Michael F

You Have The Freedom To Obey

From Album 5

Not much to add to what Adrastos and Athenae have already said, but…goddamn…the Ferguson police have managed to take a horrible situation and make it…even worse.

Like Adrastos said, we’re reaping the results of police being equipped — and trained — as paramilitaries. Not to equate, but in the fairly recent past, demonstrations here in Red Stick — obviously very small and utterly non-violent/minor demonstrations, given our not-exactly-vanguard status, have been met not by bored or bemused police (as they were when I was much younger), but overt threats of arrest and clear intent to intimidate.

It’s almost as if the public space is being turned into…a prison yard. Which probably suits some of the wingy-ier elements of the wingnut crowd just fine, but I don’t want Orange-is-The-New-Black to be a World of Tomorrow … or today.

And…could you imagine if ANY of this had happened in, to put it bluntly, a white neighborhood? No, I can’t either. And yet, what started this — excessive lethal force against a black man — wasn’t even the only such occurrence this week.

To repeat, we’re reaping what’s been sowed…and, as another song says, when justice is gone, there’s always force…

But is that what we really want?

3 thoughts on “You Have The Freedom To Obey”

  1. “The police aren’t here to create disorder. The police are here to preserve disorder.”
    Richard J. Daley mayor of Chicago

  3. I’m not going to lean on generalities too much here, but this is what happens when bad training, bad community policy, bad leadership and bad recruiting practices collide. What makes this more disturbing, though, is that this isn’t Chicago, or New York or any other large metro police department, where a small corps of assholes can define the character of the larger group. This is a small town with a small department, probably ten or twelve patrolmen per shift (the entire department, IIRC, numbers fifty-one), and their first impulse was to stonewall, which created the demonstrations, and their second was to escalate to violence.

    If you give too much firepower to stupid people, it does not make them smarter. If anything, it does the opposite.

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