Tools

Colin Kaepernick, the ex-San Francisco 49er quarterback who somehow generated controversy by kneeling during the national anthem next year, shared this on his Facebook page earlier, and there is a point being made here that is pretty important.

The police have always been a tool of the oppressors.

Individual officers may have taken action to help people in the past, and even held progressive views, but as an institution the police have never been on the side of progress or equality. This is an inescapable result of their origins, while not literally (mostly) runaway slave catchers, police and sheriff departments have always been formed to enforce the rules of their jurisdiction, notice I didn't say enforce the laws, that was intentional.

In America in particular during our early years as a country, laws, were, let's say unevenly enforced and applied, one town might have an organized force dedicated to helping the citizenry(as long as they were white and landowners) while another might have a single individual with a badge, a gun, and a hard-on for power. The thing is though, the rules they enforce might or might not have had anything to do with the laws of the country, because there was a time when the federal government was more of a suggestion than anything, and towns followed the rules of whoever held the power in them, all too frequently this meant whoever employed the most people, so corporations, or their ancestors anyway. One of the consequences of our history with slavery is culturally we got used to thinking of black and brown people as sources of cheap labor and not as people who deserve rights and stuff, so there was little to no outcry if those parts of the population where abused by the powerful, even after they technically became free.

That is the history of our organized police departments, never in their history have they had a reason to care about minorities, and never in their history have they been held truly accountable for their actions, often because their actions were not truly theirs anyway, being results of their marching orders from the powers that be. Which means those same powers had little motivation to bring any consequences down on their tools.

This holds true today of course, which is why I don't believe we have yet convicted an officer of the shooting of a minority in at least twenty years, our two hundred year history has trained our departments not to care, and our politicians and corporations to actively avoid caring, because to truly change it would be to separate the police departments permanently from those who pay their bills.

And that is what has to happen, police aren't accountable to the public and therefore will never truly care what the public thinks, no matter what their PR departments might say. They tolerate racism and sexism, and any other -ism you might think of, because they always have and, again, have no reason to change. They will never stand with a protest no matter how egregious the offense that prompted it is, they will never care about those they hurt.

They will always be the enemy.

I mean that literally, every single member of every police force is culpable, even if an individual does a great job community policing and is themselves a nice, sane, and not racist individual. They don't do anything about the rest of their departments, they don't speak out, they don't complain or fight for change, they join the thin blue line, shut up, and do as little harm as they can. But that isn't enough and never was. They are the "good men doing nothing" that allows evil to prosper.

Kaepernick said in the post that accompanied the above photo that they need to be torn down and rebuilt, and he is absolutely right, the culture of oppression that formed and sustains the police forces is too ingrained to be eliminated by changes to the law or to policy, I mean, it is technically illegal to kill people for no reason after all, but we all see how that works out in practice.

Easier said than done of course, and political suicide to say even if you are someone like Bernie Sanders, we love the shit out of our cops here in America, they keep us safe from the undesirables.

This is another example of that unspoken part of racism I was talking about yesterday, just as "he was black and therefore scary" was the unspoken, not even consciously thought, reason for the jury to give a not guilty verdict, "the police will protect us from the not white hordes" is very much part of the cultural baggage for white America. Oh, we say thugs, except many people are realizing that thugs is just a synonym for black people, so we say "gang violence" or just "criminals". How do we know a criminal? Well they look like one. What does a criminal look like? Well they have... darker skin than me.

And as long as the real criminals wear a badge and get to tell us who to fear, that is going to continue to be the case.