Skip to content

More police professionalism

Published by digby on December 26, 2014

More police professionalism

by digby

Petulant, immature, unprofessional, armed, militarized cops acting out. What could go wrong?

Corey Robin is a New Yorker and I’m not, so when when I read this the other day I thought maybe he was feeling the emotion of the moment more acutely than I was and it felt a little bit over the top to me. But now I’m thinking that maybe he’s on to something:

Listening to these cries from the cops—of blood on people’s hands, of getting on a war footing—it’s hard not to think that a Dolchstosslegende isn’t being born. Throw in the witches brew of race and state violence that kicked it off, the nearly universal obeisance to the feelings and sensitivities of the most powerful and militarized sectors of the state, and the helplessness and haplessness of the city’s liberal voices, and you begin to get a sense of the Weimar-y vibe (and not the good kind) out there.

“… the nearly universal obeisance to the feelings and sensitivities of the most powerful and militarized sectors of the state.”

Can you see the problem here? I knew that you could. Not only must we respect their authority and instantly bow to their will upon demand. We must be sensitive to their feelings.

And as Robin further points out, the entire government apparatus seems to be politically terrified of them. This story in the today’s New York Times spells it out explicitly:

Just how dramatic the turnabout has been in New York could be measured by a scene that unfolded this week at City Hall. There were no Council members blocking traffic. There were no choruses of “I can’t breathe.” And there were no mayoral meetings with protesters.

Instead, there was unstinting praise for the police from the Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, who earlier this month had asked her colleagues to repeat “I can’t breathe” 11 times, for the number of times Mr. Garner said those words before he died in the encounter with the police.

“We are here to send a simple and direct message: that we unequivocally support, appreciate and value our police officers, that we condemn any and all violence against them, that we must end hateful and divisive rhetoric which seeks to demonize officers and their work,” Ms. Mark-Viverito, flanked by fellow Council members, said at a news conference.

Update: Read Howie’s remembrance of what happened when his record label released Ice-T’s group Body Count’s famous album featuring the song “Cop Killer.”  It’s quite a story.



.

Published inUncategorized