News

It's easy when the news is owned by for profits bound to repeat whatever is given to them for the ends of "both sides", and the precipices of higher education like Columbia and Harvard jump aboard the misinformation wagon so as not to upset rich and powerful donors or lose "government grants" held at the barrel of allegiance.

This will definitely get their attention.

This guy is not a Republican. Republicans are in power and they'll gleefully enjoy this attack on 'the enemy'.

This will definitely get their attention.

So did the Reichstag fire.

After all, what are we going to do? Elect someone else like them?

This is a really good question.

Starting from about 1992, all the way culminating in the 2020 BLM protests, there was absolute fury about police brutality in this country. It got written down in the media as just senseless rage, a spasm of violence that periodically overtook certain cities. Buildings burned, people died. But there was actually a lot of intent behind it. The LA riots that restarted this grand mid-century American tradition didn't happen until after the acquittal. They beat the fuck out of this guy for a long, long time, just pounded him on the asphalt with nightsticks like the gang members that some of them are. People were mad when that happened but it was peaceful mad. But then, because of the bizarro-world media landscape and public consciousness level at the time, a jury of peers took a look at all that and said "Well, but they're the police, that's allowed."

And, that day, the fuckin' city went up. Sublime wrote a song, Koreans became a meme, and so on. We all got to watch on TV while people stopped a truck driver and dragged him out and chucked bricks at his head while he was bleeding on the ground.

It happened again and again, after that, once video recording devices became common enough that people could see what was going on and communicate the raw reality to other people. It wasn't just some isolated rumors from "the black community." But the lock on media and public consciousness is powerful. The nightly news couldn't understand it. Why are "they" burning their own city? Why this violence? Police brutality was a "debate."

Anyway, the cities kept burning. LA, Baltimore, Kenosha, St. Louis, Ferguson, St. Paul. People threw bricks and bottles and fireworks at the police, burned police cars when they could. Police had mace and tear-gas and "rubber" bullets and liked to initiate violence from their side anyway, whether the crowd was peaceful or not, and the existence of some separate rioters separated by miles or years is really all it took to "justify" it against peaceful protests. Also, it only took one Baltimore before every department in the country laid into a bunch of surplus military equipment and started looking into water-cannons, sonic weapons, developed techniques and procedures for arresting hundreds of people at a time or just randomly hurting them as an alternative.

And, through all of that time, nothing really changed all that much with the police brutality.

Anyway, starting in about 2012, The Daily Show started reporting passionately on police brutality. For the first time, someone with an audience in the tens of millions was using their platform to yell about what a problem it was. To look into the camera and simply, passionately explain in detail what the fuck was happening, why and how people were being lied to about it, what some of the answers could be.

That didn't fix it, of course. Up until 2020, you could still have a Breonna Taylor or a Jacob Blake and the officers would be fine. Now at this point, I will probably diverge from the Lemmy consensus. I think that after the BLM protests, policing changed radically in this country. I actually don't think top-down reform had too much to do with it. I think the absolutely historic scale of the BLM protests, and the groundwork of consciousness that had been laid over years and years of just accurately communicating what was happening, was strong enough to make people decide to do things differently.

Actually that cop that talked at the 2024 DNC talked about this. He very explicitly said, my whole mindset for policing used to be very backwards, I used to think some of these things were okay. It's "use of force." Of course we can apply techniques to get compliance if someone is "resisting." But, now that he sees things differently, he is reforming his department, trying to get rid of cash bail, doing some of these things that the activist community has been talking about for decades. I think most of police reform happens because of things like that. Which is why it hasn't been happening in departments that don't want that (looking at you NYPD).

I think the justice system in this country has a long way to go before it is "justice," not least of which because the economic opportunity and social contract that a person is presented with is inextricably linked to any "criminal" choices they're going to make in their life. But I actually think day-to-day policing is one of the areas that's had the most reform. You can notice that most of those walls of names of unarmed people shot because they made the police nervous or for no reason at all pretty much ends in 2020.

Why did that happen?

Millions of people in the streets.

A change in consciousness, an awareness by people who aren't affected by the problem, directly communicated to them about what is even happening and why it is a problem.

The threat of direct action. I do think burning down the police station in the precinct where George Floyd died had quite a lot to do with initiating that police reform. It's a powerful symbol that the people, directly and literally, won't take no for an answer.

Why didn't that happen? Why am I even talking about this, as an answer to this apparently unrelated question?

Well, the riots definitely didn't do much. They were happening for decades without any result that was perceptible to me. I'm not saying people weren't justified in doing them but I'm just looking at what works and what doesn't.

I think if people's consciousness isn't there, then getting violent to try to punish the people who you feel need to be punished, to change the system by naked force, is usually counterproductive. Definitely if your opponents are completely comfortable with naked violence, it is.

Think if, instead of the 2020 BLM protests, we'd had people sneaking around and randomly setting fire to police chiefs' houses. Or police precincts.

Would that have helped?

...

If you have millions and millions of people on your side, aware of the problem and willing to get into the streets to take action on it, then you're a long way along towards solving the problem. If you don't have that, but you want to initiate some random violence to even the scales, then that violence can come back on you many, many, many times over. And usually does, historically.

There is no rule of law, just elite impunity, and the so-called justice system is just another weapon for them to use against us.