Reddit Hudson — I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing

On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with….

That remaining 70 percent of officers are highly susceptible to the culture in a given department. In the absence of any real effort to challenge department cultures, they become part of the problem. If their command ranks are racist or allow institutional racism to persist, or if a number of officers in their department are racist, they may end up doing terrible things.

It is not only white officers who abuse their authority. The effect of institutional racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown. That is what is allowed.…

This hits the nail on the head of the policing issue. It's chiefly attributable to lack of professionalism at the top that trickles down the chain of command and pollutes the force. 

The other issue I saw brought up by a police officer in this regard is policing by quotas. He said that with a quota system of performance, those at the bottom of the social scale on the one's that get to fill the quotas, which is generally the poor and minorities.

However, this is just the policing aspect of the social problems leading to societal dysfunction and social unrest. Law and order and security are not the chief issues, although they are often the most visible in the news. But the issues are broader and deeper, and often go unnoticed by people up the social scale and undiagnosed by "experts" living in bubbles.

The underlying issues are social, political, and economic, and also psychological. Getting a grip on this is going to take commitment on the part of the electorate, since it cannot be solved without participation of government and the courts. Putting more police on the beat, arming them to the teeth and providing them with military hardware, and building more and bigger prisons is not going to do it. It takes getting granular and dealing with people as individuals — the way cops on the beat who knew their neighborhoods used to do. That ended with patrol cars.

It also means revisiting education, including what students do after school. Letting kids just grow up doesn't work in toxic environments. The environments just get replicated from generation to generation and grow even more toxic and therefore more difficult to fix.

In a liberal democracy, the tyranny of the majority is avoided by instituting rights that protect the interests of minorities and guaranteeing through enforcement.

VOX
I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing
Reddit Hudson
ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Carol Anderson — Trump Exposes the GOP's Dirty Secret: They Build Everything by Nurturing White Rage

America's soft fascism disguised by code words is now out in the open.

Shortly before he died, Reagan’s strategist Lee Atwater explained the game plan of the Southern Strategy in a matter-of-fact clinical policy. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘n***r’ — that hurts you, backfires,” Atwater emphasized. “So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.” But Donald Trump doesn’t do abstract and that is what has sent the GOP into a tizzy.

Nixon and Reagan mastered this by adapting to the new racial terrain carved out by the Civil Rights Movement. As Nixon aide John Ehrlichman explained to Harper’sDan Baum in 1994, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be against black[s], but by getting the public to associate . . . blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing” the drug “we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

But that lie was infinitely effective in driving policy. In 2008, the NAACP reported that “five times as many whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites.” Consequently, blacks comprising just 13 percent of the U.S. population made up “59% of those in state prison for a drug offense.” Packaged and sold as keeping neighborhoods and families safe, the Nixon administration’s well-targeted lie, which was expanded upon by Ronald Reagan, and taken up by Democrats such as Bill Clinton to prove that they could be “tough on crime, too,” has worked masterfully. Because many states disfranchise those with felony convictions, the Sentencing Project reports that 2.2 million African Americans or 7.7 percent of black adults have been legally stripped of their voting rights; as compared with 1.8 percent of the non-African American population.…

And that’s the problem. What the GOP is really mad about is that Donald Trump has made visible what many have tried so hard to hide.AlterNet

Trump Exposes the GOP's Dirty Secret: They Build Everything by Nurturing White Rage
Carol Anderson

See also

Back when Dick Cheney was being hailed for calling out Donald Trump’s racism, I notedone aspect of that radio interview that largely escaped notice: his embrace of the myth that the American continent was empty when his Puritan ancestors got here.

Cheney didn’t stop there. He then emphasized that one of his ancestors arrived as a religious refugee, a Puritan. “A lot of people, my ancestors got here, because they were Puritans.” Cheney suggested, then, that the place was empty when William Cheney arrived in the 17th century. “There wasn’t anybody here, then, when they came.”

Should be "the myth of (white) American exceptionalism."

empty wheel Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney, and American Exceptionalism

Russia Direct — Putin's Orthodox conservatives vs. Russia's unorthodox liberals

It was naïve to imagine that after hundreds of years of cruel monarchy and feudalism, and then after decades of bloody and pointless experiments with Communism, in the 1990s the newly independent Russia would immediately settle down on the path of civilized democratic development. 

No, the conservative-patriarchal conception of life, in which a strong leader and state should protect “mere mortals,” to this day dominates the consciousness of the overwhelming majority of Russians. And increasingly, this conservatism inherited from the past comes into open conflict with liberalism, which the most progressive part of Russian society is preaching.…

The basic distinction between liberalism and conservatism is a preference for freedom or order. Much of the post is about comparing Russian conservatism with American conservatism under the label of the Tea Party, which only goes so far.

According to the editor-in-chief of popular radio station Echo of Moscow Alexey Venediktov, “If Putin happened to have been born in the U.S. then he would doubtless be on the edge of the right wing of the Republican Tea Party, and would be more right wing then Senator John McCain.” 

However, the attempt to place Putin within the ideological spectrum of the American political system is quite superficial. As Russian opposition leader and world chess champion Garry Kasparov says, in the United States “the conservative right ideology is not simply a mechanical selection of values but an entire organism, all its parts are closely interrelated. For the American conservative, individual freedom flows naturally from those very same traditional American protestant values.”

In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s highest priority is order, which is more important than human rights or freedom. Almost all public opinion polls within Russia show this.…

The neocons assume that if there is regime change in Russia, liberals will take power. That is most likely an incorrect assumption, since liberals are in the vast minority. The vast majority of Russians poll as conservative or ultra-conservative, and even the reactionary cohort (monarchist) is significant. The outcome of regime change could well be toward a more nationalistic and reactionary government instead of a liberal one.

Russia Direct
Putin's Orthodox conservatives vs. Russia's unorthodox liberals

Also How Russian Liberals Create Russophobe Myths by Nikolai Starikov

Max Blumenthal — Exposed: How Republicans and Cops Are Teaming Up to Take Down deBlasio

How much does it cost you to live in your house? If you are a renter, the answer to that question is fairly straightforward (although if your rent includes a gym membership and heat, it is not clearcut what the simple cost of occupying your place is). 

But suppose you are an owner. What is it costing you every month or every year to live in your house? The truth is, you don't know with a great deal of precision, and neither does anyone else. 

There are two ways to look at the issue.…

Pretty much like the right wing went after Clinton and Obama. Now it's De Blasio's turn.

More divisiveness that is ripping the US apart and hemorrhaging American soft power on the world stage.

AlterNet
Exposed: How Republicans and Cops Are Teaming Up to Take Down deBlasio
Max Blumenthal

See also

AlterNet
Whistleblowing Officer Makes Tape of Top Cop Ordering Stop-and-Frisks of Black Males
Walter Einenkel, DailyKos

Stop “the right people, the right time, the right location,” Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack is heard saying on the recording.
[...] 

“So what am I supposed to do: Stop every black and Hispanic?” Serrano was heard saying on the tape, which was recorded last month at the 40th Precinct in the Bronx.
[...] 

“I have no problem telling you this,” the inspector said on the tape. “Male blacks. And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem [to] tell you this, male blacks 14 to 21.” 

The tape and testimony are a part of a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy.

Crooks and Liars
Mayor DeBlasio: Fire The Commissioner And Discipline Insubordinate Police Officers
Susie Madrak

Democracy Now
NYPD Officer Speaks Out on Fellow Cops Who Turned Backs to Mayor & Why People of Color Fear Police

Amy Goodman interviews Adhyl Polanco

Jacobin
Smash the Lynch Mob
Ari Paul

David Ferguson — FBI investigating death threats, intimidation, and weapons violations at Bundy ranch (via Raw Story )

FBI investigating death threats, intimidation, and weapons violations at Bundy ranch (via Raw Story )

Law enforcement officials in Nevada say that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the April standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy, the Bureau of Land Management and the armed militia who gathered at Bundy’s ranch. KLAS-TV Channel 8…

---

William Rivers Pitt — Cliven Bundy: Clown Car or Trojan Horse?

... there's some very serious and troubling stuff here, and it cannot be ignored or buried beneath the eruption of stupid we've witnessed to date. First of all, these armed yahoos actually managed to successfully fend off federal agents who were attempting to uphold and execute the law. That sets a terrible precedent, one that will almost certainly inspire more armed yahoos to point rifles at people somewhere down the line. They're still on the Bundy ranch, they've started setting up "checkpoints" along the roads around the ranch, and the feds still have to execute those orders, so this thing is not over yet...

...and note you well: here in America, you can point a high-powered rifle at federal officers and get off scot-free with your gun still in your hand. Sit down at a peaceful Occupy protest on the campus of UC Davis in California, however, and you get a gushing face full of Mace for your trouble...while the cop who sprayed you gets $38,000 in compensation for "anxiety and depression."

Far more insidious is the fact that, until he pulled his little "What, Me Racist?" number for all the world to see, Mr. Bundy's most dedicated supporters were a couple of billionaire brothers named Charles and David Koch. The Koch Brothers, if truth be told, could not give less of a damn about Cliven Bundy and his band of merry men, but until Bundy blew out like an old, racist tire, they were intensely interested in using him as the avatar for a fight they've been waging for twenty years: placing control of publicly-owned federal lands back into the hands of the states, so the states can lease or sell those lands to companies like Koch Industries for cattle grazing, mining, drilling, fracking, and lumbering.

Right now, those lands are protected from such activities, but the Koch Brothers were hoping to ride Cliven Bundy's cause to a massive land grab.... They want to drill, to mine, to frack, and to profit off those lands that belong to us...

Truthout
William Rivers Pitt | Cliven Bundy: Clown Car or Trojan Horse?