Thread: You probably missed an important story this weekend. Cops in Minnesota arrested, sexually assaulted, electronic body-scanned, and mocked for not "speaking English" an Asian-American CNN producer who was covering racial justice protests. (1) documentcloud.org/documents/2061…
Cops from multiple different Minnesota agencies violated a federal court order and abused numerous journalists, including stealing phones, beating them, and torturing them (inflicting serious pain and injury for the purpose of causing pain). These are all federal crimes. (2)
The reaction from the media was to send a sternly worded letter from a lawyer reminding police about the First Amendment and asking them politely not to do it again. A few thoughts: (3)
First, this is not an aberration. Cops have brutally suppressed every movement for social and racial justice in modern US history. We must learn the right lessons: this is what the institution of policing is. It is authoritarian. Police are the greatest threat to democracy. (4)
This is the same reason cops let a white teenager parade around murdering protesters with an illegal assault rifle and then donated to his defense. They are a right-wing fascist formation--they don't care about the 1st Amend. They never will, no matter how fancy the letter. (5)
The most urgent thing we can do to stop race-based police violence but also for any semblance of democracy is reduce their budgets, their power, their surveillance capabilities, and their military weaponry. They have proven that there is no other way. (end)
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