After Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin and his cohorts lynched George Floyd, calls to defund the police were loud and clear across the country. Those calls were just then as they are just now, but contrary to what many people tell themselves, the United States is not a democratic nation where the government is responsive to the people’s demands.
So the corporate media, wholly owned and controlled by the powerful one percent, went into overdrive to sell the right-wing Republican talking point that defunding the police state is tantamount to supporting criminals. Democrats, too, cleaved to the Republican perspective out of fear of being branded anti-police.
But I hardly speak of the Democratic party because of its weakness. Republicans set a far-right agenda; Democrats create a lite version.
I have always harkened to the old Jamaican sayings; as I got older, they became more and more meaningful. In this case, I will refer to two of them, ‘the devil finds work for idle hands, and’ too many cooks spoil the broth.’
There are far too many police officers in the United States, largely because the wealthy one percent who own the corporate media want it that way. Consequently, the middle class, which has been socialized into believing that more and more police are necessary for their safety, is always willing to be taxed to pay for more and more cops to protect the interest of the super-rich.
Disney owns ABC. Paramount Entertainment owns CBS. NBC is a division of COMCAST, and So is MSNBC. FOX is owned by the super-wealthy Rupert Murdoch. Warner Brothers owns CNN. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, and Bezos owns the marketing behemoth Amazon. We can go down the list of major opinion influencers, and the result is the same: they are all owned by the wealthiest and most powerful people, including social media sites.
In the greater scheme of things, your individual rights are of little significance, particularly when the courts are asked to adjudicate individual rights against those of the state or powerful interests. In those scenarios, individual rights are lost most of the time.
The majority of Americans, including African Americans who have suffered under the yolk of police oppression for hundreds of years, still believe the police are their protectors.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police have no specific obligation to protect. In its 1989 decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the justices ruled that a social services department had no duty to protect a young boy from his abusive father. In 2005’sCastle Rock v. Gonzales, a woman sued the police for failing to protect her from her husband after he violated a restraining order and abducted and killed their three children. Justices said the police had no such duty.
Most recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that police could not be held liable for failing to protect students in the 2018 shooting that claimed 17 lives at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Almost to a man, every last one of those parents most likely harbored the belief in what they characterize as their police department: that they are supposed to be protected by the police.
That their police department that they fund will protect their children in their classrooms.
It is a sure bet to imagine that every single one of those parents who are salaried receives their paycheck after the government removes taxes that pay for services such as funding the police. Those who operate businesses also must pay taxes, and even those who do not work also pay some kind of tax, including sales tax that goes to funding police and other services.
Yet, according to the judiciary, even though citizens do not have the opportunity to opt out of funding the bloated police state, they have no right to protection from it.
So, if the police have no duty to protect citizens, what is their role? As I intimated earlier, they are there to protect property and to extract revenue from the masses. I read an article years ago in which the author opined that if Americans were smart enough to calculate just how much taxes they pay as opposed to how little they receive from it, there would be another war of independence. The vast majority of the just under one million cops from the almost 18,000 departments that police the 320 million of us are out pulling over and ticketing motorists for whatever they choose to lie about.
I always warned my boys to avoid having to pay what I called stupid tax: traffic offenses. These days, it is impossible to avoid that tax; it isn’t a stupid tax anymore. Cops simply make up a lie on the ticket, and even if a judge sees through the lie and dismisses the ticket, you are still stuck with court costs.
The need to generate revenue is so great that cops will do anything to gin up arrests to fill jail cells in furtherance of the prison industrial complex. Some municipalities depend on traffic ticket revenue to fund large parts of their budget. So when the police see no traffic infraction, they invent them. Usually, the poorest people are forced to bear the brunt of this insidious corruption.
It is for those reasons that cops in Mississippi arrested a 10-year-old Black boy who was arrested and placed in a cell for relieving himself in a parking lot. Quantavious Eason was detained and taken to a police station in Senatobia after an officer spotted him urinating behind a car outside a law office last month while his mother was getting advice on housing issues. LaToya Eason questioned if her son’s race influenced officers’ decision to take him away in a police car and place him in a cell for almost an hour. “Would you have put a white child in a cage? If it had been a white child, he probably wouldn’t have even been stopped,” she told a news conference this week. She said the boy had seen a sign saying there were no toilets for public use inside the law office, but he desperately needed to go.
Read the full story here. https://news.yahoo.com/family-demand-mississippi-cops-fired-150011272.html
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.