A Marine-turned-cop was fired after he did not shoot a man who had a gun. His Marine training led him to believe there wasn’t clear hostile intent; his bosses say he risked other officers’ lives.
“Our society operates on a clearly defined, yet often unarticulated, hierarchy of violence… As an institution, police act as state-sanctioned gangs charged with the task of upholding the violent, racist hierarchy of white supremacist capitalism and, whenever possible, furthering a monopoly of power where all violence from/by those higher on the hierarchy upon those lower can be normalized into business as usual.Any deviation from this business as usual, any resistance — the threat of force… or any displacement of state power whatsoever — by those lower on the hierarchy upon those higher is met with brutal repression. This is why cops are always present at protests. It is NOT to “Keep the peace.” We have seen their “peace” — tear gas, rubber and wooden bullets, mace, riot gear, sound cannons, and thousands of brutal cops leaving dead bodies. They are not there for peace, but rather to maintain at all times the explicit reminder of America’s power hierarchy through the brutalization of black and brown bodies above all others.”
The origins of police in nearly every country has always been connected to violently suppressing workers and slaves, so where the fuck is this ‘decline’ narrative coming from?
Often we hear the echo of our security culture tell us policing is an inherently dangerous job, and that therefore we should give deference to these people’s judgment whenever potentially hostile situations arise. In such scenarios whereby the killing of a civilian occurs, we are perpetually told the use of lethal force was not only necessary, but simply part of an ‘incredibly dangerous’ profession — that these killings merely are a result of cops protecting themselves in life-threatening situations.
Well I call bullshit.
On October 22 last year, Andy Lopez, a Mexican-American 13 year old boy, was shot seven times by Santa Rosa officer Erick Gelhaus, a man with a history of using excessive force in his duties. Lopez was walking home from a friend’s house holding an airsoft toy-gun designed to resemble an assault rifle. Gelhaus has claimed he thought the child was holding an AK-47, a detail suggesting he could see the toy-gun with clarity. Gelhaus says he shouted to the 13 year old to drop the ‘gun’. Andy turned around, allegedly holding the toy up. Lopez died thereafter, taking multiple gunshots — one of which through his chest — when Gelhaus opened fire.
Gelhaus did not wait for backup. He did not investigate what he thought he saw. He was in absolutely no danger. His judgement smacked of shoot now, think later. In fact, Andy Lopez, like the rest of us, was more in need of protection from Gelhaus the moment the deputy saw him than Gelhaus needed to ‘protect’ himself from Lopez.
Cops Are More Likely To Shoot You Than You Are To Shoot Them
Last November the Activist Post ran a story about the propensity of police officers killing civilians. Stated was the following:
“Since 9/11, and the subsequent militarization of the police by the Department of Homeland Security, about 5,000 Americans have been killed by US police officers. The civilian death rate is nearly equal to the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq. In fact, you are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.”
That statistic is alarming enough considering if the 4,489 American soldiers killed in combat in Iraq constitute a condition of war, then the killing of 5,000 American civilians by United States police departments ought to be viewed as a war on we the People by our very own government.
Still, having watched the Lopez family struggle for justice thus far, I wanted to know better how more civilians have been killed by cops in the United States than soldiers have died in Iraq.
I decided to compare the number of American citizens’ deaths by police directly to the number of police officers’ deaths by citizens since the start of the Iraq war; after all, if an officers job is so dangerous, it is we the policed who make it dangerous.
Since 2003, as documented by the FBI, there have been approximately 587 deaths in the line of duty directly as result of civilians’ felonious actions, i.e., lethal assault, shooting, manslaughter etc. Below is the breakdown by year.
Officers Feloniously Killed Since the Start of Iraq War
2013 — 53 (data not yet available, substituted 10 year average)
Total = 587
The Myth of the Most Dangerous Job
After a minute of simple math (5,000/587 = 8.52), what might seem obvious became much clearer: A cop is far more likely — 8.5 times — to kill you than you are to kill a cop. Stated another way, when an officer comes into contact with you, you are far less of a threat to them than the perception our culture proliferates. The police are, in fact, more of a threat to YOU.
The idea that police have an incredibly dangerous job is what we Southerners call a tall-tale, a stretch of the truth to bolster an ego unwilling to accept mediocrity. Not to take away from what many “fair-minded” officers do every day, but as those stubborn things called facts would have it, policing is less dangerous than farming, fishing, logging, and trash collecting, as well as six other professions.
Now is the time to burst the cop myth and to stop giving them the deference to murder our friends and family in the street.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published to AWW on January 2nd, 2014. After a year of more exposure to, and with an evolved understanding of the function of police, I no longer hold any notions that police, as an institution, have anything to do with “fairness”. I expound on that in Gangs of the State: Police & the Hierarchy of Violence.
When I say, “abolish the police,” I’m usually asked what I would have us replace them with. My answer is always full social, economic, and political equality, but that’s not what’s actually being asked. What people mean is “who is going to protect us?” Who protects us now? If you’re white and well-off, perhaps the police protect you. The rest of us, not so much. What use do I have for an institution that routinely kills people who look like me, and make it so I’m afraid to walk out of my home?
My honest answer is that I don’t know what a world without police looks like. I only know there will be less dead black people. I know that a world without police is a world with one less institution dedicated to the maintenance of white supremacy and inequality. It’s a world worth imagining.
“In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades—roughly from 1825 to 1855.
The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime, before and since the invention of police, has been for someone to tell them who did it.
Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That’s
— strikes in England, — riots in the Northern US, — and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.
So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.”
New Yorker Tyeesha Mobley was at a gas station near her Bronx apartment with her two sons when she caught the older boy, aged nine, stealing $10 out of her purse. Thinking this was a good opportunity to teach him a lesson about honesty and consequences, she called the police, asking them to help her communicate the seriousness of stealing.
When the police arrived, however, Mobley’s Arrested Development-style lesson quickly escalated into a terrifying situation. Three of the four officers who arrived at the gas station apparently understood that this was a lighthearted call.
“They started asking Tyleke what did he take,” said Mobley. “He told them. And about three officers was joking around with him, telling him, ‘You can’t be stealing, you’ll wind up going in the police car.’”
The fourth cop, however, had different ideas. He began yelling: “You black b——es don’t know how to take care of your kids … why are you wasting our time, we aren’t here to raise your kid … why don’t you take your f—-ing kid and leave?”
When she tried to follow his order, Mobley says the fourth officer arrested her, refusing to give a reason. While she and her children cried for him to stop, one of the other officers attempted to intervene, saying, “We are not supposed to act like this.”
He replied, “Black b——es like that … this is how I treat them.”
After her arrest, Mobley was hospitalized for the bruises she’d sustained on her legs thanks to the fourth cop kicking her during the arrest. She successfully fought off child endangerment charges—a pretty interesting charge given that the “endangerment” in question seems to have been calling the police.
Mobley’s two children were placed in foster care for four months, where they reportedly received sub-par care. Now, having recovered her children—who have undoubtedly learned a very different lesson than the one she intended to teach—Mobley is suing the NYPD.
The New York Police Department is reviewing reports that computers connected to the NYPD’s own network edited the Wikipedia pages for some of the more infamous recent events to involve the force, including the choking death of Eric Garner.
Wikipedia articles pertaining to at least three individuals who died as a result of altercations with the NYPD, including Garner, were edited out of the department’s 1 Police Plaza headquarters, Capital New York reported Friday.
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