Pundits are demanding a "Sister Souljah" moment from Joe Biden

It's fascinating how much of the 2020 political narrative in the US seems stuck in 1969, when the Nixon Administration was using "law and order" rhetoric to promote hatred and fear of civil rights and antiwar protesters. And Vice President Spiro Agnew was promoting Bircher-type rhetoric including holding up the broadcast and print media as hostile to ordinary Americans. I don't recall him using the phrase "enemies of the people" in that context. But the Republican Party at the highest trying to discredit actual news reporting began long before Donald Trump became head of the party.

I've been joking about how Mark Shields and David Brooks this year have been sounding like pundits who recently came through a time warp direct from 1969. They were in full 1969 mode on Friday about all the scary, scary black people demonstrating against police departments across the country arbitrarily murdering black people. Shields and Brooks on Trump’s RNC message, the politics of protests PBS Newshour 08/28/2020 (Transcript here):

Here are excepts from the transcript, in which Mark and Bobo both agree that the Democratic Party urgently need to denounce the antiracist protesters.

[Bobo:] I think that was revealed in the Trump speech, that he was just all over the map, because there's no core idea at the center of the thing. They may be on the course of gravitating toward law and order as their central argument. But I wouldn't say they have got there yet. They're just kind of scattershot. ...

But I would say, if you measure the mood both in the Democratic and Republican camps, Democrats are a little more anxious and Republicans are a little more confident.

And so I think that has something to do with the conventions. It has something to do with what's happened outside of the conventions, Kenosha, and this sense of rising crime and violence.

And I do think — the Democrats, I think, have come to understand, they somehow got on the wrong side of order. And they got somehow attached, even though Biden is not actually attached to it, to the idea of defunding the police.

And they need to somehow make some gesture to show they understand the insecurity of the American people. The country has been through an anxious time, with the pandemic, economic turmoil. There's just this great sense of fear, of fear and a sense of unsafety, physical unsafety, from the pandemic and everything else.

And somehow they have to address that. Now, a lot of law and order talk is code word for racism. There's no question about that. But I think a lot of it is not.

And I think Democrats would be making a mistake if they just said, oh, you're all just a bunch of cryptoracists. I think people have legitimate concerns about expressing their opinion safely, about living safely.

And so I think Biden really would do well by himself to somehow address this issue and say, no, we're for policing, we want to reform policing, but we will keep you safe.

This is just an elemental issue of politics stretching back 3,000 or 4,000 years.

It's always good to have Bobo share the wisdom of millennia with us.

[Mark Shields:] I mean, I think that Portland remains a festering boil for Democrats, that what went on in Seattle and has been reported by The Times and other news organizations is really just unacceptable in a civilized society, in a law-abiding society. And Democrats cannot be appear to be indifferent.

It's Donald Trump's opening. I mean, Donald Trump's going to run on law and order. He has no doubt — no question about that.

It was interesting that there was so heavily populated with African American speakers in his behalf at the convention, which I think was, more than anything, a political gesture and initiative to reach out to suburban, particularly women voters who have been turned off by the Republicans.

So, it's — race is a — race remains the constant in American politics. But I think David makes a good point.

[Bobo:] The Times, my newspaper, had sent out two reporters to Wisconsin after Kenosha. And they interviewed a series of people who were leaning toward Biden, and had second thoughts because of a sense of rising insecurity.

And whether that's anecdote or data, we will find out in a few days. So, I still think it's in the mix.

But political correctness was a big issue for Republicans and for Trump in 2016. And the sense that you can't speak freely, the sense that — you look at pictures of Rand Paul, for example, Senator Rand Paul leaving the White House, and getting brutally verbally assaulted, these pictures are not good.

Most people are not on Twitter, and they're not seeing them. But, for those on Twitter, those who are seeing them, those in the Facebook conservative sphere, it's become the dominant story, at least in that world.

Oddly, they failed to discuss how most of the protests have been peaceful, and much of the actual violence has been generated by far-right, white supremacist opponents of the protests, or how the Trump Administration and many city police forces has deliberately tried to provoke violence from the demonstrators and encourage clashes between hostile groups of demonstrators. In some cities, it seemed obvious that at times police deliberately delayed responded to looting, even when it was occurring in a different part of town than the peaceful demonstrations, which (coincidentally or not) helps Republicans and white commentators like Marks and Bobo to blame protesters for looting.

Longtime conservative commentator and professional twit George Will, who is theoretically a Trump critic, is getting in on the 1969 nostalgia moment. He wrote in the Washington Post (Biden needs a Sister Souljah moment 08/28/2020):

Biden’s biggest advantage in the post-Labor Day sprint is that he has an even easier presidential act to follow than Franklin D. Roosevelt had running against Herbert Hoover in 1932. But this advantage could evaporate if rioting and looting continue, and millions of voters become convinced that Democrats are complicit in — because tolerant of — the shredding of the nation’s social fabric. Is or is not Biden disgusted by mob violence in the service of political nihilism? (“Let’s protest police injustices by torching an automobile dealership!”)

He needs a Sister Souljah moment. In 1992, this rap singer was pleased by the deadly Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Candidate Bill Clinton’s criticism, not of extremism in general, but of her explicitly, reassured temperate voters that he was not intimidated by inhabitants of the wilder shores of American politics [i.e., African-Americans].

Today, even more than 28 years ago, the Democratic nominee needs to display similar independence [i.e., black people and pretty much the whole Democratic voting base]. Biden’s response last week - 43 seconds of a tepid, 93-second video tweet - will not suffice. [my emphasis]

With allegedly Trump-critical conservatives like Bobo and Will presumably know at some level that they are trying to bait the Democratic ticket into upsetting their base by denouncing the current group of civil rights protesters, which is something that would suppress Democratic turnout without winning a single vote from a white person who is remotely inclined to vote for a white supremacist like Donald Trump.

One the other hand, our star pundits are heavily committed to some stereotypical scripts on politics, to which they stick long after they might have made some sense decades ago. And the conventional pundit notion that trashing black people is always a good idea for Democratic Presidential candidates. So it's actually believable that they could be making these comments seriously.

Ruth Marcus, who substitutes for Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour sometimes and whose most frequent comment is "I agree with David", didn't go as far with the Democrats-need-to-trash-black-people line, but she was impressed with the vote-getting potential of the bizarre Republican National Convention.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/how-biden-loses/615835/?fbclid=IwAR3AXO_tlZ0VdHvQUng7UmqPUg_A_phJk4Yora6x8-7Q1EhLo720Ozzrngc But the safely conventional George Packer is also on the 1969 throwback, bash-the-scary-black-people bandwagon in This Is How Biden Loses The Atlantic 08/28/2020.

White commentators are always comfortable blaming African-Americans for whatever problems arise. As the pundits cited here are showing us, if Biden loses to Bunker Boy in the Presidential elecition, they have a ready explanation all cued up: it's the fault of all those unruly black people whining because cops are killing some of them for no good reason, year after year after year.

But there are real, serious problems with policing in the US. The kind of racial politics that may have been effective in 1992 when California was not yet a "safe" Democratic state in Presidential elections and Democrats assumed they needed to compete for conservative white votes in Southern states won't fix either the real problems or whatever current dilemmas the Democratic Party may be facing around them. Even in California, Democrats are already trying to duck their duty and retreat into the duck-and-cover fetal position that is the Democratic establishment's first impulse when faced with Republican criticism, as the Sacramento Bee editorial board explains (Police reforms face defeat as California Democrats block George Floyd-inspired bills 08/27/2020):

So much for the moist eyes and feigned empathy some California Democrats showcased during the Black Lives Matter marches that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Despite performative emoting by powerful members of California’s ruling party, a slate of necessary police reforms may be headed for full or partial defeat in the California State Legislature.

The bills, which met strong resistance from law enforcement groups and some weak-kneed legislators, teetered near the brink of failure this week. [my emphasis]

Michael German reminds us again of how drastic police problems have become nationally, Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement Brennan Center 08/27/2020.

"Community policing" isn't a magic solution for the problems of murderous police

Aviva Shen writes about the favorite Democratic policing model/slogan, community policing, in “Most Cops Are Good” Slate 08/25-26/2020. She notes that it has distinct limits, particularly when it comes to reducing murders committed by police. She writes:

Central to Biden’s plan is the concept of community policing—the idea that putting more officers on foot patrol in heavily policed communities will help build trust on both sides. ...

Community policing is the opposite philosophy of defunding the police; it floods Black and brown neighborhoods with police officers. In its best iteration, which focuses on building relationships, it expands the role of police officers to encompass social work, mental health treatment, and other jobs that defund advocates argue should be handled by specially trained, unarmed professionals.

It wouldn’t necessarily hurt to make the police forces that shot Blake and Pellerin sit through more hours of training to help officers learn that unleashing a hail of bullets on people walking away from them is inappropriate. But even if you believe training and policy reforms can fix abuse, adding more police in the name of community policing would just mean even more officers would need to be retrained and reformed. [my emphasis]

Having cops out walking a beat might make some white folks feel better. Especially if they are only walking the beat in black and brown neighborhoods.

But I'm not convinced it's a particularly effective or desirable approach to patrolling. As Shen suggests, it even contributes to mission-creep, like getting cops more involved in minor incidents, e.g., the argument that preceded the attempted murder of Jacob Blake in Kenosha.

 As long as police are operating on the notion that "it's better to be judged by twelve than be carried out by six" (don't take even the most minimal chances before you start shooting), no amount of sensitivity training or dropping by the local donut shop will do any good at fixing the most serious problems.

She noes in particular of two cities that have been in the news for abusive, murderous police misconduct::

As it happens, both Kenosha [WI] and Lafayette [LA] have already embraced community policing and been paid well for it. Kenosha received a $100,000 grant from the Justice Department to institute community policing in 2018 and, after George Floyd was killed, pledged to increase de-escalation training and build stronger relationships with the community. In 2017, Lafayette received $1.2 million from the DOJ to spend on community policing after creating a new community relations committee.

Police agencies "blind in the right eye” to the violent far right

As the Trump Administration seems to be in full crash-and-burn mode, lots of insiders are trying to position themselves and/or their agencies in a better light. So that's always something to keep in mind as a background situation for stories like this: Betsy woodruff Swan, They tried to get Trump to care about right-wing terrorism. He ignored them. Politico 08/26/2020:

Just a few weeks into the new administration, DHS leaders noticed an alarming trend: a burst of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia; Rochester, N.Y.; and University City, Mo.

“We were all scratching our heads saying, ‘What is this?’” Neumann said. “You could sense that something about the threat was changing and morphing, but we couldn’t quite put our fingers on it until Charlottesville.”

On Aug. 11, 2017, scores of young white men carrying tiki torches marched through the campus of the University of Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “White lives matter,” in a public display of white supremacist mobilization that shocked and sickened the country. The next day, counterprotesters thronged the streets of Charlottesville to push back. And a white supremacist drove a car through that crowd, injuring 19 people and killing a woman named Heather Heyer.

Trump’s infamous response to the weekend: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

It could have been a moment of action from the federal government, Neumann said — a chance for a systematic White House review of the threat’s scope and causes. But it wasn’t

The deference of local police agencies to violent far-right groups has been growing - even though some of them like the Sovereign Citizens groups have been known to be particularly dangerous for police themselves.

It's also not new that there would be actual overlaps and clsse connections between police departments and far-right groups. In the South during the segregation period of roughly 1876-1970, such connections between official law enforcement and KKK-type groups were familiar enough.

Andy Campbell reports in (Portland Police Are Giving Up On Policing The Far-Right Huffpost 08/25/2020):

Allowing local far-right groups to wreak havoc on the city isn’t a big departure for the PPB. As the Proud Boys cheered, officers launched tear gas and other munitions at anti-fascist counterprotesters during a rally in 2017, which left one antifa protester with a gas canister lodged in his head. Police gave the Proud Boys an escort out of the city following a rally in 2018 that saw the far-right demonstrators outnumbered by anti-fascists. A key officer had a friendly and ongoing relationship with the leader of Proud Boys affiliate group Patriot Prayer, judging from texts obtained by Willamette Week.

But relinquishing the act of policing to the brawlers themselves is both new and concerning, especially given the context: Local extremists have escalated their violent tactics in recent weeks, brazenly introducing guns and a lot more weaponry to the melee.

This is another major problem with American policing, that they are two often "blind in the right eye" when it comes to violent political groups.

It would be a disaster if a new Democratic Administration in Washington failed to address the chronic problems of policing in a serious way. And it certainly needs to be serious enough to bring down the obscene number of police murders of unarmed black people who are posing no physical threat to them or anyone else.

Listening carefully to police "allies" of the police reform movement

Someone on Facebook posted a link to a police officer talking about police violence, protests, and "rioters." He commented in linking to it, "When I hear people condemning cops in general it pisses me off. I personally know cops who are as fine a human being as you could hope to meet." The statement is question is from Dave Bissonnette on June 3. He serves as a police officer in Middleton, Rhode Island.

Bisonnette's statement is a good reminder that liberals need to stop with their few-bad-apples, most-cops-are-wonderful stock response to police crimes. There are systematic, nationwide, deep-seated problems in American policing. And those most definitely include systematic white racism, though Vice President Mike Pence thinks it naughty to say so. (Gabby Orr, ‘We ought to set aside this talk’: Pence’s take on systemic racism meets a new test Politico 06/09/2020)

Unfortunately, for most people in urban areas, an encounter with a cop is an encounter with a cop they don't know personally. So we all have to assume we're dealing with a "cop in general". And when we see case after case after case of cops committing murder and being supported in their actions by fellow officers, no one can be confident that the "cop in general" they are dealing with in the moment is a responsible human being.

It's nice to see this Officer Bissonnette say, "please know that no one hates a dirty, piece of shit cop more than a good cop who does this job with honor and pride." But what we see in Buffalo after those two cops were charged with shoving down a non-threatening, unarmed 75-year-old man and leaving him to bleed out on the pavement, is that the other 57 cops "resigned" from their unit because their two POS colleagues were disciplined and then charged with a crime. How many similar resignation of cops "with honor and pride" have resigned over the nationwide violent abuses we've seen seeing cops commit for the last two weeks?

And it's nice that Officer Bissonnette's statement says he would kneel and march peacefully with people who want to protest (if they reach out to him). But his final full paragraph is a rant against "rioters", "thugs and opportunists", "cowards" who "are destroying people’s lives" and continues: "your behavior will not be tolerated. People are going to get hurt. Please do not test our resolve when it comes to protecting our flock. Enough is enough." That part is indistinguishable from the highly-paid pundits ranting on FOX News. And just what does he mean by, "People are going to get hurt", so "do not test our resolve when it comes to protecting our flock." That sounds like a threat indistinguishable from so many other "cops in general". And just who does he consider his "flock"? The other cops? The public he's serving, which would be even more disturbing?

I wonder what the conduct record of the thousands of cops he says he's trained looks like.

In a separate news report by Daniel Keith, Police Academy instructor shares what future cops are taught about use of force in RI ABC6 Rhode Island News 06/04/2020), Bissonette pitches for more funding for the conventional training that is obviously failing badly in many places.

And this is the kind of comment that people who  want responsible police need to take with a critical attitude:

[Bisonnette] called Floyd’s death a tragedy and said other officers are upset.

“There’s not anyone more upset about what happened than other police officers,” he said. “We’re trying to regain our balance here as a profession.”

In the viral video, Chauvin is seen putting Floyd in a neck restraint with his knee on the concrete until Floyd fell unconscious.

Bissonnette said that technique has not been taught to Rhode Island officers for decades, even when he went to the academy in 2001.

“There are bones in the neck you can very easily break by putting a lot of weight on there,” Bissonnette said. “There are veins in there that restrict blood flow where if you put pressure on them, veins that will restrict blood flow to the brain, and knock somebody out cold.” ...

Bissonnette said he will be using the George Floyd video to teach future officers what not to do in the field when it comes to the use of force. [my emphasis]

So he's going to show them Floyd's murder to show what not to do ...? We should ask how often this is done in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink way of showing, here's how you get away with the particular violent crime.

"Better training" is the standard liberal response to reports to police violence. Because it's totally safe to say that, since even the more avid police-reform advocates focus on training problems. And you can always offer more money to local police departments "for training". Here's a tip, that I learned decades ago working on the city budget in San Jose, CA. If you get more federal money designated for police training, say $5 million, a city can easily and entirely legitimately show they budgeted that $5 million to police training. And that might mean they increase police training function by $5 million worth. Or they might reduce the amount allocated from other city funds to training by $5 million, leaving the training budget at the same level while spending an additional $5 million on "toys for boys" items like tanks and grenade launchers to further militarize their police department.

This is why the proposal for more federal funding for police training that Joe Biden just made is essentially irrelevant to addressing criminal violence and murder by police. (Ed Kilgore, Biden Supports Reforming, Not Defunding, Police New York 06/08/2020) More money for training is about as meaningful as "thoughts and prayers" has come to mean.

And as important as training is, good training won't stop killer cops until we have a system in which cops who break the law, especially in committing violent crime, are actually on a regular basis criminally tried, convicted, and banned from serving on other police or security forces.

The arc of history bends toward justice - but not nearly fast enough

As it happens, the current uprisings i the US over police murdering black people comes as I'm taking part in a contemporary history course, the most recent section of which had to do with "1968," aka, The Sixties.

I was reminded about how the various memories and ideological constructions of The Sixties come immediately to many people's minds in a situation like this. Rick Perlstein wrote 12 years ago about the centrality of that period in the way Americans understand current conflicts (Getting Past the '60s? It's Not Going to Happen. History News Network 02/03/2008):

I realize it anew just about every day of this presidential campaign -- most recently when a bevy of Kennedys stood behind Obama last week and spoke of reviving the spirit of Camelot, and when the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks responded by making fine distinctions between "the idealism of the generation that marched in jacket and ties" -- the "early-60s," which he took Obama to represent -- and the "late-60s," defined "by drug use and self-indulgence," of which the Clintons are the supposed avatars.

The fact is, the '60s are still with us, and will remain so for the imaginable future. We are all like Zhou Enlai, who, asked what he thought about the French Revolution, answered, "It is too early to tell." When and how will the cultural and political battle lines the baby boomers bequeathed us dissolve? It is, well and truly, still too early to tell. We can't yet "overcome" the '60s because we still don't even know what the '60s were -- not even close....

Robert Self wrote of the period in "Bodies Count: The Sixties Body in American Politics" in  The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives (2013):

Innocent black bodies enduring violence became a hallmark of civil rights politics for the next de cade, an inescapable trope embraced by activists and visual media alike. ...

... the black freedom movement of the 1950s and early 1960s turned the violence of white supremacy against the southern racial order by making the oppression of actual bodies visible, especially through the tactical use of visual media. The civil rights generation would deploy black bodies to absorb and dramatize white violence. Then, in the late 1960s Black Power and black nationalism again transformed black bodies, this time into symbols of resistance and self-determination. Black freedom activists made their bodies into emblems of peaceful moral righteousness and, barely a generation later, transformed them into stunning symbols of personal and communal power and political projection. [my emphasis]

I confess that I've never felt like I've ever gotten an adequate conceptual grip on the use of the concepts of "bodies" in the way Self uses it here. He refers to it as “body politics,” which has become a standard academic term, as this article elaborates: Body Politics Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics 2013) But Self's point is a good way to understand part of how the memory of The Sixties, which is still very much a living memory for many, shapes contemporary understandings of politics.

But time obviously didn't stand still since the 1960s. And when we look at today's police violence, there are 50 years of developments since 1970 that shaped today's situation. (Bob Brigham, ‘They just fired on us’: Horrifying videos of cops ‘using journalists for target practice’ in Minneapolis Raw Story 05/30/2020)

There was the much-discussed-but-superficially-understood rise in violent crime that peaked in the early 1990s. There was the bipartisan response to it, which heavily featured laws and accompanying prison sentences that "treated" drug use and possession as felony crimes, when an actual paradigm of treating addiction as a medical condition was what was then and is now needed. There was the infamous federal crime bill of the 1990s and its many state-level imitators. There was the War on Terror that had a notable precursor in the federal reation to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, not all of which was well-conceived. The shift in policing to a even more militarized and counter-insurgency model that resulted has further encouraged the police to see the citizens as an enemy to be feared and fought.

I'm not in a mood at this moment to say anything that might sound remotely sympathetical to murderous psychopaths who happen to be wearing a police uniform. At the same time, part of the real background of the current situation is that the desperate condition among the substantial portion of the American public living in poverty creates conditions in which crime and violence thrive. (Current mainstream political realities would dictate that right here I should insert some qualifications to show I don't want to be seen as a frivolous hippie. But I'm really not in the mood right now.)

As all kind of advocates for the police will quickly point out, there are real violent criminals and real violent gangs who do antisocial things that have to be policed. And, yes, that creates an atmosphere where cops have to be fearful for their lives in even routine traffic stops. And none of that, none of that, justifies four cops choking a black guy to death just because they felt like murdering him.

Treating drug problems first and foremost as medical problems rather than a criminal problem and reducing the flood of small arms that flood American cities would make a huge difference for the better. Anyone who's legitimately worried about having arms for self-defense can deal with any such valid needs with shotguns. The Weimar-1920s-style Patriot Militia type groups can only function to the extent that they do because the police and prosecutors in the US and in European countries are too often "blind in the right eye." Without the willing toleration of at least some police, those groups couldn't function as they do. They can function as goon squads for authoritarian governments and movements. Their rhetoric about using their arsenals to fight for democracy against a tyrannical government is a sick joke.

That's not to say that violent far-right groups aren't a danger to cops and public officials. They very clearly are. That's why their sympathizers need to be kept out of law enforcement because they aren't actually on the side of the rule of law. That's not a matter of censoring opinion. It means that we need cops that both enforce and obey the law and don't kill people of any race unless it's absolutely necessary. White supremacists and their sympathizers and collaborators don't meet that qualification.

It may seem a bit incongrous. But I'll end this with a quote from Jerry Brown, responding to a question about how he was able to be elected as Governor of California in 1974 after St. Reagan's two terms in that position. It's a reflection on social progress that is both thoughtful and jaded. To adapt Obama's quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history may bend toward justice - but people have to decide to do the bending. From Jerry Brown: A Life in California Politics (Bancroft Library Oral History Center, 2020):

But I would say the fact that I was around, I could understand the value of being somewhat of an outsider. I mean I did have a pilot test. It’s called the 1966 campaign. We have Reagan, we have [Edmund] Brown [Sr., Jerry father who ran against Reagan for a third term as Governor in 1966], and then we see what happens. So unless you’re dense -- and as I said, I think most people are pretty dense, because they believe what should happen, based on their desires, is what must happen. But no, life doesn’t work that way. You know, the fact that we had a Civil War and 400,000 people died - it shouldn’t have been that way. We should have had a nice resolution, ended slavery, and kumbaya - gone on from there. But life doesn’t work that way. That’s why some people write about the tragic sense. That’s something we - I certainly had a familiarity with in my education. [my emphasis in bold]