‘Don't Call It A Curfew’: BORDC/DDF's Executive Director Comments On Baltimore

This article by Shahid Buttar, executive director of the recently merged Bill of Rights Defense Committee - Defending Dissent Foundation (BORDC/DDF, occasionally DDF/BORDC) considers the serious possibility that the actions of the Baltimore police imposed no mere "curfew" on parts of the city but actual de facto martial law, in response not to a "riot" but to a rejection by demonstrators of an all‑out fully equipped military operation by those police, consciously and brutally imposed on the demonstrators.

The trend toward use of military equipment, gear and tactics by city police departments against protesters of all sorts, most of the latter nonviolent, scares hell out of me, as I am certain it is intended to do. And Godwin's Law becomes less applicable as, incident by incident, protesters are beaten, tased, gassed, pepper‑sprayed etc. in the streets or taken to jail and denied the most fundamental rights of people detained in America. How often is an arrest for protesting peacefully effectively a death sentence, or a jail term without charge, trial, conviction or sentencing?

And when is enough, enough? Buttar depicts a sign at one protest:

These aren't riots. You are watching an unjust system be[ing] dismantled.

One can only hope that interpretation is recognized in the halls of power before protesters are driven to more extreme measures to make their voices heard.

Miscellany: Police Behavior, Riots, Race, Nutjob GOPers And Their Guns

This post may not be particularly coherent, but I need to clean the accumulation of tabs in the browser...

• Bryan at Why Now? points us to CBC for a less ruthlessly "edited" view of police behavior in the news: Baltimore shows police killings America's real state of emergency
• Jon Sopel at BBC News explores What a riot does achieve
• Paul J. Weber at AP via TPM notes that TX Gov Orders State Guard to Monitor Possible Military Takeover of Texas, and similarly, Rand [Paul]: I'll Look Into Whether The Military Is Planning To Takeover The Southwest; together, these tend to prove that the Texas GOP is full-blown batshit fucking nuts
• Josh Marshall at TPM thinks we're crossing that Bridgegate exactly when we come to it
• Aniza Garcia at TPM reports that a Child Finds A Loaded Gun In John Boehner's Capitol Bathroom
• antifa at Kos poses and firmly answers ignorant white Americans' too-frequent question, "Why do they burn down their own neighborhood?"

Maybe next time I'll have something original to write. (Maybe not...)

Violent Gang Roving Streets Of Berkeley...

... and they look like this:


   (Watch on YouTube.)

That was posted by Todd Zimmer three days ago.

I understand why cops are at protest events. I do NOT understand the justification for their wearing full riot gear, kettling peaceful protesters, taking pokes at people whom they may find annoying but who aren't threatening anybody, occasionally beating the crap out of one or another protester (or, worse, bystander or neighborhood resident), etc. Are antisocial tendencies the new unwritten requirement for anyone wanting to become a police officer?

I mean, these guys are not Chicago PD circa 1968, but why do they have to do this at all? Violence begets violence; irrational confrontation provokes irrational confrontation. You can't tell me this police behavior does one single thing to help keep the peace... and after all, when (as one officer said) they are "just doin' [their] job," that behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with their job. Wielding nightsticks at a mostly orderly crowd represents a failure to do the only legitimate job of a police officer faced with a crowd: keeping the peace.

(H/T jpmassar at Kos.)

‘Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do...’

"... when Missouri cops, they come for you..."

(Or insert the name of your own great state; MO doesn't have a monopoly.)

There are many cities and towns in which the police are honest and dedicated to protecting the citizenry. Considering that fact, how very much worse your risk must be if you live in a place like Ferguson, MO (or, hell, NYC), to raise the national numbers to this obscene level.

Maybe it's no accident that a show called "Cops" has the theme song "Bad Boys" ...

(H/T bobswern at Kos, from a tweet from @OccupyWallStreetNYC.)

Flee The SWAT

It probably won't do you any good... if they come to you, you'll probably end up dead anyway... but it's all you've got in these days of militarized police forces (see previous post for an example).

Matthew Harwood at TomDispatch examines the growing phenomenon of police as militarized invasion force... that's what SWAT has become in the course of the past three or four decades, growing from its origins in the 1960s as an attempted answer to the most extreme situations law enforcement can face into a quasi-military home invasion force, used mainly for serving drug warrants and equipped with the best equipment and vehicles the Pentagon can offer.

MRAP, Queensbury, NY

Bill Moyers features Tom Engelhardt featuring in turn Chase Madar on The Criminalization of Everyday Life, confronting more or less the same subject and featuring a photo of an MRAP vehicle guaranteed to terrorize (word used advisedly) any innocent citizen into staying home... where s/he is, as Harwood indicates, still not safe from the militarized invasions of the police who now own this formerly military vehicle.

A short passage from Harwood's article drives home the point:

...

In 1984, according to Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop, about 26% of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 had SWAT teams. By 2005, that number had soared to 80% and it’s still rising, though SWAT statistics are notoriously hard to come by.

As the number of SWAT teams has grown nationwide, so have the raids. Every year now, there are approximately 50,000 SWAT raids in the United States, according to Professor Pete Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies. In other words, roughly 137 times a day a SWAT team assaults a home and plunges its inhabitants and the surrounding community into terror.

...

And you thought your primary danger of being shot full of holes came from the criminals. What goes around, comes straight at us; the US has terrorized the people of other nations with these weapons for decades, most recently in preemptive, invasive wars, and now the remaindered weapons from those same wars are driving into our neighborhoods and shooting up our own children. Welcome to America!