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1. newacc+24[view] [source] 2020-05-29 13:13:27
>>void_n+(OP)
Not an argument for this site I guess. But this is what happens when you have political leaders picking sides in violence. Trump literally tweeted "when the looting starts the shooting starts" (not before this event, of course -- it's an example). You think rhetoric like that doesn't have the effect of empowering police to abuse their power against people they don't like?
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2. acobst+wx[view] [source] 2020-05-29 15:47:12
>>newacc+24
"Not an argument for this site I guess," hence the downvotes, heh. I agree though. And I'd take it a step further and say that the institution of policing in the US has historically always been on the side of systemic violence. Police forces literally started as night patrols to catch runaway slaves, which as about as racist as it gets. If there was a point in history where they somehow severed ties with their racist origins and underwent fundamental, institutional change, I've yet to learn about it.
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3. banads+bC[view] [source] 2020-05-29 16:04:56
>>acobst+wx
>If there was a point in history where they somehow severed ties with their racist origins and underwent fundamental, institutional change, I've yet to learn about it.

The opposite, actually. The civil rights movement of the 60s was infiltrated, surveilled, and disrupted by secret police, and largely ended with it's greatest leaders being assassinated and mass riots.

Then Nixon launched the War on Drugs in the 70s and mass incarceration began.

In the 80s we saw Democrats and Republicans further ramping up the war on drugs, with the passage of laws such as the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986, while at the same time it was soon revealed that the CIA was helping their Nicaraguan Contra friends raise money by importing billions of dollars of cocaine into inner cities as a part of the Iran Contra conspiracy, initializing the crack epidemic. The investigations into these wrong doings was quickly shut down, the investigative journalist leading the charge was suicided, and the government officials responsible were pardoned.

Fast forward 30 years, and the mass incarceration levels have been holding steady and communities are even weaker by some metrics than they were before the civil rights movement, though perhaps we've made some marginal improvements in states where cannabis has been legalized, but we've still got a lot more to do: namely, ending the tyrannical and racist war on drugs at the Federal level.

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