Rad Geek People's Daily

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Officer-involvement

Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 14 years ago, in 2010, on the World Wide Web.

Here’s Jenn Rowell in the Montgomery Advertiser on a recent murder in Tallassee. Notice the amazing disappearing subject:

Tallassee police have released additional information about a fatal shooting that involved officers.

In the news, fatal shootings just happen somehow, and officers, poor things, somehow end up involved.

Of course, what actually happened is that some white cops working on the Tallassee city government’s police force chased a black man down and then they shot him to death. Their victim, Michael McIntyre, was not actually accused of any crime whatsoever; the cops were in the housing projects where he lives because they were looking for somebody else to serve a warrant. (Who they found, and arrested, without any trouble. But Michael McIntyre ran away, which cops in America take as a crime in itself, and sufficient reason to chase after you, force a violent confrontation, and take you down by any means necessary, even if it means lighting you up (the police so far have refused to disclose how many shots were fired, beyond the fact that their victim was hit multiple times).

Cops claim that McIntyre brandished a weaponafter a gang of heavily-armed strangers had chased him for 200 or 300 yards. I don’t know whether that’s true or not — there’s certainly no reason to just take the police at their word — but even if it is true, I don’t much care. If I had no reason to be looking for you, no reason to hang around bothering you — if you were never accused of any crime and I had no basis to arrest or detain or harass you over anything — and you decided to leave, then you have a right to leave. If I took your decision to leave as an offense against my person or prerogative, and then chased you down, threatening to use my small arsenal of weapons to restrain you by any means necessary, and so forced a violent confrontation with you when, again, you were not suspected of committing any crime, or of posing any threat to anyone, and if I then ended it all by lighting you up, in self-defense against a threat which, if it existed at all, was purely the product of my own belligerence and escalation, then I would be considered a dangerous maniac, and I would probably be in prison for the next couple decades, if not the remainder of my natural life.

Of course, here the dangerous maniac is a gang of cops armed and uniformed by the city government. So instead they get a crowd control goon squad to clear the area of upset black people, while the Mayor pro tem of the city government takes time out to roll up and do some damage control, while their colleagues in the Alabama Bureau of Investigation perform a perfunctory investigation that will almost certainly end up by declaring that everything they did was done According To Official Procedures.

(Via Roderick 2009-12-31.)

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3 replies to Officer-involvement Use a feed to Follow replies to this article · TrackBack URI

  1. Gabriel

    Charles do you have links to any of your writings on pirates (actual pirates), gangs, and how public schools react to the problem of youth gangs? I was reading an article about “Confronting Youth Violence” and incredibly principal in charge of the center for “troubled youths” held up ex-gang members who had joined the military as exemplary role models! (I guess the message is that there’s nothing wrong with gangs as long as you joint the right one?) At the same time a lot of gangs are nothing more than “private states”, so to speak, and so it’s hard to know how to evaluate them from an anarchist perspective.

— 2015 —

  1. Discussed at radgeek.com

    Rad Geek People's Daily 2015-08-24 – Officer Involved:

    […] GT 2010-01-08: Officer Involvement […]

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