Police are the biggest gang in town

There's a funny perception of figures like Wyatt Earp in American history. He's often presented as a "lawman" who "brought order to the Wild West." This is commonly thought because Earp was named a US marshal while he was in Kansas City and later brought that authority to Arizona. He was a "good guy" in an era supposedly loaded with "bad guys" that would've been an even greater number without these knights in shining armor. But the truth is a bit less black-and-white than that.

The truth is that Earp was hired muscle, like a lot of men were in those times and places. In Kansas City, he was employed by one group of wealthy business owners to enforce the law against men often employed by other business owners or those who just wanted to take advantage of situations where and when they could. In other words, Earp was kind of a gang leader. He just happened to run with/lead the biggest gang in town and that's why he came out of it looking like someone who operated on behalf of wider society. History is, after all, written by the winners. Does this sound familiar?

I was at the Beverly Hills protest. Everyone was peaceful and kind. Shop owners cheered us on and motorists honked in support and raised their fists in solidarity. Aside from a little graffiti, there was no vandalism. Then the cops came and attacked people to start a fight. Why?

— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) May 30, 2020

Cops right now are the biggest gang in town in many of the communities that they ostensibly serve. They've demonstrated this repeatedly over the past few days as they assault citizens with vehicles, attack journalists, and occasionally flash the true colors that motivate those actions against the people that they claim to protect.

Who is this serving?

Who is this protecting? pic.twitter.com/IK8DkwLLUT

— jordan (@JordanUhl) May 31, 2020

How do I know they're a gang? Because they all wear the same colors and they all unify behind each other when one of them does something wrong. Now you can say that about many social groupings, like football teams. But cops are one step beyond, because they have authority over other social groupings. Earp was granted authority not just by the local ownership class, but also by the federal government because he happened to serve the interests of that ownership class who, of course, owned that government the way they always have and most certainly do now. (Are we as outraged by the looting of a Target as we are by the rampant looting of the public treasury during a pandemic?) Modern policing is no different. They're mostly there to prevent property crimes (Don't mess with our turf or the merchants under our protection), gather revenue for the local governments (our protection...), and enforce the interests of the wealthy. When it comes to being confronted by the wider public, it's very much a case of "us vs them."

Now, the kneejerk response to criticism like this is usually something like: What are they supposed to do? (Feel free to adopt the Helen Lovejoy tone here.) Well, let's take a look at the sheriff of Genesee County in Michigan:

He disarmed his men, took off his own gear, and joined the march. That's a deliberate choice to approach a situation not in a confrontational manner, which almost inevitably escalates the emotion and tension of any situation, but in a cooperative manner. He wanted to convince the people marching that the cops were members of their community, rather than the enforcers of it. He wanted his police to not be the local gang telling people how they should live, but rather just other people in town, who live with them.

Another kneejerk response is: What about the criminals? Well, that's easy. If the police aren't treating everyone as a criminal, then it's pretty easy to spot the actual criminals, right? If the police are cooperating with the demonstration, rather than confronting it, then it's really simple to pick out the few degenerates coming from other places to try to take advantage of the chaos that the police are no longer creating or helping to fuel. There was no looting or vandalism during the demonstration in Genesee County last night and, if there had been, the instigators would've been seen and removed instantly. That's when the police are actually part of a community and not the overlords of it.

And it's clear that there have been attempts to turn a tense situation into a riotous one by people who think a "race war" is the path toward a better White America. And it's clear that there have been simply random attempts to take advantage of the situation and get some kicks breaking windows and stealing stuff. But the real problem runs deeper than either of those. That problem is having a gang, detached from its surrounding community, oblivious to the concerns of its residents (especially Black residents), armed to the teeth, and eager to use all those toys on the people they're supposed to be protecting. Any mobster would tell you that randomly abusing the people under your racket is a bad way to do business. Until we have an approach to policing that is honestly about protecting people, rather than property, it's bad business for everyone but the 1% (like usual.)

The Others' problem

Derek nominated me for one of those silly games on Facebook the other day, where you're supposed to give an image of a film that "impacted you" without any other explanation and then nominate someone else to also participate. Movie enthusiast that I am, I figured I'd actually join in, despite my attention given to Facebook being minimal, at best. Over the first three days, I picked three films that really stand out to me and which I may write some detail about later. On the fourth day- today -I picked another that I'm really fond of: Escape from New York.

I'm a big fan of John Carpenter's early career. I think there was a tension to his technique that really made his work shine, even on the lower budgets that he was often working with or the, uh... less than stellar material. Let's not kid ourselves: Escape is a B movie. Despite the presence of bankable stars like Kurt Russell, Isaac Hayes, and Lee Van Cleef, the story is pretty shallow and no one gives a performance that would see them considered for a little, gold statue. It's your average, nigh-on post-apoc, speculative fiction (e.g. "What if World War III really happened AND crime ran out of control?!") There were a lot of them in those days; still firmly embedded in the Cold War and with a stagnant economy that Reagan had not yet performed his "miracle" upon. I had been politically aware for a few years by then and was in Tennessee, attending a small, recently post-military school outside Knoxville. When we finally convinced our floor manager to let us walk into Sweetwater, the local town, and catch the latest Hollywood depiction of a destroyed Statue of Liberty (all of us with fond memories of the end of the original Planet of the Apes (spoiler!), despite said image having little to do with Escape), we hit a brief moment of nirvana.

Here was a hardass ex-soldier who spoke in an OTT, raspy growl, dropping into New York, the locus of crime and corruption (even as a Detroit native, I remember this impression), and taking on the whole city so he could get out in the process of... rescuing the president? Wait. What? Even at that age, I was pretty much a cynic and reflexively distrusted most American officials of any kind. I had no idea why Snake Plissken would want to rescue the leader of the system that created so many problems! (Even then, I was pretty much a Marxist, too.) Of course, Snake felt the same way ("The president of what?"), until he was effectively blackmailed into it. So, yeah, instant hero identification. But as we got through the film and came to the last scene; the one that takes place in that image above, I realized that this was something unusual for my young eyes and brain. Not only was Snake an anti-hero, doing the right thing incidentally, rather than intentionally, but the opposition was more complex than your typical villain, too. Bob Hauk (Van Cleef) was trying to maintain order, within the prison and within the nation, which was his job (and saving a life, I guess.) The Duke of New York (A #1!; Hayes) was trying to speak for an entire city of supposed criminals; heavy with the implication that something akin to martial law had dropped them into this Lord of the Flies situation, justly or not. And the president (Donald Pleasance) wasn't some corrupt mastermind, devising ways to screw everyone for his own benefit. No, the thing that stood out most to me about that president is the same problem that most of them carry, intentionally or not, fictional or real.

It was the indifference.

The poignant moment of that scene depicted above is Snake's pointed question to the man he'd just risked his life to rescue and that several others had given theirs to enable. The president's response to that question is a blank acknowledgement that people he didn't care about did something to make sure he was still among the living. He was more worried about being on camera in a couple minutes (similar to the current idiot.) He was oblivious to the suffering, the trauma, and the struggle that took place to make sure that he was still president and "leader of the free world." As we sit here with Minneapolis burning as a response to yet another Black man being murdered by the police ostensibly there to protect him and all of us, that indifference is the thing that once again really stands out to me.

The manifestations of it are all around us. It is always happening to someone else. Therefore, why should we care? It's especially easy in the case of those of us who are White Americans. Black people are already deemed The Other. That bad stuff only happens to The Others and usually because they encouraged it somehow, right? It's the same situation with COVID-19. "I won't get it! I'm invincible!" Yeah, sure. You're invincible. But it's not about you. It's about all of the other people that you might transmit it to who don't happen to be invincible in their own mind like you. "But it's mostly affecting nursing homes and old people and I'm not old and I don't go to those places!" Sigh... This is just like when Republicans argue against national healthcare... right up until that moment when some part of their family goes bankrupt because of cancer or a similar situation. Then, suddenly, they realize that "this is a problem that affects all of us!"

But in this case, it doesn't affect all of us. It affects Black people. In most cases, even other minorities in this nation don't live in fear of being approached by the police. Only Black people. White people may get nervous about how fast we're driving when we pass a cop on the highway. But we don't fear being pulled over just because we're driving. And it's not just the harassment. As situations like George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Terrence Crutcher, and Michael Brown (and on and on and on...) demonstrate, their very existence is enough to encourage treatment that results in their death. Or we go one step further and discover that even being shot by non-cops isn't always sufficient to be treated as not The Other, as in the case of Ahmad Arbery, without massive public pressure. That's the purest example of racism: the treatment of others as if they were less than human. Less than animal, in some cases. How many people were just as outraged over Amy Cooper's treatment of her dog as they were over the fact that she lied to the police in order to encourage them to come and deal with this Black man who had only asked her to follow the law? She made that call and made it in that manner because she knew there was a high possibility that Cooper would be mistreated by said police; perhaps even killed. She made that call with malice. That's racism. But she was indifferent to the effects on him. That's also racism.

It's that indifference that is something of a plague on the fabled "American experiment." The idea of individualism emphasizes the suppression of feelings of consideration for others; of taking their feelings and well-being, physical and mental, into account when trying to climb the ladder of success. Even worse, the death of the American dream means that the 99% are reduced to stepping on each others' heads, regardless of the consequences, often even as they try to reach a point of sustainability, to say nothing of what most Americans deem "success." What that phenomenon means for society at large is multiplied tenfold for Black Americans.

And if we're going to get through the remainder of Republican control of government; if we're going to survive as a nation that serves the majority, rather than a wealthy minority; if we're going to pull down those edifices of wealth and redress the wrongs that that hoarding of wealth creates; then it's going to take all of us, of whatever color and of whatever gender. We can no longer look aside from what afflicts The Other. We can no longer ignore the fact that our Black brothers and sisters are people that need our help against a system designed to oppress them and a perception weighted against them. We can no longer be indifferent to the suffering of others if we are to call ourselves human. ("The name's 'Plissken'.")