“A whole generation of Democratic mayors have seen their reputations defined by their inability to manage the aftermath of police killings,” my brother @benwallacewells wrote last week, just as things we really beginning to escalate. (1/x) newyorker.com/news/our-colum…
Over the last few days, the liberal Democratic mayors of America’s two biggest cities, New York and Los Angeles, have somewhat emphatically sided with their police forces in the midst of waves of police violence against those protesting police violence.
In the case of Bill de Blasio, he went out of his way to defend the unconscionable, criminal activity of a police force that has not just resisted his guidance as mayor but explicitly and literally declared war on him. Se Blasio ran, in part, as a police reformer.
The mayor of Atlanta was somewhat more equivocal, but nevertheless focused her message this way: “If you love this city, go home.”
In Minnesota, the Democratic leadership of the state was so eager to justify police crackdown on protestors it simply lied about “outside agitators,” indulging a notorious right-wing trope and then sending in the national guard behind already paramilitarized local police.
We are seeing now, in video from across the country, examples of police behaving responsibly, too, even sympathically—in Flint, in Camden. But these are relatively small scale examples, mostly of individual cops.
At the level of national leadership, there is not just a vacuum (or worse) in the White House. There is a vacuum in the Democratic Party.
The failure of mayors has been especially horrifying, with San Francisco’s London Breed perhaps the only mayor of a large American city explicitly instructing her police force to work exclusively to protect protestors.
What do the others think the job of police is?
Cities want to see themselves as progressive laboratories and sanctuaries, which, in many ways, they are. (As @willwilkinson has described, there is no such thing as a red city anymore in America, with density the clearest line dividing red and blue voters).
But when it comes to the relationship of those cities to police force and police violence, the blue bubble seems still enforced and protected by a very different set of values, retained from the 1970s or imported from suburbs created by white flight (where most officers live).
There is something very broken here, in addition to all of the other aspects of brokenness and brutality the last week has showcased again for an America whose white majority, at least, serially chooses to avert its eyes or worse.
Mayors of super majority blue cities so left wing they are now routinely electing anti-criminal justice prosecutors should not act as though they only govern at the pleasure of their police force, who exhibit entirely different (and more authoritarian) values.
As many others have pointed out, over the last few days in nearly every major city in America the police have demonstrated that they see themselves as occupying armies putting down insurrection.
This is because of bad training, and abhorrent militarization, and ugly cultural politics (among other reasons). But it is also the result of the total moral failing of their bosses, the mayors, who could change things, but have chosen not to. In fact, the opposite. (X/x)
