The verdict is in. The murderers have won. On April 20, a jury of 12 people managed to swim against the tide of White supremacy and convict Derek Chauvin of murdering a Black man. That’s 12 votes for the party of human life.
But during the time of the trial, the party of murderers gained more votes than that. From the middle of March to the end of April, eight People of Color, mostly African American, were killed by the police.
The murderers win even against the demonstrated voice of the people. For weeks in April, for months in 2020, for years during the 21st century, people have taken to the streets demanding that the police stop murdering people, and especially Black people. Not only does it not stop, but the rate of killing goes up as if to comfort the one taken to court.
Indeed, the court process even seems half-hearted. The City of Minneapolis couldn’t bring itself to charge premeditated murder, even though Chauvin took Floyd out of the hands of other cops in order to throw him on the street and kill him. “In order to,” means with intention aforethought. That’s first-degree murder. The prosecution tried to compensate for such hierarchical niceties by charging both second-and third-degree murder, figuring that half the world seeing him charged would be sufficient.
Sufficient for what exactly, certainly not to preserve human life. Eight other people lost their lives to the same organization that was brought to trial in the person of Chauvin. In the shadow of that additional killing, the prosecution still had to play the jury odds, and go for second-degree murder rather than first. It won the bet but lost the game. Second-degree was sufficient to get 12 votes against a government agency that ceaselessly kills.
What kind of government ceaselessly kills its own people? Is that the government that many refer to as “our democracy”? In “this democracy,” the party of the murderers gains more seats in policy-making than the party of human life. A society cannot be a democracy if its government goes around killing its own people.
The police explanations all look alike. Adam Toledo had a gun. Andrew Brown had a knife and drove his car threateningly at officers. Isaiah Brown had a gun. Peyton Ham had a gun. Alvarez had a gun. Caron Nazario had an attitude and fled a traffic stop. Is this a crisis of reportage, or what?
Along with police reportage of the weapons, they confront at every turn, they now even provide audio subtitles: “stop resisting,” “drop your weapon,” “show me your hands,” “get on the ground,” “get out of your car,” etc. We hear it even when it isn’t relevant.
Talk about crisis! They say that every crisis is a result of over-production. The Great Depression of 1929 was caused by an over-production of debt. The crash of 2008 was caused by an overproduction of subprime mortgages and their derivatives (mortgage-backed securities). The affordable housing crisis now suffered by low-income people (displacement and exile from one’s hometown) is caused by an over-production of market-rate housing and landlord opportunism in raising rents.
The police crisis is caused by an over-production of death. When the government kills its own people (around 1100 a year, averaging around 3 a day), you have a police state.
The crime is disobedience, and it is what got all the other people on the list above shot and killed.
When a cop can punish a person for ignoring a direct order where no law enforcement is in process (which means no observable crime is being committed), that cop has shifted the person from civil society to military society without consent.
There is no sanctuary from it.
This is not “our democracy.” There is no democracy in a military organization. You take orders, period.
After clearing the cop who shot Jacob Blake to go back to duty, the police chief in Kenosha said the officer “acted within the law and was consistent with training. “[He] was found to have been acting within policy and will not be subjected to discipline.” There you have it. By shooting a man in the back, the cop was acting according to the law and according to police policy. It is not an accident; it is not a response to crisis; it is policy. That makes it premeditated.
However, the law that says a cop can shoot a man legitimately in the back is not a law that civil society lives by. We beg to differ. It is a law only the police live by. The next time a cop says anything about law enforcement, remember that the law for them is a different law than the law for us.
When you shoot someone, obedience becomes totally irrelevant, a non-issue. To kill someone to make them obey is nuts. And Chauvin has proven that you don’t even need a gun to be that obsessed.
But who do we become that we can’t take their guns away from them? The short answer is, we don’t have the power. We are subservient to the police. A solitary harmless man is swept off the face of the earth because of the arbitrary and biased assault by agents of the government. Once again, with semi-religious eugenic fervor, agents of “their democracy” decide who will live and who will not live.
