"Years ago, while working on a story for Rolling Stone about why so few white-collar offenders went to jail..."

"I realized I needed to better understand why the criminal-justice system worked with such monstrous efficiency to put poorer people in prison. What I thought would be a short detour to tackle that question ended up consuming five years, ending in two books about structural inequities in modern policing: The Divide, and I Can’t Breathe, the story of the brutal killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island. There are obvious similarities between the Garner case and that of George Floyd. Both victims were African American men in their forties, grandfathers trying to put troubled pasts behind them. Both were approached over minor offenses.... Both Garner and Floyd died of asphyxia from being sat or knelt upon by police officers with long abuse histories. In both cases, numerous other officers and/or medical personnel refused to stop this clear abuse, or even administer aid long after the suspect had been subdued and stopped breathing.... s I learned through years of talking to brutality victims and police alike, and by following cases like Garner’s through the courts, episodes like the Floyd killing happen thanks to a variety of interlocking bureaucratic and political imperatives. The individual racism of officers (and the structural racism underpinning police departments) is clearly a major part of the picture. But there are more immediately fixable problems at play as well. Here are four troubling logistical reasons these tragedies keep recurring...."

Writes Matt Taibbi in "Why Policing Is Broken/Years of research on brutality cases shows that bad incentives in politics and city bureaucracies are major drivers of police violence" (Rolling Stone). Read the whole thing. The 4 headings are "Time Works Against Victims," "Abuse Records Are Secret," "Juking the Stats," and "‘Law and Order’ Wins Votes."

"Hours after the Fulton County district attorney announced felony murder and other charges against the former Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks... a number of Atlanta police officers called in sick just before a shift change Wednesday evening."

"The city was left scrambling to cover absences as the Atlanta Police Department tried to tamp down rumors of a mass police walkout that spread widely on social media.... 'We do have enough officers to cover us through the night,' Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) told CNN. 'Our streets won’t be any less safe because of the number of officers who called out.'... 'This is not an organized thing, it’s not a blue flu, it’s not a strike, it’s nothing like that,' Vince Champion, a spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, told NBC News. 'What it actually is is officers protesting that they’ve had enough and they don’t want to deal with it any longer.'... Champion added that many officers felt prosecutors had not publicly shared sufficient evidence to back up the charges leveled against Rolfe, in part because the district attorney only released a video still that appears to show the former officer kick Brooks rather than the full video itself.... Although the quick action in Atlanta has been praised by civil rights advocates and hailed as a victory for activists, some in the police department have decried the quick process. Bottoms said that morale in Atlanta’s police department was at a low.... 'The thing that I’m most concerned about is how we repair the morale in our police department,” Bottoms.... 'and how do we ensure our communities are safe as they interact with our police officers.'"

WaPo reports.

In the comments over there, somebody says:

They harassed the guy for 45 minutes and when he panicked and grabbed their taser, they shot him when he was running away. Then kicked him. Sorry guys, if you think that's what policing is, you should be calling in sick.

Why do these cops think someone like Dylann Roof should be gently apprehended (and given a cheeseburger) but a black guy should be harassed? And that he isn't expected to panic? And that those cops couldn't let him run, and go after him later?

That draws this sarcasm:

Cops should wait until 0.1 milliseconds before the stun gun barb pierces the cornea of the eyeball before shooting the perpetrator in the kneecap of their non-dominant leg to slow him down and then snuggle him into compliance.

Can the cop cry?

I'm going to take a contrarian position on this: a lot of us have tremendous stress in our lives right now and it comes out in different ways. We're assuming the worst about her just like she's assuming the worst of McDonalds. No need to shame her. https://t.co/hQkhnisQoM

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) June 17, 2020

"We will not sell facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until we have a national law in place, grounded in human rights, that will govern this technology."

Said Microsoft President Brad Smith, quoted in "Microsoft won’t sell police its facial-recognition technology, following similar moves by Amazon and IBM" (WaPo).

How shocking is "And they went in and it was like a knife cutting butter"?

Trump used that phrase yesterday at the Roundtable on Justice Disparities in America (transcript). Context:

In Minneapolis, they went through three nights of hell. And then I was insistent on having the National Guard go in and do their work. It was like a miracle. It’s just everything stopped. And I’ll never forget the scene. It’s not supposed to be a beautiful scene. But to me, it was after you watched policemen running out of a police precinct. And it wasn’t their fault. They wanted to do what they had to do, but they weren’t allowed to do anything.... I said, “I’m sorry. We have to have [the National Guard] go in.” And they went in and it was like a knife cutting butter, right through, boom. I’ll never forget. You saw the scene on that road wherever it may be in the city, Minneapolis. They were lined up. Boom. They just walked straight. And yes, there was some tear gas and probably some other things and the crowd dispersed. And they went through it by the end of that evening. And it was a short evening. Everything was fine.... So I just want to tell you that we’re working on a lot of different elements having to do with law, order, safety, comfort, control, but we want safety. We want compassion. We want everything.

As I drove home from my sunrise run this morning...



... I had "Morning Joe" on the satellite radio, and he was riffing emotively on that phrase "it was like a knife cutting butter." Joe acted as though the phrase connoted murderously cutting into human flesh, and Who talks like that?!! In Joe's vivid nightmare, Trump is unfathomably evil. Joe said it's as if Trump were "running for President of the Confederacy" and Trump has decided to speak only to "angry white men — angry old white men."

Joe is 57, by the way, so that's a bit old, and he is also white and angry, so maybe he knows whereof he speaks, and yet he does not mean that he hears the siren call of Donald Trump.

But let's look at this phrase "like a knife cutting butter." It's an idiomatic expression! It means it was easy. You see the context. It doesn't mean the National Guard was sadistically injuring people. It means all they had to do was show up and walk straight in and everything worked out just fine.

It wasn't even a hot knife....



The inability to understand metaphor is, of course, highly selective. A commentator like Joe has to use what Trump gives him. He must scan the transcripts every day, looking for something to pretend to be anguished about.

"We want law and order. We have to have a lot of good things, but we have to have law and order. Got to have some strength. You have to have strength."

"You have to do what you have to do. And you look at a Seattle. We just came in. We just see over the screen and we’ve been hearing about it. Bill and I were talking about it. The law and order, look at what happened in Seattle. They took over a city, a city, a big city, Seattle, a chunk of it. A big chunk. Can’t happen. That couldn’t happen here I don’t think in the state of Texas. I don’t think so. I don’t think so."

Shockingly short sentences and sentence fragments began Donald Trump remarks at the Roundtable Meeting on Justice Disparities in America yesterday in Dallas, Texas (full transcript).

A city, a city, a big city, Seattle, a chunk of it. A big chunk. Can’t happen.

I wonder why he's doing that. Perhaps he can't help it, but I think he's choosing it. It's political poetry. It says: LAW AND ORDER. It's the simplest theme for a politician. He's there. On that theme. You know it. It's everything. Got to have law and order. Or you have nothing. Nothing.

The speech becomes somewhat less staccato:

Politicians make false charges and they’re trying to distract from their own failed records. They have some very bad records and these are usually the ones that cause the problems or can’t solve the problems. These are the same politicians who shipped our jobs away and took tremendous advantage of all Americans, but African American middle class. So much of that wealth and that money and those jobs went to China and other countries and they get trapped. They get trapped. They get trapped in a government morass. They get trapped in bad government schools. So I’m going to be announcing four steps to build safety and opportunity and dignity.

There had better be 4 steps. The steps involve law and order ("safety"), economics ("opportunity"), and something more psychological ("dignity"):

First, we’re aggressively pursuing economic development in minority communities. We’re doing it very powerfully. We’ve done it with opportunity zones, but we’re going to go above that. At the heart of this effort is increasing access to capital for small businesses and that’s with minority owners in black communities and we’re going to get it done and it should have been done a long time ago. It’s been very difficult, very, very difficult for some people, been unfairly difficult.

Second we’re confronting the healthcare disparities, including addressing chronic conditions and investing substantial sums in minority serving medical institutions. We have medical institutions in some areas of our country that are a disgrace. I was going to say not up to standard. They’re much worse than not up to standard. They’re a disgrace. Take care of it.

Third, we’re working to finalize an executive order that will encourage police departments nationwide to meet the most current professional standards for the use of force, including tactics for deescalation. Also we’ll encourage pilot programs that allow social workers to join certain law enforcement officers so that they work together. We’ll take care of our police. We’re not defunding police. If anything, we’re going the other route. We’re going to make sure that our police are well-trained, perfectly trained, they have the best equipment.

The solution for the police is to "make sure" they're "perfectly trained." He's picked up the Democratic candidate tic — "make sure." They purported way to do something it to state the desired goal and then insert the phrase "make sure" in front of it. But these are 3 good, moderate ideas about "justice disparities."

He never says "fourth" or "four," but maybe the fourth step was in this somewhere. What I see in the transcript is a switch to talking about the violence...

There are violent people around, Pastor. Even, you will admit that, right? We want to think the best, but you have some very violent people. And when they’re breaking into your house at 12:00 in the evening and you’re sitting there and you don’t have a police force, they’re actually talking about not having a police force. Well, that’s not happening with us. We’re going to have stronger police forces because that’s what you need. In Minneapolis, they went through three nights of hell.

And the answer to the violence is LAW AND ORDER — provided by Trump:

And then I was insistent on having the National Guard go in and do their work. It was like a miracle. It’s just everything stopped. And I’ll never forget the scene. It’s not supposed to be a beautiful scene. But to me, it was after you watched policemen running out of a police precinct. And it wasn’t their fault. They wanted to do what they had to do, but they weren’t allowed to do anything. It wasn’t really their fault, but they were running down the street. They weren’t allowed to do what they’re trained to do. And they took over the precinct. They burned it, essentially burned it down.

And the answer to the destruction is CONSTRUCTION — and Trump is the expert....

I’m pretty good at construction. I want to tell you that was almost what we call a complete renovation, if you’re lucky.

Hmm. Is that some kind of construction industry joke? Demolition = renovation?

I'll stop here. It's a long transcript. Read it yourself. Or did you actually watch the event? I tried for a couple minutes.

"On the new rebel state’s first night, the atmosphere was festive and triumphant. Hooded men spray-painted the police station with slogans and anarchist symbols..."

"... renaming it the 'Seattle People’s Department East Precinct.' Raz Simone, a local rapper with an AK-47 slung from his shoulder and a pistol attached to his hip, screamed, 'This is war!' into a white-and-red megaphone and instructed armed paramilitaries to guard the barricades in shifts. Later in the night, Simone was filmed allegedly assaulting multiple protestors who disobeyed his orders, informing them that he was the 'police' now, sparking fears that he was becoming the de facto warlord of the autonomous zone. A homeless man with a baseball bat wandered along the borderline and two unofficial medics in medieval-style chain mail stood ready for action."

From "Anarchy in Seattle/Antifa-affiliated activists seize control of a city neighborhood and declare an 'autonomous zone'" by Christopher F. Rufo (City Journal).

At least it's an example: Don't do this in your city. (Can I trust this not to happen in my city?)

ADDED: Here's the NYT article on the subject "Free Food, Free Speech and Free of Police: Inside Seattle’s ‘Autonomous Zone’/President Trump challenged Seattle’s mayor to 'take back your city' after police vacated a precinct and protesters laid claim to the neighborhood around it":

[F]acing a growing backlash over its dispersal tactics in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, the Seattle Police Department this week offered a concession: Officers would abandon their precinct, board up the windows and let the protesters have free rein outside.

In a neighborhood that is the heart of the city’s art and culture — threatened these days as rising tech wealth brings in gentrification — protesters seized the moment. They reversed the barricades to shield the liberated streets and laid claim to several city blocks, now known as the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.”

“This space is now property of the Seattle people,” read a banner on the front entrance of the now-empty police station. The entire area was now a homeland for racial justice — and, depending on the protester one talked to, perhaps something more....

“Take back your city NOW,” Mr. Trump wrote in a tweet directed at Mayor Jenny Durkan and Gov. Jay Inslee. “If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game.”....

The protest zone has increasingly functioned with the tacit blessing of the city. Harold Scoggins, the fire chief, was there on Wednesday, chatting with protesters, helping set up a call with the police department and making sure the area had portable toilets and sanitation services. “I have no idea where we’re headed,” Mr. Scoggins said in an interview. “We’ve been working step by step on how to build a relationship, build trust in small things, so we can figure this out together.”...

AND: Ken Jennings (who lives in Seattle) weighs in:

A play in three acts from this afternoon, since Trump is now tweeting about Seattle. A local TV host credulously reports an unusual SPD claim, doubles down when readers are skeptical, and then... finds it’s not true. pic.twitter.com/5ce8O0wFea

— Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) June 11, 2020

"I cannot promise that I will not make missteps along the way, particularly as a white woman... realizing that I cannot fully see the system that has been built up to benefit me and others like me."

Our mayor, Satya Rhodes-Conway, apologizes for her kind words to the police, which she had not intended to be heard by the general public. She thanked the police for their work during the protests, vandalism, and theft, and — as she puts it now — "failed to center" her message on Black Lives Matter. There's a hostage video quality to this:

"Day 10 of protests ends with 'defund police' painted on road leading to [the Wisconsin] Capitol."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

Protesters painted "defund police" in giant letters on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard Monday night. The street leads from the state Capitol to Monona Terrace, passing between the Madison Municipal Building and City-County Building, at top.

We're told this was "without city permission," but I think that has to be read to mean without explicit city permission. Something that conspicuous — taking that much effort, in that location — is actively condoned. It had the tacit permission of the city.

Also at the link are other photos of the 10th day of protests. Based on the photographs, I would say that the protesters are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly female.

If I were still the sort of person who roams around inside protests and talks to people, I would ask them how they would harmonize the #MeToo movement with defunding the police. A year ago, there was so much of a push to get men arrested for things that used to be ignored. Then, the slogan was "Time's up." We were never going back. Is time up on Time's Up?

I remember when it was a big feminist goal to force the police to take domestic violence so seriously that they were required to arrest someone when they answered a call. It became the statutory law here in Wisconsin. I'd like to ask the female protesters whether they ever supported that law and if they did whether they will now declare it to have been a mistake — a racist mistake.

ADDED: In "If they can, why can’t we?," David Blaska muses about painting over the "u" in "DEFUND THE POLICE." Changing the "U" to an "E" would flip the message: "Call it a little editing. Call it vandalizing the vandalism. Call it free speech. Call it civil disobedience. Call it a profile in courage or social suicide in the super-heated atmosphere of progressive Madison. Call a lawyer."

"'Gone with the Wind' was pulled from HBO Max while the long-running TV show 'Cops' was outright canceled..."

"... a sign that entertainment companies are re-examining the content they offer in the wake of nationwide protests for racial justice and against police brutality.... In a statement, HBO Max said 'Gone With the Wind' is a 'product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society.' When the movie returns to the platform it will be 'with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions, but will be presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. If we are to create a more just, equitable and inclusive future, we must first acknowledge and understand our history.'... On Monday, John Ridley, who won an Oscar for the adapted screenplay for the movie '12 Years a Slave'... call[ed] for 'Gone With the Wind' to be taken off HBO Max.... 'Cops,' once considered a groundbreaking look at the day-to-day life of police on the beat is now also out of fashion. Featuring the song 'Bad Boys'—with the lyrics 'Bad boys, bad boys whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?'— ...  'Cops' presented a very positive look at policing, showcasing officers handling everything from domestic disturbances and drunken driving to robberies and sex crimes...."

The Wall Street Journal reports (and this was not behind a paywall for me).

"Senate Republicans said they are working on a comprehensive proposal to respond to racially motivated police misconduct and other reforms to the criminal justice system."

"Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is the only black Republican in the Senate, is leading the effort, GOP lawmakers said Tuesday. 'I’ve asked Sen. Tim Scott to lead a group working on proposals to allow us to respond to the obvious racial discrimination on full display on our television screens the last two weeks and what is the appropriate response of the federal government,' Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said" (Washington Examiner).

They asked their black guy. Is that racist?

Could those who are talking about dismantling the police address the problem of violence against women?

I remember when I was being gang-raped & beaten by a mob in Egypt, would have been great to have a police force to call then. Would that have been my white privilege talking? I’ve stood against racism all my life,don’t have a racist bone in my body. My heart breaks... https://t.co/U4USN1cMP6

— Lara Logan (@laralogan) June 9, 2020

"Their argument, then, is not necessarily that we don't need police officers. It's..."

"... how we can best ensure that police officers are serving the communities they are tasked with policing? But that subtlety is lost in chants of 'Defund the Police.' And Trump, desperate for an issue to latch onto as he watches his poll numbers both nationally and in swing states tumble, will destroy any nuance in the conversation over police funding in order to paint Biden (and Democrats more broadly) as wanting to get rid of the police entirely."

Ha. Yeah. Trump IS the destroyer of nuance.

I'm reading "Is 'Defund the Police' a massive political mistake?" by Chris Cillizza (CNN).

Liberals love to present themselves as the People of Nuance. But if you're going to do slogans and chants — and especially if you're going to do vandalism and looting — you're not doing nuance. And if your knee-jerk reaction for everything you do wrong is to flip it into ORANGE MAN BAD, you are not doing nuance.

I've been following this "nuance" theme since I started this blog in 2004. Remember how John Kerry was fawned over as the candidate of nuance, compared to that vicious dimwit George Bush?

"Appreciate the article but the sanitizing and glossing over of the serious crimes including assaulting a pregnant woman with a gun does a disservice to reporting reality."

"He need not be perfect for all of us to mourn and demand change but by manipulating the life story we lose the ability to educate many who don’t see the problem as they focus on the spin versus the real story - his murder."

The second-highest-rated comment at "George Floyd, From ‘I Want to Touch the World’ to ‘I Can’t Breathe’/Mr. Floyd had big plans for life nearly 30 years ago. His death in police custody is powering a movement against police brutality and racial injustice" (NYT).

Also highly rated: "I am confused. I believe the autopsy report said he was high on fentanyl and methamphetamine. This seems relevant to the full picture yet is not mentioned in the meticulously researched article."

I've read the NYT for more than 50 years, and I don't believe I have another option for reading a real newspaper here in America. I've always been looking out for the propaganda. In fact, I was taught to that by my high school history teacher, whose class included required daily reading of the NYT. After the ousting of James Bennet a few days ago, you would think the NYT would feel extra pressure to show that it will pursue high journalistic principles and not skew things to please the people who are demanding propaganda. I can't say I'm surprised to see this sanitized portrait of George Floyd, but I want to go on record saying that this is bad.

And it's bad not only as bad journalism, but it's bad on the subject of police brutality. It doesn't matter that the man who died had big dreams of the future or professional-level athletic ability. The police shouldn't be executing anybody.

Let's analyze the comedy stylings of Woody Harrelson.

This Woody Harrelson character is saying that if we #defundthepolice he and his friends would just start murdering people, which is a weird way to show support of the police but fandom is wild sometimes pic.twitter.com/8gITCs1TFw

— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) June 9, 2020

This made me look up Woody Harrelson to see what exactly are his politics. I found "Woody Harrelson: I'm an anarchist" (Politico, 2013):

So you dislike Democrats as much as you dislike the GOP?

It's all synchronized swimming to me. They all kneel and kiss the ring. Who's going to take on the oil industry or the medical industry? People compare Obama to Lyndon Johnson, but I think a better comparison is between Obama and Nixon. Because Nixon came into office saying he was going to pull out of Vietnam, and then he escalated the war. A lot of us were led to believe that Obama was the peace president, but there are still, I think, 70,000 troops in Afghanistan....

Do you want to get more involved in politics?

No. I don't believe in politics. I'm an anarchist, I guess you could say. I think people could be just fine looking after themselves.

So... presumably the real Woody would like to dismantle the police, and he adopts a redneck character to taunt the abolitionists. He has the character speak as though he would wildly kill people if left to his own judgment of how to behave in a police-free America. I'm going to guess that what Woody is trying to do is make fun of the people who want to scare us out of getting rid of the police. What do you think?

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Commenters question whether that's really Woody Harrelson, but couldn't get to a definite answer whether it is or not! I did a search and found "George Floyd protests: Is Woody Harrelson defending police brutality? Video of lookalike man baffles internet" (at meaww):

In the video, a man who resembles Harrelson, (perhaps it is Harrelson himself, we wouldn’t know) is supporting the police saying the public needs to deal with him before attacking the cops.... While the video has garnered a lot of attention...

Garnered!

... internet users are rather concerned if it’s actually Harrelson who has featured in it. While one wrote, “I'm scared to even look up what's going on with Woody Harrelson”. Another tweet read, “@WoodyHarrelson stop with your hillbilly mean guy videos. I'm skeert.” However, a few have established that it isn’t Harrelson but a random man who holds a striking resemblance to the actor....

Meanwhile, a few were convinced that the viral video was in fact a parody by Harrelson. “I ain’t gon’ lie, I thought this was Woody Harrelson doing a parody of a redneck,” wrote one follower.

I'm going to say that if it isn't Harrelson in the video, then Harrelson ought to have done something by now to disavow the video or try to get it taken down.

"As his criminal justice proposal made clear months ago, Vice President Biden does not believe that police should be defunded."

"He hears and shares the deep grief and frustration of those calling out for change, and is driven to ensure that justice is done and that we put a stop to this terrible pain. Biden supports the urgent need for reform — including funding for public schools, summer programs, and mental health and substance abuse treatment separate from funding for policing — so that officers can focus on the job of policing...."

Said Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates, quoted at The Hill.

Has Biden himself come forward to speak to reporters? I'd like to see him do that and to face aggressive questioning on the subject — as aggressive as the questioning reporters use on Trump.

It's irritating to get the message from a campaign spokesman, and I really dislike the preface "As his criminal justice proposal made clear months ago." So much has happened in the last 2 weeks, and Biden should make a show of caring about the new push for dismantling the police. To say, we already talked about this months ago sounds a bit callous toward the people who are demanding very strong measures like abolishing the police and unresponsive to those of us who are anxious about these extreme demands.

"What if in the middle of the night my home is broken into — who do I call?"

CAMEROTA: "What if in the middle of the night my home is broken into. Who do I call?"

BENDER: "Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege." pic.twitter.com/WhubQ9yJIf

— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) June 8, 2020

We're told not to take "defund the police" and "abolish the police" literally.

In this WaPo op-ed — "Defund the police? Here’s what that really means." — by Christy E. Lopez, who is a a Distinguished Visitor from Practice at Georgetown Law School where she co-directs the Innovative Policing Program. She tells us not to be "afraid" because it's "not as scary (or even as radical) as it sounds."

We turn to the police in situations where years of experience and common sense tell us that their involvement is unnecessary, and can make things worse. We ask police to take accident reports, respond to people who have overdosed and arrest, rather than cite, people who might have intentionally or not passed a counterfeit $20 bill. We call police to roust homeless people from corners and doorsteps, resolve verbal squabbles between family members and strangers alike, and arrest children for behavior that once would have been handled as a school disciplinary issue.

Police themselves often complain about having to “do too much,” including handling social problems for which they are ill-equipped. Some have been vocal about the need to decriminalize social problems and take police out of the equation. It is clear that we must reimagine the role they play in public safety. 

Defunding and abolition probably mean something different from what you are thinking. For most proponents, “defunding the police” does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety, and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight — or perhaps ever. Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence interruption programs....

Why not use words that people can understand and that convey the meaning you want to put in our head? If your idea is so reasonable, why not use words that are effective in making people who care about peace and harmony agree with you?

Police abolition means reducing, with the vision of eventually eliminating, our reliance on policing to secure our public safety....

Now, that's just confusing! You said "reducing" but then you said "eliminating."

The “abolition” language is important because it reminds us that policing has been the primary vehicle for using violence to perpetuate the unjustified white control over the bodies and lives of black people that has been with us since slavery.

But the slavery abolition movement was not about reducing our reliance on slavery! Why take such an important word and undermine what it means? If you successfully "remind us" of the evils of slavery, you are making us think you are saying the police are an evil, like slavery, that must be entirely eradicated.

"A veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged on Sunday to dismantle the city’s Police Department."

The NYT reports.

Saying that the city’s current policing system could not be reformed, the council members stood before hundreds of people who gathered late in the day on a grassy hill, and signed a pledge to begin the process of taking apart the Police Department as it now exists.

I don't see how this can possibly be done. It sounds like madness. There is some ray of rationality in "to begin the process" and "taking apart the Police Department as it now exists."

Maybe it's a slow process and they take it apart but they put it back together again in a form that's just different from the way it now exists. Maybe it's just a new way to say reform.

Council members said in interviews on Sunday that they did not have specific plans to announce for what a new public safety system for the city would look like. They promised to develop plans by working with the community, and said they would draw on past studies, consent decrees and reforms to policing across the nation and the world.

So they have no plan or even a general idea of what it is, but they pledge to do it. I imagine a lot of Minneapolis people are alarmed and anxious but won't say too much about all this.

ADDED: "Dismantle" is an interesting word. Especially in this context, it makes me think of the famous essay title "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." And did you know that the original meaning of the word is "to divest of a mantle or cloak; to uncloak" (OED)? The extended meaning is "To render (fortifications, or the like) useless for their purpose; to pull down, take to pieces, destroy, raze."

"Sleepy Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats want to 'DEFUND THE POLICE'"? Well... they probably won't quickly deny it.

Sleepy Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats want to “DEFUND THE POLICE”. I want great and well paid LAW ENFORCEMENT. I want LAW & ORDER!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2020