In The Dark Knight, The Joker observes about the members of law enforcement that “Their morals, their code; it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble.” As the class and colonial contradictions of the United States increasingly come to a head, and those marginalized by the system seek to stand up for their rights, this reality about our police keeps becoming more apparent. Their pledges to protect and serve, to be “peace officers,” are meaningless when they decide to fulfill their true roles as suppressors of liberation efforts.
Last month, it was revealed that several members of the police department of Eureka, California-right in my area-have been regularly using private text messages to threaten violence against peaceful protesters and to express that they view certain individuals in their community as subhuman. They’ve made demeaning comments about the homeless and about women, and they’ve even dehumanized the sick. “The outbreak monkey on L st has been contacted by eoc and is code 4…evidently they just called him until he answered and they’re good with that,” reads one of their texts about a resident believed to have contracted Covid-19. “There’s supposed to be a protest at the courthouse from 1700 to 1900 for the ‘war in Iran’,” reads another text, made in January of 2020 in response to a planned protest against Trump’s drone assassination of Soleimani. “Confirm u all have ur riot gear?? Gas mask, helmet, and dude handle,” they continue. “I’ll beat those fucking hippies down,” another officer replied to this suggestion. They didn’t do any of these things to the anti-war demonstrators, but they clearly had a good time fantasizing.
This isn’t even the worst we’ve lately been seeing of how the police in this country talk when they don’t expect the public to scrutinize their language. Last month, it was revealed that individuals who were flying helicopters over Los Angeles had remarked: “Great when they put the fuel dumps on these helicopters…I would have dumped it on Glendale Boulevard a long time ago!” This was a reference to the protesters who’ve gathered at Glendale Boulevard, and who this individual evidently holds a grudge against. The other member replied to this with “I’ll bring the match,” then they laughed.
The Los Angeles Police Department rushed to paint themselves as virtuous and innocent in the situation, tweeting, “It has been confirmed that they are NOT employees of the LAPD.” Hilariously, the LAPD attempted to strengthen the case for this denial by stating that the helicopters were “not hovering,” and that hovering is “not recommended” for LAPD helicopter pilots. This was them exercising plausible deniability, and trying to divert the conversation away from the intentions for extreme state violence which had just been expressed; every helicopter pilot is trained to operate in a holding position, and it’s not like U.S. police always follow their own rules. Plus, it’s the helicopters of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department that have the capacity to dump fuel, and this entity is completely tied in with its fellow fascist fighting force the LAPD. Law enforcement is without a reasonable doubt behind this threat to commit violence.
These remarks are the hints of the bloody campaign which the forces of reaction in this country aim to carry out. The benevolent image of the U.S. law enforcement agencies, which they so desperately try to protect through denials and deflections like the ones the LAPD just engaged in, is indeed a bad joke. Their true form is a front that’s prepared to wage war against disfavored political actors and marginalized groups, in tandem with the right-wing terrorist organizations whose goal is mass extermination.
This is no exaggeration. There’s even a symbolic and historical connection between the far-right’s desired program of terror, and the image of the helicopter. “When Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, armed Trumpists, and the like wear T-shirts that offer ‘free helicopter rides,’ they are referencing a program of extermination,” The Intercept’s Christopher Ketcham has observed. “Following Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’état, which ended the short-lived and turbulent administration of Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende, an avowed Marxist, thousands of Allende’s supporters were killed, tens of thousands of perceived enemies of the putschist regime were tortured, and thousands of others were disappeared, often after being flown in a military helicopter and toppled from the sky. Sometimes this free helicopter ride included splitting open the guts of kidnapped victims while they were still alive so that their bodies wouldn’t float when dumped in the sea.”
The law enforcement entities in my area and other parts of the country can pose as righteous upholders of the public’s wellbeing, but in the end their function is terror on behalf of bourgeois colonial interests. It can’t be any different as long as law enforcement exists to serve an empire which is built on the theft of Native land and the perpetual genocide of colonized peoples. It’s no surprise that none of the members of “The Texting Quad” have been fired so far, or that police funds in Eureka haven’t been diverted towards public safety programs designed to handle emergency situations without needlessly introducing guns. The Squad at one point ridiculed efforts to ban choke holds-in spite of George Floyd having just died because of a choke hold-because their role is to advance deliberately excessive state violence. Officer Rodrigo Reyna-Sanchez, who implored his colleagues to “face shoot the fucker” in a conversation about the handling of a suspect, especially embodies this philosophy of violent escalation that pervades U.S. law enforcement’s culture.
While the LAPD’s associates have articulated this philosophy even more explicitly than the Eureka officers did, in these last few weeks they’ve also been demonstrating the philosophy’s logical conclusion: war against the undesirables. The LAPD recently shot six people in seven days, then sent hundreds of heavily armed officers to assault and forcibly remove these people’s allies in the Echo Park homeless encampment. Los Angeles City Council member Mitch O’Farrell then lied about the operation supposedly not being a sweep, while attempting to divert blame for the violent escalation towards the non-violent protesters who showed up for a vigil. The LAPD’s uses of projectiles and reported acts of pavement-shoving against the demonstrators, all unprovoked, fit right in with U.S. law enforcement’s guiding ideology.
This is an ideology of terror, where the poor, disfavored ethnic groups, and opponents of colonial and imperial chauvinism must be brutalized into submission. “There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order,” writes Hans-Hermann Hoppe, one of the guiding political theorists for Pinochet’s modern online admirers. “They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They — the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism — will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.”
The January 6th Capitol Hill attack, whose perpetrators were largely members of law enforcement, was a spontaneous example of the highly organized terror that the state and its aligned right-wing paramilitaries aim to carry out. The Proud Boy culture in U.S. law enforcement that’s been revealed by the Eureka police texts and the Los Angeles helicopter recording galvanizes the drive towards terror. The chauvinism and ultra-nationalism that’s ingrained into these institutions serves as a rationale for the wars against the people that they’ll continue to wage with increasing intensity.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
No comments:
Post a Comment