QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From AlterNet:

Black 14-year-old Carrying a Puppy Tackled and Choked 
by Police for Giving Them a "Dehumanizing Stare"

Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta justified the use of force, saying McMillan was exhibiting threatening “body language,” which includes “clenched fists.” McMillan adamantly denies this charge because, well, he was holding a puppy.

“Of course we have to neutralize the threat in front of us,” said Zabaleta.  “And when you have somebody that is being resistant, somebody that is pulling away from you, somebody that’s clenching their fist, somebody that’s flaring their arms, that’s the immediate threat.”

McMillan’s mother, Maurissa Holmes saw the incident and recorded it on her cell phone. She told WSVN-TV, "I ran over there and said, 'That's my son, that's my son. Can you get off of him? He can't breathe.'

More here.

Again from AlterNet:

1 Black Man Is Killed Every 28 Hours by Police or Vigilantes

"Operation Ghetto Storm" explains why such killings occur so often. Current practices of institutional racism have roots in the enslavement of black Africans, whose labor was exploited to build the American capitalist economy, and the genocide of Native Americans. The report points out that in order to maintain the systems of racism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation, the United States maintains a network of "repressive enforcement structures". These structures include the police, FBI, Homeland Security, CIA, Secret Service, prisons, and private security companies, along with mass surveillance and mass incarceration.

And

The report digs into how police justify their shootings. Most police officers, security guards, or vigilantes who extrajudicially killed black people, about 47% (146 of 313), claimed they "felt threatened", "feared for their life", or "were forced to shoot to protect themselves or others". George Zimmerman, the armed self-appointed neighborhood watchman who killed Trayvon Martin last year, claimed exactly this to justify shooting Martin. Other justifications include suspects fleeing (14%), allegedly driving cars toward officers, allegedly reaching for waistbands or lunging, or allegedly pointing a gun at an officer. Only 13% or 42 people fired a weapon "before or during the officer's arrival".

Police recruitment, training, policies, and overall racism within society conditions police (and many other people) to assume black people are violent to begin with. This leads to police overacting in situations involving African-American suspects. It also explains why so many police claimed the black suspect "looked suspicious" or "thought they had a gun". Johannes Mehserle, the white BART police officer who shot and killed 22-year-old Oscar Grant in January 2009, claimed Grant had a gun, even though Grant was subdued to the ground by other officers.

More here.

And finally, this Youtube video coming out of my home town Houston, courtesy of a facebook friend:



The universe is telling me something when all this information comes my way over a twelve hour stretch.

I've written a lot here over the years about police brutality and corruption, and how certain aspects of police culture make it all inevitable.  But I've barely scratched the surface about a related but different aspect of police culture: American police forces exist in no small part in order to keep the black man down.  And I say this entirely without irony.  Because it's true.  You won't find it written in any mission statements anywhere, but you see it all the time, on the evening television news, in the papers, and just walking down the street.  

You can quibble about what the personal motivations are for a given cop who unjustly arrests, brutalizes, or kills a black man, but in the end personal motivation doesn't matter: this happens so incredibly often that its net effect is to oppress black men--you can't make that go away by talking about "bad apples," or how difficult the job is, or how you think black men wrangle with police more because they commit more crimes, which is a racist notion, anyway, from the get-go.  Cops oppress African Americans right in front of our faces all the freaking time.  This is one of the main functions of the American police officer, whether you want to call it that or not.

It's well past time that we have a massive public discussion about this.  I, for one, am sick to death of everybody ignoring what is a massive injustice.

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