The public notion of good policing and the actual practices police departments follow have been diverging for several decades (if they ever converged). What we're seeing right now is not some inexplicable increase in bad behavior or cops deliberately targeting journalists. For modern American police this is just business as usual, except the volume of deployment is significantly higher than in the past few decades and the visibility is much higher as well.
Edit:
There is a flip side to this coin. When you have a systemic problem of this scale, you should be cautious about making simplistic (especially moral) judgements about individuals in the system. When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things.
I'd be interested to know to what extent it is that the police have simply internalized Trump's media antipathy. Perhaps the insane self-destructiveness of his time in office is leaking...
As a meta note, I've noticed that people often respond to comments saying "I'm shocked with a recent occurrence of X" with "X has always been bad and been happening for a long time" and in my opinion that response only serves to desensitize people to the bad thing.
> self-referential post-modernist bullshit
Umm, what? What contaminations exactly are you thinking about? I just can't place self-referentiality into this topic. Are you suggesting there is a comparable analysis that does include self-referential motifs? Also, why is self-referentiality or postmodernism bullshit?
This was all going on from day one of the reportedly "peaceful" protests. I've watched multiple anchors on CNN and MSNBC discuss "peaceful" protests against backdrops of live rioting/burning/looting.
The police need some degree of reformation but journalists chose a side at least as early as 2016. This is what happens when activist journalism is completely normalized. Police are humans too. You can only expect them to take so much targeted abuse before they target those who are amplifying threatening voices.
What are the common refrain on every single stream after the sun goes down? "FUCK 12". People openly threatening to murder police. All night long. These are the people journalists are defending. These are the agitators that the police have to deal with. Where are news reports of protesters throwing rocks at riot police? Multiple incidents of people throwing artillery shells (fireworks) into police crowds?
You shouldn't trust the media any more than you trust the current administration.
Lobster brain claims another. I have to say that one of the most overlooked forms of anti-intellectualism in modern life is the immediate discount of anything that uses even remotely complex terminology or looks in the general direction of critical theory.
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." -- Stainslaw Jerzy Lec
If we assume there is such thing as human free will (your quote shrinks the possibility of what we can affect with our free will), Police officers are agents who have the ability to see these environmental factors and {choose to stay officers, ignore employer-provided therapy, vote for the union leadership which negotiates their employment contract, etc.}.
We don't have as much control over our lives as we would want, but police (as individuals and as a voting bloc) have significantly more control over the lives of others than us non-police do.
Edit: Please see HN comment guidelines.
The police and police wives in my family were already very cynical of journalists way back before Trump got roasted at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.
Every journo article that criticizes the work of an officer, a criminal case of the department, or any slight of the honor/reverence that Blue Liners have for the profession / individual LEOs is taken very seriously. The irony is that the journos can't publish accurate information without sources and police and their families don't/won't/can't be sources which would make their stories more accurate.
In the end, you get a media outlet either echoing the statement of the PR department of the Police or you get an investigative reporter doing the actual "checks and balances" role of the media. I just think police culture (and the legal/employment restrictions placed on officers) can't be comfortable with freedom of the press.
"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." - Commander Adams (Battlestar Galactica)
Obviously, this doesn't directly address the militarization of the police, but it should be easy to see how it can go both ways. Outfit the police as a military unit, and they'll start acting like one. How much surplus military equipment was sold to police since the Iraq war?
"Critical theory" isn't even a thing and barely even intersects with post-modernism, although I suppose it shares some philosophical leanings. It's just a repackaging of Marxist ideals applied to other demographic groupings besides class, and it's just as easily disproven.
Edit: Thanks to whoever downvoted me, because they had nothing worthwhile to say in response. Rejection of objective truth is a core principle of post-modernism, you can ask the post-modernists yourself if you like, they'll agree. Meanwhile speaking the truth earns you hate since the rise of post-modernism.
That's not true at all. Media coverage of law enforcement matters is filled with quotes, anonymous and named, from the police community. That's not less true right now.
There's nothing stopping these people from talking to the press. Like anyone with an opinion, they're happy to do it for the most part.
By next week this will be pushed out of the news. By November it will be completely forgotten, except among the minority who it directly affects and were already aware. All of the outrage you hear now will not translate into change.
So when people say "X has been bad for a long time", people need to hear that as "and this time you should remember it and do something".
>can't be comfortable with freedom of the press.
I can see that - but equally, while each institution has an extreme pole it pulls towards, there are usually a few cooler heads who keep everybody grounded. Beating up journalists is an inherently self-destructive thing to do, no matter what you feel about them - ultimately, they have power, and if you beat them up, they're going to hold a grudge.
Perhaps the thing that Trump is really doing is demonstrating that, for whatever reason, normal rules no longer apply. You can build a wall in the desert. You can threaten people with real nuclear weapons on twitter. You can hit that jerk journalist who thinks he's smarter than you.
Anyhow, it's very strange. If I was in the US, I'd definitely be trying to diversify out of the country. Norms are what make a civilization. When they start getting broken from the top down, anything can happen.
And writing for the 10-30% of people who think that incentives matter more than innate character - we don't need people to be sensitised and spring loaded to be shocked. These growth of these problems has been a visible trend for my entire lifetime and longer if you buy arguments like those presented in, say, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.
Anyone who gets shocked by trends that have been around for that long is either very new to this, or part of the problem. The solution is less shock, more reform to promote basic principles of equality, freedom and prosperity.
It's true that police officers and their families do have 1st Amendment protections, but they are also governed by employment law and can be castigated by brass, fellow officers if they cause ripples which screw up a case or department morale.
> There's nothing stopping these people from talking to the press.
If you work for a company, were told that only the communications office was allowed to talk to the press about company business, the press asked you for a quote about something your company did, and you undermined the company's product/feature/initiative in a named quote, do you think your employer has the legal right to fire you for insubordination?
If it's police wives, they probably aren't allowed to have the information by department policy, so the officer who passed on that information could (and should) receive a reprimand.
With legal cases, police officers can't just go talking to press about a case because it could be used by the defense attorney to muddy the facts of the investigation or get some evidence thrown out.
Do you remember the helicopters shooting at helpers in ambulances? The drones being sent to weedings? The children being shoot in beaches?
If somebody can kill Osama Bin Laden without a trial and to became an hero, and other can kill Soleimani without a trial, then other can kill Floyd also without a trial, or beat Ian Murdock, or make Aaron Swartz commit suicide...
Extrajudicial executions are the new normal, and this magic trick was being slowly deployed in front of our very eyes, for years. And anybody is in the menu. We all travel in the meat train now. All is allowed, because we accepted the new contract.
That said, I still found the attacks on the press this week absolutely shocking. Police treating people of color differently than white people is absolutely nothing new. Attacking and arresting credentialed journalists, while they are clearly identifying themselves and broadcasting on live TV is something I never thought I'd see in America.
I mean, they literally have a license to murder.
1) Institutional and culture view of policing, vs say other western countries that are more community policing based.
2) General brotherhood of law enforcement and protecting each other. There is a lack of holding each other accountable.
3) General protection afforded by law, either explicitly or implicitly via half hearted attempts at prosecution / investigation etc.
These combined gives law enforcement as an organization and individuals a sense of normalcy in what they do, and also feeling of invulnerability.
This doesn't apply to all police officers of course, and I actually believe the majority are law bidding and trying to do good in a tough environment. There are probably also a non trivial amount that gets into law enforcement to wield power over others. Law enforcement needs to be held to a higher standard, and because of the power they wield must be scrutinized much more closely.
However, the police deliberately targeting journalists who clearly identified themselves is something we haven't seen before in America. And yes, many of these cases were deliberate as you can see in the video embedded in the article. Just in a week, there were over 120 confirmed cases, many of which were live on camera. This is an attack on the free press, and takes police brutality to a whole new level.
Interaction with police is one of the rare cases where self defence doesn't cut it. In fact, defending yourself just gives more justification for law enforcement to apply more violence.
Imagine if you were George Floyd, and you knew you were going to get killed. What do you do? If you don't resist you die. If you do resist you might still die or at least be assaulted, then charged with resisting arrest and will have "deserved" the violence by resisting at the end of it.
On the bystander side too. Everyone watching knew it was wrong, but there is no good way to intervene. You either put yourself in harms way, and probably won't effect the outcome, or intervening action will be used to justify whatever violence was used, or likely both.
For some reason, you always have a few commenters who want dismiss shocking events by saying the shocking event is not 'surprising' or that it 'has always been happening' or was in some sense 'already known'. As if that should make it less morally outrageous. I've never understood what purpose that debate was supposed to serve.
You also don't beat journalists simply because you don't beat people not engaged in crimes.
Modernism used paradox as a concept, ie. one meaning or the other is true but both cannot be, post modern reacts against that allowing for multiple similtaneous meanings. These paradigms are are discovered in different fields at different times.
You can thank your president, who labelled the press as "The enemy of the people" for that too.
Words have consequences.
- Hannah Arendt
> This drug thing, this ain't police work. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun to a corner to jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean you call something a war, and pretty soon everyone is going to be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon, the neighborhood you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory. You follow this? [..] Okay the point I'm making is this: Soldiering and policing, they ain't the same thing. And before we went and took the wrong turn and start up with these war games, the cop walked a beat, and he learned that post. And if there were things that happened on that post, where there be a rape, a robbery, or a shooting, he had people out there helping him, feeding him information. But every time I came to you, my DEU sergeant, for information, to find out what's going on out on them streets... all that came back was some bullshit. You had your stats, your arrests, your seizures, but don't none of that amount to shit when it comes to protecting the neighborhood now, do it?
- Howard "Bunny" Colvin in "The Wire"
These are the people you are defending.
> Where are news reports of protesters throwing rocks at riot police?
Yes, where are they? After all, you have to have this from somewhere. And after seeing the above scenes, keep in mind that this isn't two soccer teams who both have the same job. The police's job is to uphold the law, citizens don't have a job as such. They don't get paid to not break the law, they pay for the apparatus that punishes them if they break it (and let's too many cops go free when they do). The cops are armed, they get paid, they have special privileges to prevent such things, not to use them to do them.
Imagine a little child hitting an adult with all their force, and then the adult hitting back with all their force, and someone just saying "they're both being bad". Not that the cops are adults versus infants, but they do have levers and enjoy protections -- all paid for by the people they or their colleagues brutalize -- that multiply their force by many orders of magnitude.
Interestingly, the set of people complaining about each's actions are almost completely disjoint.
Weird. I wonder why there's a Wikipedia article for something that's "not even a thing"[0].
> It's just a repackaging of Marxist ideals applied to other demographic groupings besides class, and it's just as easily disproven.
Can you cite a single critical theorist who simply transposes class analysis to "other demographic groupings"? The theorists I've read actually stray pretty far from the concept of class conflict, and they do not construct, for example, "gender conflict" or "race conflict" out of the "ideals" such as class conflict. Is there any evidence for your claim at all? Or are you claiming that any analysis of conflict between demographics is simply a repackaging of class conflict?
You fail to recognize the specificity of the idea of class conflict, and why it can't be "repackaged" as an abstraction. As an abstraction, all you're left with is "societal conflict", but nobody would deny that there is some conflict in society of some kind. The concepts of economic exploitation, alienation, historical and current primitive accumulation, base and superstructure, etc. are all core to class conflict analysis, but from what I've read, few if any of these are present in the literature on race and gender.
And while we're on the topic, can you point to which "easy disproofs" you're talking about as they relate to class conflict or "other demographic" conflicts? Ironically, the same critical theorists you claim "aren't a thing" were the same ones to argue against the traditional conception of class conflict (e.g. Marcuse).
The philosophy is all about subverting epistemic certainty and rejecting the very concept of objectivity. Moral relativism isn't unique to Postmodernism, but it's a critical underpinning. As is the idea to reject objective truth.
You're arguing that I do not know what I'm talking about, except this was actually my field of study. I am very familiar with all aspects of Postmodernism and as I said before if you ask the Postmodernists they would agree with my assessment, although I'm sure they'd have more positive things to say than I do.