As Adam Serwer said of his piece on Twitter today, "American policing is set up to reward officers who commit abuses, and punish those who report them. It’s not a system that can be overcome by the benign intentions of individual cops." Here's how it begins.
—Erika
—Erika
When the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin dug his knee into the back of George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes while Floyd pleaded for help, he was merely following the president’s advice.
“Please don’t be too nice,” Donald Trump told an audience of police officers on Long Island in 2017, in a speech largely focused on the MS-13 gang. The audience laughed. “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’”
Floyd’s killing has sparked nationwide protests, despite the fact that the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 100,000 Americans and left 40 million without work, is still killing about 1,000 people a day in the United States. Those Americans who were disproportionately dying from a plague came out in force to protest being murdered by their government. Trump, who ran as the “law and order” candidate, now presides over the very “American carnage” he vowed to end.
A different president might have tried to quell the unrest and unify the nation, but Trump is incapable of that. He cannot rally Americans around a common identity or interest, because his presidency is a rejection of the concept, an affirmation of the conviction that America’s traditional social hierarchies are good and just. He is hardly the first president to embrace those hierarchies as unassailably virtuous, but he is the first in decades to do so openly. Law and order, for this president, simply means that he and his ideological allies are above the law, while others, such as Floyd, are merely subject to it. The chaos sweeping across the United States has many causes, but the one over which the president has the most control is the culture of lawlessness and impunity he has cultivated and embraced. When you attempt to impose “law and order” without justice, you get chaos.
The moral core of the protests is a simple demand: that police who abuse their authority be held accountable, that black Americans be able to live free lives without fearing that they will be cut short by a chance encounter with law enforcement. This demand clashes with the history of the United States, in which the ideal of equal justice coexists uneasily with the tacit understanding of many Americans that guarding the color line is one of law enforcement’s obligations, a commitment that has existed from slavery to the beating of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Ronald Reagan blamed the activist for his own murder, hissing that King’s death was the kind of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order.”
When a white dog-walker in Central Park threatened to call the police on a black bird-watcher and tell them that “an African American man is threatening my life,” she was leveraging their mutual understanding that the police exist to protect white people from black people. This is why Chauvin and his fellow officers thought nothing of him being videotaped as he dug his knee into Floyd’s neck, and why authorities in Georgia saw no crime in the stalking and killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Integrating police departments was meant to help align law enforcement with its stated ideals, but as in every other area of public policy, correcting centuries of tradition is an arduous task, even if one is sincerely committed to it.
A report on the New Orleans courts by The Lens on how the DA’s office refused to prosecute nearly half of the felony domestic violence cases in 2019.
—Erika
—Erika
A new report by the watchdog group Court Watch NOLA reveals that the Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office refused to prosecute 47 percent of felony domestic violence cases in 2019. Late last year the DA received criticism when it was revealed that the office had dropped 83 percent of misdemeanor domestic violence cases in New Orleans Municipal Court in 2018 and 2019.
Simone Levine, director of Court Watch NOLA, said the refusal rates for both misdemeanor and felony cases reflects a broader disregard for victims of crime in the New Orleans criminal justice system.
“I think it sends a simple message. I think that crime victims are simply not being listened to. I don’t think that they are being involved in the process,” Levine said of the refusal rates. “I think that they’re forgotten. I think that they’re forgotten by everyone.”
The section of the report contends that in general crime victims in New Orleans — specifically victims of domestic violence — are not being provided with adequate resources and are often left out of the criminal justice process that is intended to keep them safe.
George Joseph at Gothamist has obtained secret recordings of police in Mt. Vernon, NY.
—Erika
—Erika
In hours of secretly recorded telephone conversations, police officers in Mount Vernon, New York, reveal widespread corruption, brutality and other misconduct in the troubled Westchester County city just north of the Bronx.
Caught on tape by a whistleblower cop, the officers said they witnessed or took part in alarming acts of police misconduct, from framing and beating residents to collaborating with drug dealers, all as part of a culture of impunity within the department’s narcotics unit.
The Mount Vernon police tapes, obtained exclusively by Gothamist/WNYC, were recorded from 2017 to this year by Murashea Bovell, a 12-year veteran of the department who has been blowing the whistle on misconduct for years.
In 2014 and 2015, Bovell reported his colleagues’ alleged corruption and brutality in confidential complaints to the city and a lawsuit against the city, which was dismissed on procedural grounds. But he saw little change, so he began quietly recording his colleagues to substantiate his own claims.
“I need to have something tangible,” he told Gothamist/WNYC. “Something to prove that what I was saying is true, and wouldn’t fall on deaf ears if the time came.”
The tapes are just the latest in a series of public corruption scandals that have rocked the city in recent years. The police department itself has gone through at least five different commissioners since 2015. Bovell sued the city again last year, alleging retaliation for his activities.
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