"Police officers around the country have been responding with violence as demonstrators gather to protest the killing of George Floyd. Much of this violence has been caught on video and has been instrumental in pushing authorities to hold officers accountable. In Buffalo, New York, for example, two police officers were charged after video went viral of officers shoving a 75-year-old protester to the ground. In New York City, two police officers were suspended for violence that was caught on video: an officer violently pushing a woman to the ground and another pulling a protester’s face mask down before blasting pepper spray. The sheer volume of material coming out of the demonstrations, though, makes it difficult to keep track, so two activists decided to start compiling the clips into a handy spreadsheet that is available online."
GeorgeFloyd Protest - police brutality videos on Twitter
Full Article:
[slate.com]
In Malcolm Gladwell's "David and Goliath, he writes about an approach taken in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, N.Y., long a hugely dangerous neighborhood, that turned things around in the 2010's. An officer took over as head of the city's Housing Bureau, which had responsibility for the Brownsville Projects, of which there are many. Much of the violence and robberies were being carried out by teen gangs. The officer,Joanne Jaffe, created a program, called J-RIP, that did a lot of reaching out to the kids, and their families. Jaffe understood that the ploce had no legitimacy in the neighborhood, because of the older "Broken Windows" approach to policing, which had landed people in jail for minor infractions. Thus, many of the families, virtually all, had brothers, fathers, uncles in jail. This hardly endeared the police to the kids.
Without going into more detail, the number of robberies and arrests, there plummeted over the next few years.
Joining with the kids, and their families, which included many younger siblings, who would soon be teens, themselves, created a sense of legitimacy for the police presence. And this led to different behavior.
The British "occupation" in Northern Ireland, led to more violence in response to the Catholics' sense of their illegitimacy.
In 1969, "The same year that Northern Ireland descended into chaos,"Two economists, working for the RAND Corporation," wrote a report about how to deal with insurgencies..."Rebellion and Authority," that "everyone red." It "became the blueprint for the war in Vietnam," even. It was about domination! Trump would like it. But it was all wrong, ass backwards.
When the report wrote "...that 'influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism,' they meant that the power of the state was without limits. If you wanted to impose order, you didn't have to worry about what those whom you were ordering about thought of you. You were above that." Later, he wrote that "When the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.”
“It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,” Seån MacStiofåin, the provisional IRA’s first chief of staff, as quoted in Gladwell’s book.
Trump, in his imbecilic calls for "Domination!" is bringing on backlash, as well.
Thanks for this.
I just entered a related post, at
[agnostic.com]
The naked truth about "protect & serve".....perverted!