My thoughts and feelings have been both simple and complex, emotional and cerebral — regarding the protests in many cities. I don’t want to focus on those thoughts in this entry. Partly because I think my readers know where I stand on most of these issues (police violence, racial inequalities, etc.), but also because it’s not my voice that needs to be heard on those issues. Plenty of people more eloquent than I am, with stronger ties to the relevant communities, have already spoken and are still speaking — listen to them.

Where I come in is that this space (my blog) is where I work on ideas, few of which become fully formed until I type them here. During the initial week of protests (which lasted for months, despite most news media ignoring the continuation), I had several related thoughts and opinions, which I’m calling “sidebars” because they aren’t the main points, but still deserve airing out.

Note: The fact that I’m writing about these side issues shouldn’t distract from the main ones: (1) that police violence against citizens has never been adequately addressed in this country, (2) that Black people (and other people of color) suffer disproportionately under this system that was never designed to protect them (and in fact was in many cases designed specifically against them), and (3) that our most dearly-held constitutional freedoms — freedom of assembly and speech and the press — are far too often proved to be shams whenever protests erupt.

The Surprising Strategy Of Overbearingly Proving Your Critics’ Point

One thing that always strikes me in times of demonstrations and protests is that the instinctive response of police (and many elected officials) is to immediately prove their critics correct. I can’t get over the sheer dumbassery of how enthusiastically this happens.

Can you imagine, if you were accused of sexism, responding by insulting and dismissing women? Or, if you were accused of racism, reacting by using racial slurs or long-debunked racial stereotypes? Every observer quickly agrees that the accuser’s point is thereby proved. Imagine if you were driving, and your passenger commented that you are a particularly bad driver. If you hoped to prove them wrong, that would be the worst possible time to steer directly into a utility pole. Any reasonable person knows it doesn’t make sense to respond to allegations by doing exactly that of which you have just been accused.

Yet that’s what (many) police departments do, and in fact did, in the face of these anti-police-violence protests.

In a sane world, protests against police violence would be met with an absolute lack of police violence — in fact, absolute cooperation and assistance, or simply getting out of the way. Yet, even though police knew their responses would be more carefully watched and more widely broadcast than the initial infraction, they once again did exactly what they almost always do, responding with the exact violence and oppression of which they’ve recently been accused.

It’s public relations idiocy, especially in an age when most people carry high-definition video recording equipment in their pockets, and when the resulting videos are easily accessible and organized online.

If we’re going to continue funding police departments — and it looks like most places will — can I suggest hiring public relations experts to help them avoid these easily-avoided pitfalls?

And it wasn’t only responding with violence to protests against that very violence. When accused of treating armed white suspects more kindly than unarmed black suspects, police promptly kept doing that too. On camera.

Perhaps even more egregious (in terms of police public relations) were the attacks on the journalists covering the protests. Even if police assume that most journalists are in some way anti-police, it still doesn’t make sense to break cameras, arrest press photographers, or actually physically attack reporters. Yet they did, all over the country. One organization, U.S. Press Freedom Tracker scours the internet for reports of aggression toward journalists, and counted more that 400 such incidents around the May/June demonstrations. (Note: by early October, that number was over 800.)

Prime Time For Misinformation Campaigns

One reason I waited to write is that quite a bit of misinformation was floating around — I didn’t want to tarnish any of my points by citing something that might turn out to be incorrect. Not all misinformation is outright lies; sometimes it is incorrect framing, lack of context, or telling only partial truths.

One example is the oft-shared photos of police officers kneeling with protestors, or hugging them in supposed solidarity. The first one I saw was heart-warming indeed. My immediate thought was: “Yes! This is what they should all be doing!” But for city after city, I began to see reports that those same police departments ended up attacking protestors. Another example: Louisville Police kneel with protestors, June 1, but the same police department gassed them, June 2.) Sharing the first story without the second is misleading at best.

On both social media and in the news, a multitude of reports claimed “outside agitators” were responsible for shifting peaceful demonstrations into violent clashes. By simply waiting, it was easy to learn that most of these claims weren’t true — unless one counts the police officers as outsiders (because most police officers don’t live in the cities they’re policing). Also, simple logic helps: if the protests were in major cities nationwide, how dumb would an “agitator” have to be to travel away from his local protest just to agitate a distant one?

For those of us comfortably at home with no direct involvement, mass news media framing of the events often mischaracterized events. I saw many dozens of headlines using the phrase “protests over the death of George Floyd”. Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers was certainly the catalyst — it was the most recent killing of an unarmed Black man by police at the time the protests began. But if Floyd was the only thing happening here, we would have seen one subdued gathering in a single city, possibly with subdued singing and a few later news reports about a pending lawsuit. The national media can certainly do a better job of contextualizing the long-pent-up frustration of millions of Black Americans. Journalists and headline writers have a responsibility to make it clear to the wider national audience that Floyd was only one of several THAT WEEK. Not to mention dozens of others earlier in the year, some of which still haven’t been addressed — like the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville in March (no officers were charged in her homicide; the only officer charged was the one who missed her and shot at walls instead).

Even knowing that the once-viral “every 28 hours” claim isn’t precisely true, it remains factual that police in the U.S. kill about 1,000 people per year, with Black and Hispanic people disproportionately represented, and that a great number of those killed were unarmed (with black women most likely to be unarmed and white men most likely to be armed when killed by police). And that this is ongoing, and in addition to so many other ways our country has failed so many (every demographic except cishet white males with money), like overpolicing, economic inquality along racial and gender lines, hiring biases, and a hundred other things. So it becomes absurd to push the narrative that all the “unrest” is over a single, isolated incident.

Another way national news outlets have failed in their framing and contextualization of events is using terms like “clashes between police and protestors”. This is absurd bothsidesism, especially in cases where police overtly and without provocation attacked peaceful demonstrators or harmed/arrested journalists in their frenzy to attack someone, anyone in the vicinity.

Stop Blaming This On The Grifter In The White House

Day after day, I saw “this is Trump’s America”, the implication being that what’s going on — either police violence, or mass protests, or violent police responses — are somehow the fault of TAINTUS. This is ignorant and dishonest. Yes, there are easily-linked-to instances of the goof-in-chief fanning flames of hatred. But the flames were burning bright before he fanned them.

Police violence hasn’t substantially risen since the GOP took the White House in early 2017. (By several counts, it has actually decreased.) Police kill citizens at a rate of about a thousand people per year: 1,146 and 1,092 in 2015 and 2016 versus 1,004 in 2019 — these are unofficial numbers, because no “official” numbers exist.

Black Lives Matter arose during the previous administration, starting with the death of Trayvon Martin and rising to national prominence in 2014 after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner (all pre-TAINTUS). The protests that lit the nation in 2014 (beginning in Ferguson, Mo.) were, as you might remember, also prior to the present improbable presidency.

And of course our nation’s entire history is littered with “civil unrest”, shocking police violence, and racial tension. There have been dozens just in my lifetime, perhaps most notably the 1992 L.A. riots that followed the exoneration of police officers in the Rodney King case. Many of the cases are only reported locally, never going “viral” — especially in the days before 24-hour news networks or the internet. (Click here for a fuller list of “incidents of civil unrest” in the United States.) The point is that this isn’t “Trump’s America”; it’s just America. Systemic racism, insane amounts of unnecessary police violence, and the constant overbearing pressure from our economic system... They’ve always been with us.

Invading The U.S.?

And no, it didn’t slip my notice that we invaded the United States this week. Of all the places the United States has invaded over the years, this is the one I least expected. Republican senators called for it in The New York Times opinion pages. The Republican president repeatedly urged it in tweets and in speeches. And then the armored vehicles rolled in, manned not by overmilitarized police but by actual military servicemembers.

This one doesn’t worry me personally. My town is heavily manned by U.S. soldiers, who I expect will defend our city from the invading U.S. soldiers. At some point, I expect United Nations peacekeepers to show up to protect everyone else from a president and ruling party gone mad.

(UPDATE: The opinion editor for The New York Times, James Bennet, resigned a few days later, after first defending Tom Cotton’s call for war, and then later claiming he had’t read the op-ed.)

Ever-Evolving Views

Through all this, I kept close watch over my own views and positions, checking to see whether any opinions have changed or strengthened. I know my thinking on the above topics has evolved over the years (though due to an unfortunate incident, my older blog entries are now gone). And I know that some of my positions have never changed. I’ve never been a huge fan of killing people or other forms of violence, for example. But my views regarding pacifism, the military, the death penalty, and policing have definitely adjusted over time.

If anything, what changed this week is that I grew more exhausted with the same old platitudes that go nowhere. Yes, black lives matter. Yes, the police should stop invading homes and killing people in their sleep. I began to ask myself: what, specifically, must take place to prevent such incidents in the future? We need, both at a national and local level, precise and well-described solutions. I’m convined the vast majority of us — even most regressives, if pressed — agree that neither George Floyd nor Breonna Taylor should have been killed.

What must arise from these demonstrations, protests, and all the conversations around them are proposals. Specific policies that can actually reduce the frequency of police violence against citizens. And we need to put those policies in place as soon as possible. Many, if not most, of them need to be enacted at the federal level — in Congress, to avoid a patchwork of halfhearted and poorly understood local rules.

(Initially, I listed a few here, but later broke them off into a separate entry on proposals for police reform.)

If the political will generated by these protests isn’t enough to accomplish anything, then I guarantee we’ll see the same thing again in a few years — if not sooner.

Personally, I am not (yet) ready to propose full-on abolition or defunding — “abolish the police” sounds like a fun thing to shout at a rally, but the result of actually doing that seems like a libertarian/anarchist fever dream. As a member of the property-owning class, I easily envision a need for community police employees — though they don’t need to be armed for war to take a report about some kid’s bike being stolen or the neighbor’s dog barking all night. I might get there someday. With a solid argument, I could probably be convinced. I felt myself slipping further in that direction during the most intensely-covered weeks of the protests. I know it would require me to entirely reenvision how I see society’s structure.

Conclusion

Again, I don’t want to take the focus away from the central issues of the recent demonstrations/protests: police brutality, an unjust system that was never meant to protect anyone but the top tiers, and the widespread racism that continues to plague our nation.

But just like you, I can think about more than one thing at a time, and the above is some of what’s been on my mind during all this. Another thing on my mind is my children: how to talk to them about it, what their lives will be like in the future, and what I want the world to be like for them.