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DEFUND THE DAMN POLICE
I’m just going to say it up front, right here, “…white supremacy doesn’t care if you’re watching.” For so many years before there was a twitter feed in everyone's pocket, the police would allege that the version of events, put forward by twenty witnesses to an police involved incident, simply didn’t happen the was that those twenty black people say that it did. The police version, in absence of other “credible” evidence, was invariably accepted as fact. Many hundreds of young black men perished at the hands of police, all over the country, under various circumstances, even with overwhelming witness evidence contrary to police testimony. White supremacy rules supreme in law enforcement, doesn’t care that we’re watching, and that has to change.
I was privileged to engage on a Facebook discussion thread last week on the subject of police violence against people of color. I very rarely read an entire discussion thread, but this one was lively, focused, sharp, and overwhelmingly positive, so it was superb reading. One young man suggested that it might be a good idea for young people to begin entering law enforcement in significant numbers in order to begin to have a meaningful impact on police brutality. At first blush it sounds like a good plan, I’ll admit, but when one takes a number of considerations to mind, problems with that theory bubble to the surface. First of all, white supremacy controls who makes…