Thursday Open Thread [7.7.2016]
Earlier this week, Alton Sterling was killed in front of a convenience store in Baton Rouge. There are two videos in the public domain for this one and there may be more. The owner of the store has been forthcoming about what he witnessed, which sure looks like a plain execution from here. The Justice Department and the FBI are investigation and kudos to the Governor of Louisiana for getting them involved so quickly. In the midst of the media reports of Sterling’s previous run ins with the law, it seems that Sterling had a gun in his pocket. He was carrying a gun in an open-carry state.
By the way, for those who will make a point of Sterling’s carrying a gun, which has been reported in a number of places, remember that Louisiana is an open-carry state. If he were armed, then, right up until the moment somebody shot him to death, Alton Sterling was exercising his Second Amendment rights in exactly the way the NRA and its noisy apologists have suggested we all should.
Except that we’re not all black, the true original American Exceptionalism has come home again.
I haven’t seen the video of this, either.
Last night in the suburbs of St. Paul, another black man was killed by a police officer. This man apparently was licenced to carry a weapon and was accompanied by his girlfriend and a young child. The girlfriend livestreamed part of the encounter to Facebook. You can see the tape at the Mother Jones link above. I haven’t seen the tape, I just can’t.
This is Cassandra writing this Open Thread. I can’t tell you how angry I am that more black people are being shot down by police officers — on video — and that the odds are that they’ll get away with this murder. I’m just as angry that law enforcement keeps telling everyone that they need better cooperation and partnerships with the black community, yet they still can’t bring themselves to treat this community with better respect. The heartbreak and the anger here is that there is no way to win this game. You can’t gain enough respectability, you can’t follow directions closely enough to overcome *their* fears, their *anger*, *their* bigotry and all of *their* entitlement to take your life or the life of someone close to you. Police, fans of police and bigots will work at blaming the victims here, pretending that there is some perfect set of behavior that would have saved these guys. I’ll remind you that it is that fantasy of some perfectly subservient behavior that was the organizing theory of the Black Codes. That never went away apparently and lives most vividly in the souls of people who want someone to “make those people behave”.
I am a fan of non-violence to pressure governments to do the right thing. But increasingly — as people want to equate their freedom with their guns — I am thinking that the next step is for African Americans to legally buy a gun and get licenced to carry them. If enough of us do it, perhaps policing will change to adjust to a legally armed citizenry.
Not sure how much I can hang out in the comments here today. I’m accustomed to this progressive community devolving into conversations of how much more perfectly black people could respond to authority to save themselves this abuse, but am not sure I can psychically live with that today.
But this is today’s topic.
#BlackLivesMatter
Tags: Black Lives Matter
“I’m accustomed to this progressive community devolving into conversations of how much more perfectly black people could respond to authority to save themselves this abuse, ”
You are distraught and not thinking clearly.
Cassandra, thank you for that personal note. It is sickening. The never ending stream of murders by police who “feel threatened” and the continual rationalizations by racists and idiots who find it impossible to imagine a world in which the white cop is not “the good guy.”
Mike Mathews’ FB comments section, for example, is utterly disgusting. How can the simple statement “Police need to stop murdering people” be controversial?
I watched both videos, and feel sick to my stomach.
The FB video was heartbreaking. I can’t imagine remaining so polite to the officer and focused. I would have completely lost it, but as a white woman I wouldn’t have been shot – so I’m allowed to completely lose it. This hit me so hard. That woman wasn’t allowed to have a human reaction – and she knew it. She knew that a human reaction could result in the officer shooting her as well. I. Just. Can’t. Imagine.
And why the hell was she handcuffed and put in a police car? Her boyfriend was dying and she wasn’t allowed to be with him? We’ve seen this so many times before. Remember the black kid shot by his white male neighbor as he was taking out the trash? Remember the mother not being allowed to go to her son as he lay dying? I would have beaten the crap out of anyone keeping me away from my child, and my privilege would let me get away with it.
What the hell is wrong with the police? And there is something horribly wrong. There was a 4 year old in the back seat of the car while the cop was shooting. She was there while the cop lost it after the shooting and was still pointing his gun at the car. The mother and daughter are extremely lucky to be alive.
My head is all over the place. This has to stop. I’m ready to fire every police officer and start over. When it comes to cops silence is golden, expected and excused. Sorry, but until police officers start policing themselves they are all complicit.
It is a testament to the restraint of black men that they do not pursue street justice against cops.
In a bit of good news, working people win one in Delaware! This made me smile. Robin Densten worked for the DOJ and was often required to work overtime without overtime pay, so she quit. She applied for unemployment benefits but the DOJ fought tooth and nail to deny her benefits. She appealed pro se and won against the lawyered-up DOJ. She didn’t get damages or even get her job back. All she got was unemplyoment benefits. but she won on principle and the law, and the story made the AP feed. The DOJ onslaught against Densten looks like it was inherited from St. Beau.
If you are interested the gory details of the case are here:
http://law.justia.com/cases/delaware/superior-court/2016/n14a-09-008-rfs.html
I suggest everyone start referring to these incidents using precise language. That’s what I’m doing. These are lynchings. Mr Sterling was lynched. Eric Garner was lynched. We are all responsible if we don’t step up and say exactly what is happening.
Also, I’m not discussing it with anyone. There’s nothing to discuss. Two cops arrived, tackled Sterling, pinned him to the ground and executed him. There aren’t two sides so there’s nothing to discuss re: the lynching.
Agreed, Dorian. These are lynchings.
Congress can respond almost immediately to faked videos about ACORN and Planned Parenthood. When are they going to respond to any of the multiple REAL videos of police killing black men? Let’s ask our delegation and our candidates for Congress.
Words have meanings. These are not lynchings. In lynchings, a mob performs the criminal acts, making it difficult or impossible to assign individual guilt.
By definition, these are murders, even though juries refuse to convict.
All lives will matter only when Black Lives Matter.
I think there is a mob. They might not be at the scene, but they’re there to make sure the cop doesn’t get charged – a modern day lynching.
Government sanctioned executions. i.e THE argument the gun nuts love to make as to why people need guns.
“making it difficult or impossible to assign individual guilt”
Does it really matter who pulled the trigger? I thought under most statutes all the accomplices are guilty of murder, including the guys who held him down, and the getaway driver. The triggerman might get a heavier sentence but the charge is the same for all the accomplices.
it does matter. Mob mentality is different from storm-trooper mentality. This was storm trooper mentality. They didnt get “swept up in it all” and forget themselves… or however they try to explain it. They knew from the moment that interaction began that they could murder this man and not have to answer for it. Hell, given where it happened, they probably started their night looking for a black man to kill.
There is no trigger in a lynching. The form of execution mattered. Hanging was considered the most shameful manner of execution. Being shot was considered the least.
Also, the whole point of lynchings was that police and prosecutors had their power superseded by the mob. This is police using their power extrajudicially — arguably far worse. The first situation is vigilante “justice.” The second is fascism.
I wrote that before I saw Ben’s comment. He beat me to it.
Unless police go to jail for these murders and go quickly, how can a black person have any faith in this system? I’m white and I don’t trust the police to not kill me or abuse their authority. I simply can’t imagine what it must be like to be an African American these days.
I disagree, Ben, about the pre-meditation angle.
True story from three nights ago:
I come home from an out-of-town trip about 9 p.m., during the rainstorm/fireworks display nearby. My adult son and his wife had hosted a party at my house for about a dozen friends, and it was just breaking up. One guy, very drunk, wanders into a neighbor’s garage, where the neighbor finds him lying on the floor and calls the police, since he has no idea who this guy is or even if he’s alive.
By the time the county officer arrives, the guy is back on the front lawn and his (almost equally drunk) GF is telling the officer to leave the drunk alone, which is when I realize all this is going on out front. The officer was highly emotional by this time. He doesn’t have his gun out (white privilege; this is a solidly middle-class neighborhood), but he’s wound up enough that he’s ready to arrest the couple; he’s yelling at the woman about her attitude.
Long story short, the hardest person to deal with in the situation was the cop, and it wasn’t hard to see this from his side: He gets a call about what might be a body in a garage. He shows up to find a guy so drunk he can hardly speak and an irate girlfriend screaming at him. He’s amped up, and perhaps understandably so. The GF is telling him “everything’s all right,” to which the cop responded, “If everything was all right, nobody would have called the police.”
I have no doubt that had this been a black neighborhood, things could have gone down differently, by which I mean much worse. I doubt I could have deterred the officer from arresting the couple at the minimum.
It’s not that they are a priori racist, though that might be the case. It’s that, in the adrenaline rush, they are afraid, which makes them overly aggressive.
@Jason: The best way to police the behavior of the police isn’t the threat of jail, because they know they can beat that rap. The best threat is to their pensions.
On a lighter note, remember SuxCo’s sheriff of Nuttingham? Here’s a story from Georgia about one of his fellow nutjobs actually trying to effect a “citizen’s arrest” at a county meeting. Hilarity ensued:
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/anti-government-kooks-laughed-out-of-georgia-county-meeting-for-trying-to-arrest-commissioners/
I dunno, A. Dont you think cops have the scenario in which they would kill someone in their heads? Dont you think they’ve played it over a dozen times? “All I need is an excuse”. They might not
have been out looking to kill THIS MAN on THIS NIGHT, but they were certainly ready to take a life and knew full well they would get a paid vacation for it.
It is possible to point a gun at a cop and survive:
Here are 8 white people who pointed guns at police officers — and didn’t get killed
The police, the criminal justice system, and, by extension all of us, are a mob. These are lynchings. Until we stop trying to dissect them and just call them what they are and end them, they’ll continue.
I think that guy in GA was the guy that did a video about 10 years ago for his wacky citizen grand juries and gave the wrong URL. He didn’t have the domain name registered and in 10 minutes, I did. Good times.
And I agree with Ben and anonymous — this isn’t lynching. Lynching is dependent on mob justice where the authorities look the other way or somehow sanction it. This is more state sanctioned killing. A level of policing certainly that would not be allowed pointed at white people.
From that link:
“Rather than a speech, this will be a demonstration,” said demonstrator Paul Nally, of Barstow County. “This is what happens when public officials ignore the rights, privileges and immunities of citizens.”
Citizenship is all rights, privileges and immunities with these whack jobs. No compromises, courtesies or responsibilities.
Donald Trump is not the source of America’s incipient fascism, he’s a symptom. The backlash against Black Lives Matter is the better evidence of fascism afoot in the land.
As Philando Castile’s mother said on TV this morning, she taught him to comply with police, and he did, and he got shot anyway.
From a fascist perspective, the great thing about Black Lives is that you don’t have to make them wear a special star to know who they are.
Cassandra – That’s fair enough. I personally think these killings fit your definition quite well actually. If I’m honest I think they fit your definition exactly.
@DG: Unless you dissect them, you can’t learn the best/fastest way to stop them.
You are distraught and not thinking clearly.
Puck, you need to thank your higher power that you are not in my presence today. All you have to do is to search for a Trayvon Martin or Zimmerman or Ferguson or Gates threads to see the BS. Not that you would know or have done any searching to remember.
Stop trying to diminish the problem or just stop participating.
OK I did, and as I already knew, there were very few comments suggesting how black men should change their behavior, and they were all from the usual gun nuts and rightwing trolls, none from the “progressive community” as you alleged. But maybe we all look alike to you.
Meanwhile you can go back to your usual pastime of scanning IP addresses.
I guess I fail to see what details need to be dissected. Two cops pinned a guy to the floor and executed him. I’m not going to consider that fact that one yelled “gun” and subsequently pulled a gun out of the dead man’s pocket. These are exactly the type of distractions that allow the murder to be sanctioned/ignored. I’m done with that.
If you all want to discuss chokeholds procedures, or what constitutes resisting arrest, or selling loose cigarettes or CDs or whatever, have at it. I have absolutely zero interest in that conversation.
@cassandra: Some of us don’t know how to search the archives. Maybe reprinting a few choice quotes would refresh memories.
A similar defense for murder by cop is “He grabbed for my gun, so I shot him.” Well, obviously you won the struggle for the gun, and then later you shot him for some other reason.
I’m not interested in having such a discussion either. I do think it illustrates that faulty police training is involved, and the issue has been mostly sidelined in the racist backlash against BLM.
For those who don’t remember when this was discussed immediately post-Ferguson, police are taught to protect themselves at all costs, and that means all costs. Police shoot people (mostly minorities, especially black, but also low-status whites) when they SUSPECT a person MIGHT be reaching for a gun. They have in several cases shot, on sight, black men holding sharp implements who were no credible threat to their safety.
Yes, that appoach avoids tragedies like the stabbing of Lt. Szczerba a few years ago — but at the cost of hundreds of lives annually and the perpetual armed occupation of thousands of square miles of our cities. It also won’t address some of the more egregious examples, like Sterling or the two South Carolina shootings (and now the Minnesota execution. ICYMI, he told the cop he had a licensed gun and was reaching for his wallet, at which point he was shot.) For that we need more frequent psychological screening. A lot of these cops have PTSD and don’t know it.
A movement needs concrete steps to put reform into action. IMHO this would be a good place to, if not start, at least apply pressure. Reform of police training is doable, and I think it has a good chance of helping.
To continue on the police issue, the more drastic solution would be to go the Camden, NJ route — break the union control of policing by constituting a new force.
This could ultimately be the best solution in Delaware’s case. If Wilmington were merged into New Castle County, both forces could be dissolved and a new one created. But I don’t see such a thing happening until after John Carney has served two terms, Tom Gordon has finally retired and — knock wood — Matt Denn is governor.
puck’s old progressive pal anoni was all over this thread blaming Gates for his issues with the cops. Geezer finds fault with the victim asking the cop “Do you know who I am?”
And I’m not spending my work day searching. And puck, I’m completely over you trying to pretend that this space is some perfect example of allyship. It isn’t and you can go back and review your own posts on violence against women as a prime example. I get that this messes with your idea of yourself as some superior progressive, but too bad. There’s all kinds of issues in this space and you are not a help to that.
That said, you need to think about taking a time out here.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you should spend a lot of time on it. I really don’t know how to do it, so I don’t know if it’s easily searchable. No disrespect intended, but the Gates incident looks so tame compared with what has come since.
Meanwhile, here’s an excellent article on the NRA’s response (or lack thereof) to two gun owners being gunned down by police:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/07/3796062/nra-black-lives-matter/
The NRA thinks its members constitute the “well-regulated militia” in its original form — slave patrols.
There is one aspect in which these two shootings operate like lynchings: They send a clear message to the black community about its place, reinforced every time another cop kills another black person for no reason beyond having come to the attention of the cop.
Before the concentration camps, this was what it was like for Jews in Germany. Those wearing the star would be brutalized in the streets, their possessions taken from them with just as much legal cover as the authorities in Ferguson had for impoverishing black citizens over unpaid traffic tickets.
It’s becoming clear that, just as with education in the 1950s, it will take federal intervention to protect African-Americans from their fellow citizens.
Amanda Marcotte also points out the NRA hypocrisy and concludes with this:
“It’s time to admit the NRA is not a “gun rights” organization. The NRA — and their allies in the Republican party — are about one thing and one thing only: Stoking racialized fears of crime amongst paranoid white people for political gain and gun profits. The inability to give two hoots about the police killings of two gun owners, who happen to be black, just confirms it.”
http://www.salon.com/2016/07/07/nras_offensive_hypocrisy_when_will_the_organization_demand_justice_for_black_gun_owners_shot_by_police/
And more, from The Atlantic:
“Heightened awareness of a drumbeat of killings—including two this week—leaves many people feeling angry, exhausted, and powerless. Counting the number of dead and watching videos of them die doesn’t prevent it from happening again.
“In one in five fatal shootings, the names of the police officer responsible is never disclosed. Even when they are, many officers face no consequences.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/monitorial-citizenship-technology/490286/
Sorry to keep harping on this, but it IS the topic of the day. Consider how big a deal this is to put such a dent in the non-stop Trump coverage.
The Atlantic article concludes that monitoring the police as in the Minnesota case will keep up the pressure.
If Wilmington is “merged” into New Castle county, the city government needs to be dissolved so that we only have one, preferably not the city, corrupt government and police force running things.
If we can’t get guns out of the equation, then, we’re all f’d.
With a home on the west side of 141, only a couple of miles from the city boundary, I’ve always been terrified that Wilmington will try to annex the neighborhood.
What’s thoroughly disappointing in this entire situation is two aspects, one that cassandra nails, and one that she doesn’t consider.
First, this from cassandra: I am a fan of non-violence to pressure governments to do the right thing. But increasingly — as people want to equate their freedom with their guns — I am thinking that the next step is for African Americans to legally buy a gun and get licenced to carry them. If enough of us do it, perhaps policing will change to adjust to a legally armed citizenry.
It is tragic that this was the logic that led to the creation of the Black Panthers in the 1960s (and I am NOT saying it’s wrong; I happen to agree with it), and we are now five decades later . . . and the streets of 1960s Oakland now belong to all of America.
Then there’s this: no matter what we do about race relations and civilian oversight of police, as Mother Jones points out, NOTHING is going to substantively change until we get the cops OUT of the revenue generation/collection business, and back into the business of protecting people from crime.
http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops-excessive-fines
It’s high time to realize that we are not dealing with a rash of isolated incidents. We are dealing with a systematic war on certain sectors of the American people (chiefly people of color, poor people of all colors) by urban administrators who visualize using cops as a taxation/collection agency and the police who have compromised their integrity as “the thin blue line” in order to cooperate.
Reform of police training is doable, and I think it has a good chance of helping.
It is, as is a revision of Use of Force Polices like the recommendations for the Philly PD by the DOJ.
The lack of comment by the NRA on the rights of black people to carry weapons goes part way to support something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. And that is that the NRA is a collaborator in the violence in communities as well as a collaborator in the shootings by the police. They clearly support a country awash in guns and clearly don’t give a damn that people get them and use them illegally. Because more illegal gun use supports their narrative of making sure that people have a way to protect themselves. A country awash in guns is more dangerous even for the police and they’ve certainly internalized the fact that they can encounter guns everywhere. Guns in the hands of everyone is a legitimate police problem. Even so, they don’t gun down white people with the same frequency.
It is tragic that this was the logic that led to the creation of the Black Panthers in the 1960s
Yes, they were originally formed to protect themselves from the police. And when a bunch of them posed on the steps of the capitol with their legal guns, Ronald Reagan eventually signed the Muford Act which was meant to roll back certain gun rights and give the police a way to harass black people further.
^^^^ My point exactly (but more explicitly stated).
“Sorry to keep harping on this, but it IS the topic of the day. Consider how big a deal this is to put such a dent in the non-stop Trump coverage.”
We need to harp on this. It should be a topic everyday until something gets done here in Delaware and elsewhere. In Delaware a cop punted a man in the head on camera and was acquitted, then got a nice payout to go away. Meanwhile, the city of Dover illegally refuses to disclose details of the legal settlement.
Too many police records are not available for public scrutiny in Delaware for no good reason. Civil asset forfeiture reform never made it out of committee. I read all the time that cops have the same rights as any American, but they don’t. They have more.
Ten officers were shot tonight in Dallas, and three have died. This is NOT the way to effect reform in policing and police-community relations. They are still human beings with families.
Nuts and bad guys do almost all their killing with guns. Cops fear citizens because any of them might be bad guys with guns. Innocents in heavily armed neighborhoods fear bad guys with guns and cops with guns, along with the occasional nut with a gun. All blacks have to fear profiling cops with guns.
Notice one common thread here?
Obama’s right… need real gun control laws.
Huh?
Liberal Elite says:
July 8, 2016 at 7:31 am
Obama’s right… need real gun control laws.
Yep… That’s the core of half of the problem.
What do you prefer?
5 dead cops? or angry blacks with no rifles?
Choose one.
What happened in Dallas is exactly the revolutionary wet-dream scenario the gun nuts have been peddling for years. A “good man” a “man who served his country” , fed up with tyranny against his people uses his Constitutional right to make war on a government that has failed him. It whats the Bundy Militia wanted, its what Alex Jones and that ilk preach. There is one difference here.