Textbook cause and effect confusion.
I mean, I guess we should blame protesters for this sort of thing happening the last 35 years, right?
Just to expand on this a bit: The argument from people like Weinstein is, “See, violent protesters! This is why we need police militarization.” But this misses some important cause and effect. Police were militarized to fight the drug war. And overwhelmingly, the tools ...
... and tactics or militarization are deployed against people suspected of nonviolent, low-level drug offenses. Militarization also isn’t just about guns and gear. It’s about mindset. When you dress a cop like soldier, arm him like one, train him like one, and then tell him ...
... he’s fighting a “war,” we shouldn’t be surprised when cops start to see themselves as soldiers — not peacekeepers protecting and serving, but as the “thin blue line between civility and anarchy.” That “us vs. them” mentality conditions police to see the people ...
... they serve not as citizens with rights, but as potential threats. That bunker mentality — “whatever I have to do to get home at night” — is why bad cops get cover from other cops. It’s why police advocates and unions are so adamantly opposed to de-escalation training, or ...
... rewarding cops who courageously hold their fire, even when shooting would be justified, to talk someone down. It’s why police culture is polluted with imagery like the Punisher, the grim reaper, and the glorification of violence, and why police social media accounts are ...
... so rife with racism, bigotry, and dehumanization. In other words, militarization creates a culture that makes incidents like the killing of George Floyd inevitable. Floyd wasn’t a person to those cops, he was just a potential threat. Hence, no need to check to be sure ...
... he’s breathing. No need to treat his claustrophobia or fear of dying seriously. Just like the cops in the video above have little concern about the children in the house before deploying all that violence over some pot. (The affidavit for the warrant shows they didn’t even...
... bother to investigate whether children lived at the house.)
I obviously don’t condone shooting fireworks at cops. And even critics of militarization, like me, recognize that a city the size of Portland needs riot gear, bulletproof trucks, ballistics shields, a SWAT team ...
I obviously don’t condone shooting fireworks at cops. And even critics of militarization, like me, recognize that a city the size of Portland needs riot gear, bulletproof trucks, ballistics shields, a SWAT team ...
... and so on. But to say that militarization is justified by protesters shooting fireworks neglects the history and evolution of militarization, how it overwhelmingly tends to be used, and the mass destruction it has wrought on innocents, marginalized communities, nonviolent ...
... offenders and the relationship between police and the people they’re supposed to serve. Raids like the one above happen hundreds of times per day in this country. (Though, thankfully, increasingly rarely in Little Rock.) They inflict violence on entire households over ...
... nonviolent crimes that have yet to even be *charged*, much less proven in court. And they’ve left a long trail of bodies. Breonna Taylor is just one.
Tweets like Weinstein’s just brush all of that aside. Again, violent protest is wrong — and counterproductive. But ...
Tweets like Weinstein’s just brush all of that aside. Again, violent protest is wrong — and counterproductive. But ...
... that doesn’t mean protesters, even violent ones, don’t have legitimate claims. To say they justify police militarization takes an important cause of these protests and holds it up as the solution to ending them. It won’t. It will only ...
... create more George Floyds and Breonna Taylors. It will only provide more reasons to protest. And yes, some of those protests will turn violent, too.
