The police are government agents. Police brutality and murder is in fact, government brutality and murder.
Although minorities are disproportionally targeted, police brutality is not exclusively an expression of racism. In sheer numbers, as opposed to ethnic percentages, many whites are also maimed, killed, and falsely imprisoned by police officers. The police will brutalize and falsely accuse a white hedge-fund manager if he’s unrecognized and “in the wrong place at the wrong time”. You don’t hear of these cases because they’re settled out of court, often with large taxpayer funded financial awards to the victims or their families and with the stipulation that victims can’t discuss their cases with media.
Furthermore, police violence and murder is also prevalent in cities where the mayors, police chiefs and the majority of officers are black. On January 7, 2023, Tyre Nichols, a Black 29 year-old photographer and father of a young son was kicked, beaten and tased during a routine traffic stop by Memphis police. He died in hospital on January 10th. Police body camera footage shows that Nichols presented no threat or resistance to the police. All five of the police officers involved were Black. (Note: they were all fired by the Memphis Police Department and charged with felony murder of various degrees.)
Police crime is much more than an expression of “racism”; it’s an expression of US government state power.
The “few bad apples” explanation of police violence and murder is no longer credible. How many more videos of police brutality and murder by large groups of police as well as individual acts of police violence do we need to watch to acknowledge that the problem is nationwide and systemic? How many acts of police brutality and murder are not recorded on video?
In 2020 1,021 police killings were reported, in 2021 1,136, and in 2022 a a record breaking1,176 were reported. So far in 2023 police killings are setting a new recorded. Furthermore, the number of reported police killings is left to the discretion of 17,985 separate police agencies in the US, so these figures are likely gross underestimates.
No one really knows how many people die in the U.S. after encounters with police that didn’t involve a firearm. The federal government is supposed to track these deaths, but inconsistent reporting from local law enforcement agencies means no one really knows how many occur.
Medical officials cited law enforcement as causing or contributing to about half of the deaths. In many others, significant police force went unmentioned, and drugs or pre-existing health problems were blamed.
Almost 25% of those who died were threatening no one or, at most, committing minor infractions, AP’s analysis of cases shows. Another 45% involved people who police say tried to resist arrest or fled non-violent situations. In the remaining cases, police were intervening to stop people who were injuring others or were a potential danger. —AP April 2, 2024
June 4, 2023 “CDC Report Recognizes Police-Perpetrated Killing as Major Cause of Violent Death”
URL: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?hl=en#inbox/FMfcgzGsmrGgcZntCjVZslLdjvbPxWQd
Recommendations for “better police training” are absurd; we shouldn’t have to “train” sane people with a normal conscience not to act like psychopathic killers. Moreover the police have “qualified immunity” from legal prosecution literally giving them a “license to kill”. “Qualified immunity” should be removed as it greatly encourages police brutality and murder.
The murder of Edward Bronstein, a 35 year-old white father of five children by the California Highway Patrol in March 2020 graphically illustrates this point.
WARNING: This video may be disturbing to some people.
As shown in the video of Bronstein’s murder, police violence and murder is “democratic”; they’ll brutalize or kill anyone—including you—if the circumstances allow (e.g. they’re in an area with no CCTV cameras, no civilian witnesses are present, their bodycams are off, etc.). It’s worth noting that several of the police officers involved in the Bronstein murder are “minorities”; police violence and murder is “democratic”.
This video of 30 year-old Randal Ray Worcester being assaulted by Crawford County Sheriffs in Arkansas was posted on August 21, 2022:
The US budget for policing in 2021 is $123 billion; that’s more than the military budgets of nuclear powers such as Russia ($65B). The American private prison-industrial-complex has an additional annual turnover of $74 billion which eclipses the GDP of 133 nations. (Nov 1, 2022).
In January 2023 two Democratic representatives, Judith Garcia and Carlos Gonzalez, proposed a bill that would offer prisoners in Massachusetts a new way to win reduction in their sentences: by donating their bone marrow or vital organs.
The bill stated that the commissioner of the Department of Corrections should establish both a bone marrow and organ donation program within the department and a committee focused on bone marrow and organ donation that would set eligibility standards for inmates interested in the program. While forbidding commissions or monetary payments for donors, it stated that prisoners could “gain not less than 60 and not more than 365 day reduction in the length of their committed sentence” if they donated bone marrow or an organ.
The idea of giving sentence reductions in return for organ donation raises serious ethical issues. As someone who has studied punishment and imprisonment, including the conditions of confinement in American prisons, some states have allowed prisoners to donate organs without any external incentives. or whether prison inmates can ever consent freely to organ donation.
Recently, however, Garcia and Gonzalez have walked back their proposal and are planning to introduce a version without the promise of a sentence reduction. —Austin Sarat / The Conversation
The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported 4,234 people died in US prisons in 2019 (the most recent year statistics are available). More people die in US prisons annually than the total number of people incarcerated in many countries.
We are witnessing and experiencing US government “state power”. US domestic policy is now a mirror of its brutal foreign policy, but enforced on the American civilian population. American citizens are surveilled 24/7 on their cell phones, computers, TVs and by ubiquitous CCP cameras. The police have been militarized and serve as the de facto arm of the US military to supress and crush increasing civilian unrest over the extreme wealth inequality that has resulted from the deindustrialization of the US economy accelerated by both the Reagan and Clinton administrations and which continues to this day.
While the US military has been killing millions of innocent citizens abroad for decades with impunity, the police are killing thousands of innocent American citizens at home with impunity. We live in a police state—and we have for decades.
“If you want to know the future I can tell you now; it’s a boot on your face, forever.” —George Orwell
