Gallup released a poll last June indicating that 60 percent of whites and 48 percent of nonwhites expressed having confidence in the police. What explains the 12 percent gap? Maybe better, what about the 40 to 52 percent of us that have little or no faith in law enforcement?
Trust in the police has been declining even among whites.
Like almost everything else in America that touches on ethics, justice, and dare I say it—truth—has been on the downward slide. That’s just one of the characteristics of collapse.
Still, there are plenty of folks out there who view the police (like the military) as above reproach. The uniform and shield erects an impenetrable wall that makes them immune to criticism. The police, however, are far from being the bastions of goodness and morality that some like to see them as. This article demonstrates a different side of policing—and it isn’t about “protect and serve,” an outdated myth.
Not since the late 1960s and early 1970s have these kinds of questions increasingly been on the minds of Americans not cowered and co-opted by the mainstream media embracing a pacifist/reformist ideal about government and its protectors, like the police.
I used to work in an office with one of these “the police can do no wrong” type of tools. Come to think of it, she was a tool about just about everything else—business and politics, too—but when it came to the law enforcement fraternity, she’d rather rip your eyes out than tolerate anyone talking trash about the po-po. Her dad was a cop, so I guess that was part of the problem.
Does everything in America have to be about this kind of irrationality? I guess so.
The police are not your friends.
So another cop shot another black man. This time it was in South Carolina. Liberals continue shaking their heads. Their solution—attaching body cameras to cops. Like that’s going to make any difference.
Some cops lie. This was apparent in the South Carolina shooting. Thankfully, someone filmed the shooting. More important, he had the courage to make the video public. That takes guts.
If the police tried to cover up the truth in the Walter Scott shooting, like they did in the Mike Brown shooting, as well as arresting the videographer on Staten Island who shot the video of Eric Garner being choked to death, then it’s obvious that police aren’t always up to good deeds in their work. They are capable of lying, especially when it becomes about the CYA issue. We don’t even have accurate information on the numbers of people that have been shot by police, so it’s impossible to assess how many white people have been shot. Of course that didn’t stop Bill O’Reilly, an apologist at heart for the law-and-order mindset, coming up with his own numbers.
Which brings me to this. Why is it so hard to believe that the police might also be lying, along with the FBI, in the Boston Marathon Bombing? Are Boston cops somehow a special breed possessing some greater moral fiber than any other members of law enforcement? There are certainly good cops in any community. There’s also the idea of the “blue wall of silence” which protects the bad cops and prevents ethical ones from speaking out without serious consequences.
But don’t take my word for it. Do a little reading on your own.
This is a good starting point.
Then we have these five books, too. I read Kristian Williams’ book back in 2013. It’s well-written and makes a strong case why a healthy dose of skepticism about cops is healthy, necessary, and lays out the seminal history of policing in the United States.
Don’t be surprised if the killing continues, and you wont be once you understand that,
(from the publisher’s website for, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America)
violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.
Your view on policing will never be the same, again.
We didn’t have police in this country until the mid-1800s, and even then they weren’t popular. They existed to protect the moneyed and keep the poor immigrants in their place. Historically, police are always the local agents of the empire, no matter the rhetoric of Bobby Peel or others. “To protect and serve” is a crafty phrase that omits what is being protected and who is being served. The average American thinks they protect his stuff and serve him. But the average American is wrong about so many things.
I find the Federal haste to kill Tsarnaev remarkably similar the Federal haste to kill McVeigh. I have spent a lot of time, in bursts, going through the pictorial evidence online, and can clearly see a few things. One, most of it has been carefully selected to omit crucial seconds of events. Photographers (of questionable provenance themselves) who had their cameras on full auto were shooting photos at a tremendous clip, and yet several seconds at a time of their sequences are missing. Two, nothing in the photographic evidence supports the incredible claims of carnage, missing limbs, etc., that the press gleefully reported. Almost all the “witness” accounts are contradicted by the actual footage of what the witnesses were doing at the scene. The crowds were largely dissipated when two bombs allegedly went off, yet there is almost no filmed evidence at all of the first bomb site. The second site, at the finish line, was clearly recorded even by suspiciously edited photography, and does not support the conventional narrative of what happened. The press is lazy as shit, they don’t get paid for actually working hard, especially when it would take nothing more than time and doggedness to learn a lot more than we know now. Reporters get fired and prosecuted for doing that.
Chechens. The arrogance of the FBI and CIA and others leads them to think that they can turn and control anyone. The Russians know better about Chechens. Even Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago that Chechens were the only group in the camps that the guards did not touch. Read Dmitri Orlov on the Chechens; he has no love for them, but he certainly has a grudging respect. Knowing the FBI and CIA both tried to “handle” them as sources makes me deeply suspicious that something went very, very wrong, which would explain the efforts first to kill them, and then to get the death penalty for the second brother (who is not allowed to speak to the public as it is, what are we afraid of?) as soon as possible? And why was it necessary to murder their Chechen friend in Orlando? What did he know that needed to be silenced?
At the end of the day, though, we are left with largely unanswerable questions, and as others wiser than myself have noted, that’s just where TPTB would like to leave those of us who question the phony evidence. Leave unanswered questions, dangle just enough evidence that shows the rest is false, and you keep the theorists diving in and out of rabbit holes for decades (see Kennedy, John F.). As to what was achieved, we saw a whole American city bow down to our new armored overlords during the three-day “manhunt.” Armored soldiers keeping the serfs in line, nothing to see here, just stay inside so we don’t have to shoot you.
@LP Great comment! A blog post in itself.
Did you see this? The NYPD breaks an NBA player’s leg. What a bunch of thugs! Dave Zirin of The Nation has the story. I just heard this, on Twitter, of all places. Of course, the original police version is different than what appears to have happened. If this is “serving and protecting,” I want no part of their service and protection!
Reading between the lines in LP’s comment and using your blog title, I’d suggest the media is not your friend, either. They use techniques similar to the police, like ambush. They show up at unsuspecting homes and businesses to get “the story.” It doesn’t matter what an interviewee says, because the footage that doesn’t suit the “story” will be clipped away. So it’s better to not speak with them either, at least not without your lawyer and your publicist handy.
I didn’t see that about Sefolosha, but if he is a Swiss national, the NYPD may be in for a worse ride than expected. However, at 6’7″ 220lbs, he is seriously under weight. The link implied that the terrifying guy suffered no violence because he was white, but I find it just as plausible that the bullies took on the black man not because he was black, but because he was physically much weaker.
A side note: I worked at Georgetown U. when the US olympic basketball team trained there under John Thompson. That was the last collegiate olympic team, although most of them played pro ball. They were huge, dimensions beyond normal humans. Not long after the Washington Bullets drafted John “Hot Rod” Williams out of LSU (IIRC), I actually sat across from him on the metro. He was a “small” forward, but his legs stretched completely across the aisle and his thighs were at least 28″ in circumference. I am shorter and have more muscle than Sefolosha, and wonder how these Manute Bol types find their way into the NBA.
The media is not our friend, true. Whether they are willing accomplices in telling the big lies, or greedily telling half-truths for headlines, or just incompetent and too dense to even realize they wouldn’t know the right questions to ask if the questions punched them in the nose, they invariably miss the real story and peddle illusion. The ambush is a very useful tool for creating illusion.