Maryland Legislature Upends Republican Gov Veto Of Police Reform, Electing Democrats Matter…

I wish I had a dol­lar for every stu­pid com­ment I hear when police bru­tal­ize and kill inno­cent unarmed peo­ple. “Police need more train­ing.” “The police need bet­ter train­ing.” “The police need bias train­ing.” Yadda, yad­da, yadda.
Me, I have no such sil­ly mis­con­cep­tion about what real­ly is hap­pen­ing with American policing.
American polic­ing is white suprema­cy on steroids; it is that sim­ple. They do not care that there is a world­wide spot­light on them, begin­ning with the unlaw­ful slaugh­ter of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, up to the uncon­scionable pub­lic lynch­ing of George Floyd last year by a white sociopath wear­ing a cop uniform.
The Michael Brown killing was not where it began; nei­ther was the six­teen bul­lets in the back of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, and it cer­tain­ly has­n’t been the pub­lic lynch­ing of George Floyd. This is a cen­turies-old prob­lem that has result­ed in the loss of untold black lives at the hands of white police.
As I have repeat­ed­ly said, this abuse of Black peo­ple began with tak­ing our ances­tors from Africa by rapa­cious & vio­lent sociopaths, enslaved and bru­tal­ized, and con­tin­ued through slave patrols. It mor­phed into some­thing called polic­ing that was designed to pro­tect whites from the grow­ing Black population.
The very foun­da­tion­al prin­ci­ples of polic­ing were specif­i­cal­ly designed to be anti­thet­i­cal to African-Americans. For those rea­sons, I con­tin­ue to con­tend those prin­ci­ples [must] be decon­struct­ed if there is to be any sem­blance of jus­tice in America.
This process will not be accom­plished by expect­ing white men and women to help to decon­struct this igno­ble process that has giv­en them an unfair advan­tage for centuries.

Much like the wan­ton and sense­less mass shoot­ings that have become an accept­ed part of pop­u­lar cul­ture, police vio­lence against African-Americans has been as accept­able as apple pie.
They beat and kill black peo­ple for any and every­thing, walk­ing, talk­ing, run­ning, dri­ving, eat­ing, sleep­ing, sit­ting, breath­ing, and what­ev­er else comes naturally.
Of course, for those read­ing this from out­side the United States, all of these nat­ur­al things are like­ly to get African-Americans jus­ti­fi­ably mur­dered by police.
Or so says the white juries that find them not guilty on the rare occa­sion that they are charged crim­i­nal­ly with mur­der­ing some­one. Worse yet, the hand-picked white grand juries that are primed to return no true bill do so with effec­tive dis­patch. In case you are won­der­ing if bench tri­als are bet­ter for the aggriev­ed par­ties, the answer is no; they are worse; that’s why cops always opt for bench tri­als; the judges are the worst.
The move by Maryland’s Democrats in the state leg­is­la­ture to over­ride Gov. Larry Hogan’s ® veto of the police account­abil­i­ty leg­is­la­tion was the first in the nation.
Hogan, on Friday night, vetoed a slate of crim­i­nal jus­tice reform bills that the General Assembly had passed on Wednesday. But Democrats hold a veto-proof major­i­ty in each cham­ber of the state leg­is­la­ture and had said the vetoes would be scrapped after they vowed to imple­ment new law enforce­ment account­abil­i­ty mea­sures fol­low­ing a string of high-pro­file police killings of unarmed Black men, includ­ing George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.
The bills’ pas­sage does away with the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, which pro­vid­ed police pro­tec­tions, includ­ing remov­ing com­plaints after a cer­tain amount of time had passed and a five-day wait­ing peri­od for offi­cers accused of mis­con­duct to speak to inter­nal investigators.
Maryland Democratic Legislators should be com­mend­ed for hav­ing the grit to brush aside Hogan’s veto, and for send­ing a strong mes­sage with their over­ride.https://​www​.bal​ti​more​sun​.com/​p​o​l​i​t​i​c​s​/​b​s​-​m​d​-​p​o​l​-​s​a​t​u​r​d​a​y​-​s​e​s​s​i​o​n​-​2​0​2​1​0​4​1​0​-​e​y​f​r​b​x​r​l​e​v​h​r​v​o​h​r​m​4​3​l​b​n​t​v​y​q​-​s​t​o​r​y​.​h​tml

As I said in a pre­vi­ous arti­cle, there is no such thing as a good Republican. Hogan sells him­self as a mod­er­ate, but he only does so to win in lib­er­al Maryland; when the chips are down, and they are required to stand against injus­tice, they revert to their white­ness and stead­fast­ly refuse to dis­man­tle the police state that sup­ports black oppression.

Rest assured that what Democrats did in Maryland will not become a trend in the oth­er 49 states, no mat­ter how lib­er­al they say they are. New York, the sup­posed lib­er­al icon, just decrim­i­nal­ized marijuana.
Across the coun­try, Republicans at all lev­els of the food chain have decid­ed that their hatred of Blacks tran­scends com­mon sense. They would rather drain the pool than share it.
Police in one hick town in Virginia decid­ed to pull over an SUV they claimed did not have tags. The Brand new Chevy Tahoe was being dri­ven by an Army sec­ond lieu­tenant in uni­form, who just hap­pened to be black.
Never mind that the new vehi­cle did have a tem­po­rary plate in place. The Military offi­cer, U.S. Army 2^nd Lt. Caron Nazario, slowed his vehi­cle and con­tin­ued for about two min­utes, after which he pulled up at a well-lit gas station.
The two imbe­ciles with guns drawn com­menced pep­per spray­ing and threat­en­ing Lieutenant Nazario.

I con­tin­ue to make a case for vot­ing in every elec­tion. There is a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing among far too many of our peo­ple about how the process works. Sure it is impor­tant to turn out to vote for the Presidential can­di­date of your choice, but you must vote in all elec­tions at the state and local lev­els. In the state leg­is­la­tures, the igno­ble race laws were enact­ed; in the state leg­is­la­tures, those laws [must] be repealed, as the Democratic leg­is­la­ture in Maryland did on Saturday.
Regardless of whom you elect President, if you do not uproot the racist Republicans at the state lev­el, the racist pro-police & vot­er sup­pres­sion laws will not only [not] be repealed, they will be rein­forced with even more des­per­ate Jim-crow laws as we have seen in Georgia after the 2020 gen­er­al elec­tions, and in dozens of oth­er states across the nation.
African-Americans in the state of Maryland may have some­thing to say about the idea that their indi­vid­ual votes do not count, as far too many of our peo­ple are pre­dis­posed to believ­ing and saying.
It is through the process of vot­ing at the grass­roots lev­el, elect­ing can­di­dates who share your val­ues, that this mon­strous sys­tem will be uprooted.
It is because they under­stand the pow­er of your vote, as evi­denced in Maryland on Saturday, as evi­denced in the elec­tion of two Democratic US Senators in the heart of dix­ie Georgia why they are try­ing to stop you from voting.
It would help if you did­n’t fall vic­tim to the charm offen­sive of local Republicans. They come to your church­es, they show up at events that are impor­tant to you, they seem far less mean and hate­ful than the hate­ful nean­derthals in Washington DC, don’t they?

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​o​n​-​e​v​e​r​y​-​i​s​s​u​e​-​w​h​e​n​-​b​l​a​c​k​s​-​a​r​e​-​t​o​-​b​e​n​e​f​i​t​-​r​e​p​u​b​l​i​c​a​n​s​-​s​a​y​-​h​e​l​l​-​no/

But are they any dif­fer­ent? It is how they man­age to get elect­ed; the charm offen­sive, cou­pled with you opt­ing out of non-pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, gets them elect­ed, even in deep-blue states.
The longer that you allow them to get elect­ed, the longer you will con­tin­ue to see this sup­port for police vio­lence against our people.
Even on the sim­plest of issues like right­ing bla­tant wrongs, on issues where there is evi­dence that laws and poli­cies have brought untold harm to African-Americans, local Republicans, like their nation­al coun­ter­parts, vote against restora­tive jus­tice. On sim­ple issues like right­ing the wrongs of mar­i­jua­na arrests in states like New York, where police for decades destroyed the lives of count­less young men of col­or through fraud­u­lent, dis­pro­por­tion­ate, and racist arrests and incarcerations.
When the (Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act) came up to right some of those wrongs, every Republican in the state­house vot­ed against it.
Let me sim­pli­fy this. Despite the wrongs that police did and con­tin­ued to do to black peo­ple using the mar­i­jua­na laws when a bill came up to end the crim­i­nal­iz­ing of mar­i­jua­na use, every sin­gle Republican vot­ed to keep the law in place.…. every one of them.
How then do you stom­ach them show­ing their faces among you, smil­ing like they are your friends, know­ing that they con­tin­ue to leg­is­late against you at every turn?

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.Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.