Arson and looting in Minneapolis. Now do we have your attention?
It is counterproductive. It makes things worse. Yet maybe the riots have a positive purpose.
George Floyd lay prone, handcuffed behind his back.The police officer's knee and weight was on his neck. We could see and hear Floyd say he couldn't move and couldn't breathe. He begged for help. "Please. Please."
The officer kept the weight on. Floyd died.
The videotape of George Floyd's slow death at the hands of Minneapolis police are so shocking and apparently indefensible that the public response was instant and universal. Police spokespeople criticized the officers. Even Fox and Trump himself admitted the video looked bad.
It launched civil unrest and the news story changed to that. Now the video on cable news showed angry people burning buildings, breaking windows, throwing rocks, and looting. There were voices of disapproval from government and new commentators. Now Trump was tweeting warnings.
Impression Number One: How self defeating for the cause of justice for Blacks. How counterproductive. Instead of generating a step forward in race relations, the riots generate two steps back. The riots and looting send the message of black menace and criminality. No wonder citizens--and the police--treat blacks with suspicion and roughness. Look at them: violent thieves. What a terrible message.
Impression one is that the riots hurt the cause of justice.
Impression Number Two: Maybe the riots do good. I realize this is unintuitive to many readers.
This was not the first instance of indefensible police behavior; it just happened to be videotaped. Four officers participated because it did not seem wildly wrong to them, even with witnesses taping them. If this incident had ended up being resolved with some private grieving by the family and friends, with some public apologies by a police chief and city politicians, with perhaps the firing, arrest, and--possibly--a manslaughter plea and a few years in prison in protective isolation for the police, then it would be understood to be a situation of "bad cops did bad."
It would be a manageable incident. Perhaps, in the months to come, there might be a memorial plaque at the site of the death, along with opportunities for white and black politicians to express apologies and to feel absolved, promising they would use this tragic incident to improve their systems. It would show George Floyd did not die in vain.
It would be a manageable incident. Perhaps, in the months to come, there might be a memorial plaque at the site of the death, along with opportunities for white and black politicians to express apologies and to feel absolved, promising they would use this tragic incident to improve their systems. It would show George Floyd did not die in vain.
And nothing much would change.
The net cost to Minneapolis would be approximately zero. A few people would get to present themselves as peacemakers and eager to do better next time, net-net a positive for them. A big civil settlement with the family would cost a fraction of one percent of the city budget.
The riots change this into a big deal. Now the takeaway is that if Minnesota police screw up like this the cost to the city is in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions. It means whole neighborhoods become blighted for a decade, maybe a generation. It is a huge black eye on the city, county, state. It means police departments get overhauled, that many careers up and down the line are stunted, perhaps ended, pensions cut short. It means chaos inside the department, with internal investigations and records of citizen complaints against every officer getting reviewed all over again, this time without the presumption of innocence by the officer. It is a cluster-fuck, an unmitigated disaster. Avoid this at all costs in the future.
From the point of view of black citizens, that isn't a bug. It is a feature. The riots make this an incident worth avoiding, not just regretting.
Impression Number Three: This is why a segment of Bernie Sanders supporters will vote Green. It isn't that they support Trump, because they don't. Although some Sanders supporters assert that they see no difference whatever between Biden and Trump, most in fact consider Trump worse and different. Sanders himself certainly does. No matter.
Some will vote for a Green candidate anyway, even at the price of Trump's re-election, because they are so frustrated with what they consider the failure of the liberal-centrist Democratic Party to address the big problems of income distribution and justice that they want to get their attention by doing the voter equivalent of rioting. They don't want an apology and promises of reform. They want Biden-type Democrats to be frightened, angry, and to pay a price that gets their attention. If it takes the re-election of Trump to do it, so be it.
Impression Number Four: I enjoy privilege. It is inconceivable to me that I would be treated the way George Floyd was treated. There is exactly one way he could have better communicated that he was no threat to the police than to be lying prone on the street, hands cuffed behind his back, saying he cannot move, cannot breathe, that he was dying, and begging, please, for help. He could have been white, or female.
Black men are treated differently. I knew that. The phone camera video reminds me. It is easy to forget that. The riots will help Minneapolis remember, too.
5 comments:
"Are All Whites the Deplorables of 2016?"
The riots and arson that have eclipsed police homicides of unarmed blacks in Minneapolis and Louisville, and the other homicides during citizen's arrests by white pursuers, have now boxed Biden in-- he cannot pick Klobarchar, Warren, Gillibrand or any other white woman. Indeed, he is now out of wiggle-room-- and he has been wiggling hard to avoid it-- in being able to not pick a black woman for VP. The search now must turn to vetting little known black women for whom no video exists calling out systemic "white racism" and demands for reparations. Stacy Abrams, Kamala Harris, Ayanna Pressley et al have created volumes of video that the GOP can play in an endless loop assailing white racism in words easily depicted as being hurled against all white people, made even worse by calls for reparations.
Hillary Clinton's 2016 catastrophic branding of "deplorables"was limited to just Trump supporters. The white racism branding encompasses 70% of the electorate.
Getting the party faithful to accept an unknown black woman who does not have a pedigree of public denunciations of whites and calls for reparations may not be possible. We have probably reached the tipping point where a black woman who has not broadly denounced white people, in Biden's words, simply "ain't black". Barrack Obama was elected precisely because no footage existed of him denouncing whites generally. His mother was white. Obama is not precedent for Biden's quandary in selecting of a black VP candidate that the agitated party faithful will accept.
The riots and looting and burning are ready made television for GOP style "law and order"-- the kind that always works for politicians in times of racial unrest or rising crime statistics, candidates like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Biden is increasingly being forced to say things like blacks and Hispanics should be released from prison on a large scale. It is a redux of Michael Dukakis granting "furloughs" to black prisoners in Massachusetts in the 1980's. It will likely be fatal to electoral victory for Democrats
It is getting ever harder to see a winning path for Biden and the Democrats so long as our racial politics remain so inflamed. It will be impossible if those flames keep growing.
Minnesota and Minneapolis are a democratic state and city, controlled 100% by democrats. Minnesota is bluer than blue.
Amy Klobuchar declined to prosecute the "killer cop" many years ago, even though he had many complaints against him.
What happened to George Floyd was WRONG, and hopefully some cops, the police chief, and the mayor take a deserved fall for this event.
ALL blacks aren't mistreated this way. Money talks, and the cops would have never done this to LeBron James or Magic Johnson.
ALL whites don't get the preferential treatment. Plenty of low-income whites have had their faces rubbed into the pavement, and knees have been put on their necks. You've just never seen a video of it.
This was an unfortunate and criminal event. Rather than blame it on racism, I'd prefer to blame it on how some low-income folks are treated by the police. Someone with lots of money, regardless of their ethnicity, gets treated better than the rest of us. Just ask OJ Simpson.
Bernie voters were prepared to abandon Biden before the Minneapolis event occurred. I expect a huge block of Bernie voters to sit the election out because Biden is corrupt, senile, and uninspiring. Biden doesn't have a chance.
I don't think the riots will "do good."
Look at what just happened in Minneapolis. Who in their right mind would want to open a store in that neighborhood? Any time a cop does something that can be characterized as bad (regardless of whether or not it's actually bad *), they won't just go after the cop, they'll go after you. No one wants to be the next Reginald Denny.
There's a reason for "white flight," and it's not "racism." It's self-preservation.
I agree with Thad about the likely political repercussions of this rioting. The Democrats will be politically incapable of denouncing the violence **, and all of us potential victims of that kind of racially-motivated violence will notice and vote accordingly.
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* Case in point: Michael Brown in Ferguson, who committed a strong-arm robbery in a convenience store, and then attacked a cop and tried to grab the officer's gun. They rioted over that, shouting a sloganized lie, "Hands up, don't shoot."
** Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, when asked about the police response to rioting after the death of Freddie Gray, responded that "we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well."
Perhaps the mmost frightening aspect of the incident in Minneapolis is the
overall stupidity of the officers involved. As a nation, (thanks to the preponderance of the ubiquitous cell phone camera) we have passed the era in which such atrocious behavior by the police can be denied. I'm certain our
lying scumbag of a president would proclaim the policemen involved in this
incident as "good people", which they are obviously not. Moral leadership in our country is utterly lacking in the presidency, the Congress and on down thru state and municipal levels. The election of Trump uncovered the dismal fact that ignorance and bigotry run rampant through our nation. While rioting is never to be applauded, what actions are left to a populace that
can only react with lawlessness when their pleas for justice are routinely
ignored by goverhing bodies at every level? Let's remember that the Boston
Tea Party was also a riot and we celebrate that bit of lawlessness with glee!
Bob Warren
“ Plenty of low-income whites have had their faces rubbed into the pavement, and knees have been put on their necks. You've just never seen a video of it.”
Incorrect. The Eagle Point police shooting of an unarmed man in a restaurant bathroom a couple of years ago. For which taxpayers are paying dearly, much less so than he did with his life.
I read the entire Grand Jury testimony AND watched the video.
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