Bad Cop, Bad Cop

On May 25, 2020, in the course of an arrest, Officer Derek Chauvin held suspect George Floyd to the ground so long that Floyd died.  In the aftermath of the Chauvin-Floyd Affair in Minneapolis, I’m seeing an array of responses.  I’ll get back to that in a moment, but first I’d like to clarify a few things.

I have two uncles who were NYPD.   Uncle Tom, who was the husband of my father’s twin sister Mary, served in the Navy in WWII.  He retired and passed away.   Uncle Raymond, my father’s younger brother, was a detective, and he died while we were still living in Paris, meaning no later than 1990.  Neither uncle ever expressed praise for Hitler, Mussolini, etc. and Uncle Tom was even in the US Navy on the Murmansk run, meaning he was up against the Kriegsmarine (German Navy under Nazi Germany).   So count both as non-stormtroopers.   Sadly, both passed away long before I had any chance to discuss any police issues with them.

In October 1995 my buddy Phil and I took a road trip to Flint, Michigan, to buy a 1968 Pontiac Firebird 400.  Along the way we had to take the cab from the Detroit bus station to the airport to get a rental car to go to the seller’s house in Flint.  The cab driver, of African descent, casually remarked that he had attended the Million Man March (probably upon learning we had come up from the DC area).   That march was supposed to draw attention to issues which African-American men were concerned about, which would include police brutality.

In August 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem at preseason games, ostensibly to protest police brutality.  As you might imagine, this caused quite a stir. My own impression at the time ("Shut Up And Play Your Football" 9/29/17) was to argue that this was not the appropriate forum to raise the issue.   As noted below, however, if we allow the police free reign to do as they please, we're liable to wind up with fascism.  That may be important enough to justify bringing the issue to public attention by kneeling during the anthem at a football game, ostensibly a non-political context.  So put me down as reconsidering my prior position.

Of course, long before the Chauvin-Floyd incident in Minneapolis, Rodney King had the misfortune, on March 3, 1991, to be pulled over by LAPD and severely beaten, the whole matter caught on camera (the “Holliday video”).  Four LAPD officers, Briseno, Powell, Solano and Wind, were eventually charged and tried in a California state criminal court for the beating.  The jury was almost all white, and acquitted the officers, despite the video apparently showing them beating King when he was on the ground and no longer resisting arrest.  Soon after the verdicts were announced (April 29, 1992), L.A. erupted in riots.  Apparently the local population was extremely upset that these four officers were not found guilty. 

Note: there was a subsequent federal trial, at which Wind and Briseno were acquitted and Powell and Solano were found guilty and sentenced to 30 months in prison.  This was in March 1993, almost a year after the state trial and riots.  Pulling the case out of state court and into federal court was nullified in part by the US district court judge taking positions highly favorable to the police when deciding on sentencing, overturned by the Ninth Circuit (Federal appellate court) then knocked back down in part to the district court sentences by the US Supreme Court, ruling that the trial court judge had sufficient discretion to make his remarkably lenient sentencing decisions.

Suffice to say that we still have a problem with police misconduct in this country, decades after the Rodney King affair in Los Angeles. 

Most police departments are supposed to have a division called Internal Affairs, whose job it is to weed out corrupt cops or discipline cops who get out of line.  Sadly, we’re seeing IA being ineffectual most of the time, mainly because police officers refuse to testify against fellow officers even if they know the accused officers are corrupt.  Moreover, the police unions are a bit too zealous and effective in preventing IA from disciplining errant officers, so the blame might not be entirely upon reluctant comrades – if at all.  For whatever reason, the police seem to be doing a poor job of weeding out the bad cops, and the Floyds out there are paying the price.

The US is full of a wide spectrum of adherents of political beliefs, with the Republicans and Democrats generally in the center.  At the extremes are communists and anarchists on the left, and fascists and Neo-Nazis on the right.  Many extremists realize that their views are in fact, unpopular, and feel their interests are better served voting for whichever major party is closest to their values, as far away as that might be:  communists for the Democrats and Nazis and fascists for the GOP.   That doesn’t mean all Democrats are communists or all Republicans are Nazis, but there are obviously some at the extremes who would qualify.

My experience has been that, on the left side of the spectrum, communists, socialists and anarchists have no problem identifying as such as a matter of pride, and not identifying as Democrats.  That being the case, I’m more inclined to believe a Democrat if he or she denies being a socialist or a communist.

On the right side, however, this isn’t so cut and dried.  The real issue is people who appear a little too eager to make excuses for the police.

Returning to the Chauvin-Lloyd affair, I’m seeing a fair amount of posts on Facebook with the following themes.

1.     Before we canonize Floyd as a saint, we should recognize that he had a criminal record.   Uh, yeah.  This means, that as soon as you walk out of jail or prison, having served your time, the police are privileged to summarily execute you at any time, without question.  Right?   A variation on this is a snide, “how about not breaking the law?”  What happened to “innocent until proven guilty?”  Are the police judge, jury and executioners as well?  If they allege a suspect was committing a crime, do we simply take their word for it?  Are the police privileged to use lethal force on suspects committing non-capital crimes?  Moreover, we’re seeing this business of police planting drugs on innocent suspects and arresting them, even bragging to non-police about the practice.  Egregious behavior like this definitely needs to stop, effective immediately. 

2.     The following police officers [listed herein] died in the line of duty, but are not given the same publicity as Floyd.   Well, I’d imagine their deaths were properly noted and recognized in their hometown newspapers and by their communities, though nationwide we aren’t acknowledging their deaths in the line of duty.   But these were volunteers who faced violent criminals in the course of their duties as police officers.  This is normal, though we’d prefer if no police died at all.  Failing to focus national attention on them is not a conspiracy to ignore or shame them.  Another variation is a meme showing white victims of (alleged) black perpetrators, asking "did their lives matter?"  Well, so long as the alleged perpetrators have been arrested and are being prosecuted (allowing for the same due process everyone else enjoys) - and not simply released and/or ignored, I'd say the meme is dishonest and disingenuous.  

3.     The protesters committed the following acts of looting or vandalism.  No, looters or vandals committed these acts, possibly contemporaneously with a protest.  That doesn’t mean the protesters themselves did this.

The overall trend of these is to equate opponents of the ruling order as dangerous, violent criminals, and to essentially give the police an irrebuttable presumption of propriety, a blank check to do as they please without any form of accountability.  No matter how egregiously out of line the police conduct in question is, these people are determined, as a matter of principle, to somehow find some excuse to justify it.  The end result is to essentially absolve police of any misbehavior under any circumstances. 

Now, I’m sure you if asked these people how they felt about Benito Mussolini, they might give you a blank stare, and if you brought up the Austrian corporal who caused all those problems – or his infamous party with its distinctive swastika emblem – they would angrily deny any connection and resent being accused of anything close to sympathy with the Nazis.  They may well not have a single anti-Semitic bone in their body and genuinely acknowledge the Nazis as evil.   

Well, so what?  If you are going to give the police unlimited power and consider anyone remotely uncooperative as a dangerous criminal to be locked away, you are – drum roll, please? – a FASCIST.   You would be perfectly happy with a police state so long as you yourself weren’t behind bars.   You don’t want to wear a black shirt or a swastika armband, but whether you realize it or not, you fit in with these people.  If you don’t like it, maybe you should reassess your unqualified passion for law enforcement while there’s still a chance to do so – outside of a prison camp or gas chamber. 

Here's another thought.  Those of us with whiter complexions, whose ancestors came here from Europe, not Africa, voluntarily, may be inclined to dismiss the urgency of the topic as the victims of police brutality are more often black than white.  Not our problem, eh?  Not so fast.  If we wind up with a police state because us white folks were happy to let the police do whatever they wanted, sooner or later we're liable to become victims ourselves, if more likely later than sooner.  "Then they came for me..." (Thank you, Niemoller).  

Fortunately, it appears that Minneapolis is taking a hard look at the problem, and a litany of calls to defund police departments is finally shining a more serious light on this issue.  In the NFL, we’re starting to see more players come forth and acknowledge that maybe Kaepernick had a valid point to make, an issue that needs to be taken far more seriously and definitively resolved, because obviously the Rodney King beating didn’t suffice to convince us, nor did the Million Man March.   If we refuse to hold the police accountable when they step over the line, if we make excuses for them no matter how brutal and oppressive they act, we begin to look like a country perfectly willing to accept a police state, i.e. fascism.   I should think we don’t want that… right?