Hispanic or another minority, young and handsome men or occasionally women who reinforce the false image of dedicated “protecting and serving” that cop shows also portray. They are all trained to give the impression that they are our last line of defense against the rising tide of crime that does not exist. They speak softly and confidentially about gangs coming over the border or from nearby towns and point at the odd graffiti left by bored kids in the alley as a sign of the Apocalypse.
The tattoo-covered bruisers who lift weights, abuse steroids, and go out to prey on whoever is not a citizen like us are kept well out of sight.
And I argue. I point out that the muzzled Belgian Malinois that nice K9 officer brought to show us could not find Mrs. Smith’s scarf (saturated with Chanel #5 that you can smell five feet away) that she had been wearing on her neck all day when the officer had her put it on the ground under a bush on the patio 10 feet away while he and the dog waited out of sight. Plus it growled and tried to lunge at Mrs. Parker when it saw her raise her cane to ask a question out of the corner of its eye.
I made a book group watch Ava Duvernay’s movie about the 13th Amendment’s giant exceptions to who can be considered a citizen were granted so our police are just the old slave catchers under a different name. Most of them sat with their arms tightly folded across their chests staring at their shoes and the next day I was expelled from the book club on the grounds that I had shown a movie instead of a book and it was a bit too angry for them. They had all seen and/or watched “Driving Miss Daisy,” “The Help,” sand “Hidden Figures,” so of course they agreed they had not a racist bone in their bodies and felt the situation was much more positive than Ava’s movie showed.
(I meant to get fired from the club. Their tastes in books were terrible sentimental romantic dreck, but while I had their attention I tried to open their minds a bit.)
It’s like trying to break though a brick wall with half a spoon, and when you do finally get a brick out there’s another 12 more layers of brick in the way. The next day you get up to go back to work and Fox News has not only mortared your brick back in, they are adding a whole nother layer over it.
It’s easy to throw up your hands and stop trying, but I am an inherently optimistic person who thinks that if enough of us keep trying, we can get it done. The video footage of these murders have done their own bit of convincing, especially George Floyd’s. Their beloved grandchildren are often of mixed race, because it’s California and much more bluntly anti-racist to them than I feel able to be. So I will keep pushing where I can, which is mostly donating these days. It’s going to take years, if not decades, to get it done. I won’t be alive, but I want to die knowing I tried my best.
sab
My little city had protests last summer, and the police handled it pretty well. Things went smoothly.
The police union wants to stir stuff up. City council passed some ordinances outlawing stuff (chokeholds, e.g.) that are currently illegal under state law. Takes them out of discussion in contract talks with the union even if state law changes. The union is pissed.
My husband went to an inner city/downtown Catholic high school in the late 1960s. He knows a lot of retired cops. Despite the blue wall, they are pretty disgusted with the current situation and very grateful to be retired.
They blame a lot of this on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Younger cops are all veterans, and basically see themselves as an occupying force. The Ohio supreme court decision letting them move out of their cities compounded this problem.
An issue they (older and retired cops) hadn’t realized was the Lewinski phuck-up training. They hadn’t realized how unqualified he is. And his training has become so popular that local police forces can’t avoid it. If they don’t let these guys go to it then the union will demand it. If that fails, the FOP will pay their way.
In my city the retired cops knew how to de-escalate. The current cops less so, and the younger they get the worse they are at it, and they aren’t learning. Things will get worse.
Lewinski and his ilk really need to be totally discredited. I don’t know how to get that ball rolling, but it is as important (and maybe part of ) what peaceful protests are trying to accomplish.
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie:
Please explain.
Scout211
@Mike in NC:
Thank you! DVR now set to record.
I also saw that airing right before it is an episode of American Experience about Ruby Ridge. DVR now set for that one, too.
Miss Bianca
@Laura Too: That’s way more than most of us manage to do. Kudos.
sab
@Jay: Defund the police is a stupid slogan and a stupid idea. Lots of urban neighborhoods need police and want police. They just don’t want police shaming and/or killing their law-abiding kids.
Laura Too
@sab: It is a slogan that punches a lot of buttons that scare people, There may be a better way to put it. The way policing is now isn’t working. If that gets the discussion started I am all for it.
Laura Too
@Mary G: Thank you for the thoughtful comments. I agree that sometimes it seems like our conversations go unheard. but just like with kids – you don’t think they are paying attention and then they surprise you. I am lucky that I am surrounded by brilliant committed friends who march with me (I have actually met the most amazing women at marches) and keep me tethered to reality when I need. I figure I am white, I don’t get to sit this out. I have been privileged in ways that I don’t even know. My beautiful friend Ruhel Islam lost his restaurant, Gandhi Mahal, in the riots last year. He said if that is what it takes for justice to be served and healing to happen, let it burn. I hope to someday be half the person he is. I keep learning daily.
Laura Too
Thank you all for your insightful comments. BJ is my refuge whether or not I comment-most of the time I come late and everyone is already gone. I read too slowly to add anything useful but I feel so protected. You all lifted me up when my Uncle died. You funded and played along with me in getting Mr. Merlin to Tomato Queen and getting to meet the wonderful Steeplejack. You stayed up late with me when I spent those terrifying nights of the police riot watching the front of the house and the smoke filled days of the aftermath. And now my city and I are here again. Watergirl is so great at making things I send in sound great, and I truly appreciate her brilliant abilities. I will take the suggestions and try to implement them or find people who can. I am lucky this wonderful place exists! I am off to bed, I’ll check back in the morning. Night Johnboy…
KSinMA
@Mary G:
Thank you for this. Good for you!
Your sister shall remain safely anonymous
I don’t want to appear to be on the side of the cops. When I was twenty, same age as this poor kid who was killed, I got pulled over all the time. I’ve gotten tickets for expired tags, for stopping to drop off a friend in a ‘no stopping zone,’ and all manner of arbitrary, sometimes capricious things. Sometimes the cops were professional, and sometimes they were real dicks.
I have no love of cops at all. I’ve also been arrested once.
But never for the life of me would I consider trying to resist if I was being arrested, not even my younger more-argumentative angrier self would have done that. Never would I try to get back in my car to try to ‘get away’ (or whatever). To me it would be OBVIOUS that that would end very badly for me.
It’s terrible that this kid was killed, and that this cop fucked up so incredibly badly.
But could someone explain the defense of this kid trying to get back in his car and….well, did he think that was going to turn out well? What was the operative theory there?
Laura Too
@Your sister shall remain safely anonymous: He panicked. I can understand why after watching so many videos where even complying gets a man killed. I can’t put myself in his place but I do understand flight or flight. Thing is, cops knew who he was. Let him drive away and pick him up later. People are so willing to forgive a cops error but not young mans?