Reformers said body cameras and video evidence would stop police brutality. Instead, we're being told to not believe our own eyes.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7wnkz/the-police-are-gaslighting-us



Night after night, Americans peacefully exercising their Constitutionally-protected rights are being brutalized by police in cities and towns across the country. Millions of people have watched phone-shot videos of cops pushing down protesters, shooting them with rubber bullets and pepper spray balls, and kicking them over. We see it happening with our own eyes, but police and elected leaders are telling us not to believe what we’re seeing:

In Buffalo, police said a 75-year-old-man—who was walking alone doing nothing when he was pushed over by a cop, hit his head on cement, started bleeding from his ears, and was ignored by a group of a dozen officers—“tripped and fell.”

In Manhattan, the New York Police Department said that an essential delivery worker who was arrested for the crime of doing his job after curfew could have been lying about his job.

In DC, Park Police said that an Australian media crew that was sitting down and filming a protest when they were bashed with riot shields “were not readily distinguishable from violent protesters.”

In Erie, Pennsylvania, police pepper sprayed a woman who was sitting down. She covers her eyes with both of her arms. A cop then kicks her in the face.

In Los Angeles, the LAPD shot a homeless man in a wheelchair in the face with a rubber bullet. A photo of the man's bloodied face has gone viral; the LAPD has declined to comment.

These are just a few of the incidents I remember seeing off the top of my head, that have been seared into my brain as I and others have watched, horrified.

A Cop Was Filmed Telling Armed White Men To Avoid Arrest "So We Don't Look Like We're Playing Favorites"

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/salem-oregon-cop-warn-white-armed-men-playing-favorites



The police chief in Salem, Oregon, has apologized after a viral video showed one of his officers telling a group of armed white men protecting a store to shelter inside to avoid being arrested for violating a curfew so officers "don't look like [they're] playing favorites."

"We're going to really enforce the citywide curfew shutdown so we can arrest anybody walking around," the unidentified officer tells the men. "My command wanted me to come talk to you guys and request that you guys secrete people inside the businesses or in your vehicles somewhere where it's not a violation ... so we don't look like we're playing favorites."

He adds, "That would be unhealthy."

A clip of the encounter uploaded to TikTok went viral after it was shared on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/Satellit3Heart/status/1268863536299675648

The person who made the TikTok, Dani Green, 20, told BuzzFeed News she did not film the video but saw it posted on Facebook and wanted to share a clip on platforms where she believed younger audiences would see it.

"I didn't think what they were doing was right, and I wanted more people my age to see that, both locally and nationally," she said.

Police brutality didn’t begin in the Trump era. But this administration made it worse.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2020/06/trump-sessions-police/612715/

Police brutality is a decades-long problem, one that predates this administration. But President Trump made it worse, my colleague Adam Serwer argues in a sweeping new piece. He gave the police permission to be brutal.

This administration rolled back Obama-era police reform. In 2017, Jeff Sessions, Trump’s then-attorney general, ended the Justice Department’s oversight of local police departments.

Trump personally holds “few ideological convictions as consistent as his belief in the redemptive power of state violence against religious and ethnic minorities,” Adam argues, recalling the president’s 1989 comments about the Central Park Five—and his continued refusal to acknowledge their innocence—and his travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries, among other things.

Meanwhile, America already knows how to fix this. “The nation has studied its racism on a loop for decades,” our politics staff writer Adam Harris points out, citing more than a century’s worth of commissions assembled to address it. Calls to study it anew aren’t helpful—the nation “doesn’t need to diagnose the problem again,” he writes.

“Another commission won’t tell us anything we don’t already know.”

Further reading:

A professor of law, a former deputy chief of police, and a criminology professor offer their blueprint for how to actually fix America’s police.

David A. Graham points out a tension in this week’s protests: The use of force by police can’t pacify protests responding to the use of force by police.

Militarization can escalate already-tense situations, Nick Baumann reports.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/business/billionaire-wealth-inequality-pandemic-jobs/index.html

New York (CNN Business)The past three months have been financially painful for many Americans -- but not for billionaires.

US billionaires have become $565 billion richer since March 18, according to a report published Thursday by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank.

Total wealth for billionaires now stands at $3.5 trillion, up 19% from the low point near the beginning of the pandemic, the report said. Amazon (AMZN) boss Jeff Bezos alone is worth $36.2 billion more than he was on March 18.

Since that day, nearly 43 million Americans have filed for initial unemployment benefits. Lower-income workers, especially in travel and service-sector jobs, have been hit particularly hard by the health crisis.

The numbers put an exclamation point on the deep divide between haves and have-nots that is helping to fuel unrest across the United States. Wealth inequality is likely to get even worse because of this crisis, experts say.

The acceleration of wealth for the richest Americans is being driven by the remarkable recovery of the stock market, which has skyrocketed in large part because of unprecedented action from the Federal Reserve.

"The stock market taking off — and decoupling from the real economy — is exacerbating inequality," said Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco.

Live updates: D.C. mayor issues citywide 11 p.m. curfew; protesters march on U.S. Capitol on sixth day of protests in D.C.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/06/03/dc-protest-george-floyd-white-house/

A sixth day of protests in Washington began Wednesday with a demonstration at the Capitol. The protest came after as many as 2,000 demonstrators descended on Washington on Tuesday, the largest and most boisterous crowd to gather in the nation’s capital during protests over George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police.

Here are some significant developments:

• Protesters returned to Washington for a sixth day Wednesday as people lay face down near ornate fountains on the East Front of the Capitol, hands held behind their backs as though cuffed. At noon, hundreds stood in the rain at the Capitol chanting, “I can’t breathe!”

• After two nights with a curfew that began at 7 p.m., Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced Wednesday that a curfew will go into effect at 11 p.m. and extend through 6 a.m. Thursday.

• Bowser raised concerns Wednesday about the expanding outside law enforcement footprint in the District amid days of large demonstrations, saying, “we should all be concerned about who is giving the orders.” Over the past few days, numerous federal police agencies and National Guard members from several states have deployed across the city.

• Many protesters on Tuesday said they came out because of what happened Monday, when hundreds of peaceful demonstrators were forcefully cleared from Lafayette Square — one of the country’s most symbolic places of protest — by federal forces at the behest of Attorney General William P. Barr, before President Trump walked across the square to pose for photos at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Many protesters were struck with pepper balls; others were pushed and hit.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/trumps-george-floyd-obama-protest-police-violence-kneeling.html



Last October, Minneapolis Police Union president Bob Kroll appeared at a Trump rally. Clad in his red “Cops for Trump” T-shirt, Kroll (who has been alleged to be affiliated with white supremacists) gloated that the president had unshackled his officers from the restraints imposed by Trump’s predecessor. “The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” he told the crowd. “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the Holder-Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start takin— letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”

We will never know if that unshackling emboldened Derek Chauvin to murder George Floyd. But the line between the relief demanded by Kroll on behalf of Minneapolis police, and the naked assassination committed on camera by one of his officers, is quite direct. The world around us, in which the streets of every major American city are filled with protesters, is the result of Trump granting the wishes of the most retrograde police officers. They are getting what they asked for.

The last few years of the Obama administration were one of the most productive periods of criminal justice reform in American history. The Obama administration changed sentencing guidelines to reduce the disparity in the treatment of drug crimes that had disproportionately harmed black defendants. As part of an effort to inculcate a “guardian, not a warrior” mindset, it restricted the transfer of surplus military equipment to police departments. Most importantly, it formed consent decrees with more than a dozen police departments to force them to change their practices.

These reforms did not root out brutality and racism. They were mild both in form and intent, undertaken with the goal of conciliating police and their communities, believing that enhancing trust would ultimately create safer conditions for police as well as those who fear them. It was the epitome of evolutionary cultural change.