The sheer amount of violence cops commit & the money we spend on them is mindblowing. Cops harass, arrest, beat, & sexually assault people regularly. We pay them to do it & protect their violence in courts. Here is some coverage from this week. This is just what made the news.
Police fired less lethal weapons at Cassidy Doyle, who said she was kneeling when she nearly lost an eye despite wearing a helmet and goggles. Idris Salaam was hit by a tear gas cannister trying to deescalate tension between police and protesters.
After killing 3 people, this cop gets to quit his job & be paid $125,000 on his way out. He killed Alvin Cole in February 2020, a mentally ill man with a sword named Antonio Gonzalez in 2015, and Jay Anderson, who was asleep in his car in 2016.
Since 2010, members of the Vallejo Police Department have killed 19 people---a higher rate than that of any of America’s hundred largest police forces except St. Louis’s. Records show that cops who shoot unarmed men aren’t punished; they are promoted.
NPYD's budget is $5.9 billion, which includes $220 million paid out to victims of their violence and misconduct.
"LAPD just released a $1.86 billion budget proposal for 2021-22. Their 2020-21 appropriatiton was $1.72 billion, so this is a $136 million increase. It would be their biggest budget ever." @sh4keer
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Dred Scott is buried 2 miles from where Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson. Philando Castile is buried there, too. In 1875, the SCT said "blacks had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." While overruled, its logic still infects our society today. 🧵 1/10
SCT: Black people "might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it." Prison slavery is legal. We cage more than any country---mostly Black & brown ppl. 2/10
If you treated every state as an individual country and compared their incarceration rates to the rest of the world, the thirty-three highest rates of incarceration are in the US. We are the world leader in mass incarceration, imprisoning more than China, Russia, and Iran. 3/10