I’ve got some serious introspection to do and to get myself in gear on a couple of things. Even APOD posts, as you’ve no doubt noticed, have fallen by the wayside. Again, if you want to talk, please hit the ask box, that sends me an email and I will know.
Reblogging into the queue.
I’ve got some serious introspection to do and to get myself in gear on a couple of things. Even APOD posts, as you’ve no doubt noticed, have fallen by the wayside. Again, if you want to talk, please hit the ask box, that sends me an email and I will know.
Police ‘killed deaf cyclist with stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop’
“A police officer killed an elderly, deaf and mentally disabled man riding his bicycle by shooting him with a Taser stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop.
Roger Anthony, 61, was killed as he made his way home in Scotland Neck, South Carolina, after officers responded to a 911 call about a man who had fallen off his bicycle in a car park.
The caller told dispatchers that the man appeared drunk and that it looked like he had hurt himself.
Officers said they repeatedly told Mr Anthony to get off his bike, but when he didn’t respond, they shocked him.
The state Office of the Medical Examiner hasn’t yet determined a cause of death.
Family members claim Mr Anthony had hearing problems and suffered from seizures. Now they’re considering whether to file a lawsuit against the town.
His brother Michael said: ‘What did they tase him for? It’s hurting me. It’s really hurting me.’”
I knew even before I clicked the link that Roger Anthony was a black man.
Fuck the police.
As soon as I saw that they’d been called to help him & wound up killing him I knew the deal.
fuck.
Instead of saying fuck the police, remember that the police are human, therefore not all police are good. And these sort of things happen. There are good policemen, too. Yes, it’s sad. But we’re not all good.
While I understand your point completely, the object being to avoid harmful generalizations, you may be missing the linguistic nuance of “the police” in the phrase “fuck the police”. While, on the one hand, this does refer to specific officers in specific incidents as individuals, on the other hand, the larger sense aimed at here is the institutional racism practiced inherently in the policing of society. The roots of the phrase “fuck the police” in this sense stem from the history of the phrase in African American resistance movements. It has, however, become a meme-phrase on tumblr to mean “I do what I want”, clouding the meaning conveyed the by the phrase in the usage I meant.
Institutional racism is a broader concept than any one act of racism. It speaks to the detrimental racialization that occurs, seemingly without any willful act (except willful ignorance) on the part of those involved, when a system is constructed in such a way that the rules are already biased against a racial or ethnic group.
The classic examples of this in the realm of criminology are mandatory drug sentencing and capital punishment. In the case of drug sentencing, there are two places where institutional racism comes into play. In the first place, in the guise of helping a specific racial or ethnic group who is “caught in the ravages of drug X1”, the minimum sentencing for possession of drug X1 becomes grossly disproportionate to the sentencing for similar drug X2, which is usually found to be more popular among white, middle-class people. This sets up those who it is meant to protect to therefore fall harder when they are convicted of drug crimes related to X1. Secondly, the minimum definition of “possession with intent to sell” becomes a much smaller quantity, again in order to “protect” people from dealers. This is used to determine if a person who is arrested gets sent for rehabilitation instead of jail time or if they are prosecuted as a “dealer” who gets hit with minimum sentencing guidelines. Again, by making the rules different, the system sets up those who are more likely to be users of drug X1, a racial or ethnic minority, to end up being more likely to be prosecuted as “dealers” of drug X1. A statistically similar amount (relationship to dosage/street price) of drug X2 would not make a person a “dealer”, again creating a situation in which those who are white and middle-class are less likely to get harsh jail terms than the racial or ethnic minority.
In the case of capital punishment, and even with sentencing as a whole, the situation becomes more complicated, but still obvious when viewed in the aggregate. When a poor person, usually a person of color, is being charged with a crime, they cannot afford lawyers whose first priority will be to have them tried for a non-capital crime, perhaps by offering to plead guilty of a lesser charge. (This assumes, of course, that there is sufficient evidence to convict them of the crime in the first place.) A secondary consideration here is that many public defenders are overworked and may not have the time to review each case as fully as a private lawyer would, and could easily miss clues that the evidence against the defendant is scant at best, or collected in such a way as to create serious doubt as to the guilt of the defendant. Either of these situations keep those who can afford private lawyers generally off of death row, while the poor, and especially poor PoCs, are disproportionately represented on death row.
Finally, moving out into the larger realm of sentencing, I’m going to pull this quote from an abstract of an article published recently (March) in a law journal:
Racial bias within legal institutions is a long-standing concern among sociolegal scholars (Trubek 1990). This scholarship has made clear that racial factors shape legal outcomes through a complex interaction of individual-level, group-level, situational, and structural forces (Haney López 2006; Ward et al. 2009). Within criminal law, a large and methodologically diverse body of research indicates that racial and ethnic bias against nonwhite defendants continues to affect criminal case outcomes in multiple and complicated ways (see, e.g., Everett & Wojtkiewicz 2002; Kautt 2009; Sommers 2007; Steen et al. 2005; Steffensmeier & Demuth 2000). These biases are especially problematic in death penalty cases, where jurors are exclusively empowered to render life and death sentencing verdicts. Although some of the racial disparity in how death sentences are meted out is the product of prosecutorial decisionmaking in seeking the death penalty (Baldus, Woodworth, & Pulaski 1990; Paternoster & Brame 2003; Radelet & Pierce 1985), studies continue to demonstrate that jurors’ death sentencing behavior is significantly affected by the race of the defendant and the race of the victim in the case.
Mapping the Racial Bias of the White Male Capital Juror: Jury Composition and the “Empathic Divide”
1. Mona Lynch1, 2. Craig Haney2
Article first published online: 16 MAR 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2011.00428.x
© 2011 Law and Society Association
.
This kind of intersection of racial bias and institutional presence is what “fuck the police” is meant to evoke here. The act of resisting this insidious, because it tries to be invisible, “just part of the way things work”, and not explicit in its racism, institutional tendency toward racism is where we get “fuck the police” and why it is used in the context of this story.
“A police officer killed an elderly, deaf and mentally disabled man riding his bicycle by shooting him with a Taser stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop.
Roger Anthony, 61, was killed as he made his way home in Scotland Neck, South Carolina, after officers responded to a 911 call about a man who had fallen off his bicycle in a car park.
The caller told dispatchers that the man appeared drunk and that it looked like he had hurt himself.
Officers said they repeatedly told Mr Anthony to get off his bike, but when he didn’t respond, they shocked him.
The state Office of the Medical Examiner hasn’t yet determined a cause of death.
Family members claim Mr Anthony had hearing problems and suffered from seizures. Now they’re considering whether to file a lawsuit against the town.
His brother Michael said: ‘What did they tase him for? It’s hurting me. It’s really hurting me.’”
I knew even before I clicked the link that Roger Anthony was a black man.
Fuck the police.
As soon as I saw that they’d been called to help him & wound up killing him I knew the deal.
fuck.
The mythos surrounding today’s celebration always makes me sad, but taking the time to stop and think about all the things to be thankful for always works wonders for my mood.
May you all feel as blessed as I tend to feel when I really stop to think about the things that are good about life.
…eh, nothing more. *zonks*
…well, one was just an arrival earlier today:
Also, the kid is here! Yay!
