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Showing posts with label US police violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US police violence. Show all posts
Information Clearing House ✒ The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal produced one of the first comprehensive surveys of Israeli training of US local and federal law enforcement officials in the following article published by Al Akhbar English in 2011.)
Max Blumenthal
15-June-2020

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”

Continue reading @ Information Clearing House.

The Israelification Of American Domestic Security

Valerie Tarico ➤ Here is why, amidst the anguish of watching yet another black man senselessly murdered by someone who should have been protecting him, I am distressed by hearing people on the left–meaning my people–rationalize violence.

 
I’ve walked a German concentration camp in silence, absorbed as much trauma in the Rwandan genocide museum as I could handle and touched the ground by Cambodia’s killing fields. My lifetime has included the Balkan War, the napalming of Viet Nam, the brutalities of apartheid, and the Cultural Revolution.

Minneapolis burning
 

It always starts this way–in legitimate grievances, in desperation–with frightened, wounded, angry people seeing no other path to wellbeing–in verbal dehumanization of the other, in violations of property with the first killings seen as aberrant.

It often begins among people shaken to the core by uncontrollable factors that feed resentment or futility: economic instability or stagnation, rapid cultural or demographic change, abrupt political shifts. In this gestalt, voices in the media or in the church or in government or other positions of power put words on the gut feeling that something is wrong. They point to a perpetrator, someone who is other, who is bad clear through, and who must be stopped at all cost.

Whether lines are drawn along racial, tribal, class or ideological boundaries; whether violence is perpetrated by over-dogs or underdogs, eruptions of violence, large and small, *almost always* feel justified and righteous to the perpetrators. While committing violence, we almost always feel like either victims or saviors.

“Feel” is the operative word here, because the intellectual rationalizations follow feelings. We are almost all capable of looking with horror on the atrocities committed by people who are not us, while simultaneously feeling justified in our own. We use different words to describe what we are doing, to soften it, to sanctify it, to make it holy.

But there are other paths, including in the struggle for racial equity that must be carried forward now amidst a pandemic that has flooded our communities with anxiety and uncertainty. Nelson Mandela modeled it. Van Jones articulates it here. There are no action figures or superheroes on this path. It’s not the stuff of guts and glory. It isn’t cathartic.

Peace and justice are built by ordinary people who stand by their neighbors in violation of the boundary lines drawn by conflict, who steadfastly oppose goading and instead channel their grief and anger into the painstaking, grubby work of creating the change they want to see and the future they dream for all.

Valerie Tarico
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. 
She writes about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society.

On Violence

From Vox ➤ US cities and racist policing. 

By Anna North
Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old black boy, was stoned to death by white people in 1919 after he swam into what they deemed the wrong part of Lake Michigan.

In response, black people in Chicago rose up in protest, and white people attacked them. More than 500 people were injured and 38 were killed. Afterward, the city convened a commission to study the causes of the violence.

The commission found “systemic participation in mob violence by the police,” Khalil Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and author of the book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, told Vox. 

When police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them.

Continue reading @ Vox.

How Racist Policing Took Over American Cities, Explained By A Historian

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