HAVENT THEY BEEN DOING THAT ALREADY? Yes, the cops blamed the protesters. (So did Rudy Giuliani, but don’t get me started on him.) Even more chilling, the police union purportedly declared in a widely shared statement that the NYPD has “become a ‘wartime’ police department. We will act accordingly.” Violence threatened is also violence enacted. Wartime? These are the marching orders to the 35,000 armed members of the biggest police department in the United States. This is the message now sent to protesters around the nation who have been finding novel and peaceful forms of expression to resist oppression – who have been protesting in reaction to police violence, not causing it. For the state and its agents, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die,” the postcolonial scholar Achilles Mbembe wrote of his term necropolitics, which describe who, exactly, wields the power to kill. The fear inside that police union boss is not just about the actual violence which may befall his members; it’s a fear that the NYPD is in danger of losing its monopoly on the threat of violence. To Patrick Lynch (and to all of us), a cop’s killing is unacceptable. But to Patrick Lynch (and to too many white people), a cop acting as judge, jury and
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 22:12:38 +0000
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