Given how the
prosecutors were acting like Wilson's defense I'm not sure that a trial by him that resulted in an "Innocent" verdict would've been much better. This is pretty blatant corruption on their part but it belongs to a larger process that continues to demonstrate why people
cannot fundamentally trust the system even when our society's commonly held values say that these things, trials and law enforcement, are there to protect us. A deep cynicism surrounding the issue has taken hold and it's not simply a matter of an "unruly mob out for blood" as conservative punditaters have been trying to paint it, but a group sick of being drenched in
their own blood and being told it's justice. The law only works when it is granted legitimacy and our courts have pissed all of the trust necessary to do so away at the behest of those who wantonly deny the violation of human rights on a nigh-constant basis in favor of social mores that glorify the militarized authority. It has pissed it away to provide the modern racist their comfort and emphasizes their voice in these social discussions. In violating the reasons people trust the law's legitimacy, it has pissed away an essential foundation to our society, without which shall lead to further instability, and it will only continue to erode until people address the underlying issues that have led to this state.
But that would require a drastic change in the U.S. culture, and there's little chance of that when we continue to see the present as inherently more "modern, progressive, and enlightened" than times before. When we overall continue to attack movements challenging these issues as outdated and irrelevant to contemporary life, as if the mid-20th century resulted in the magical evaporation of all these problems and we arrived at an egalitarian utopia that carries none of that baggage from our history except in a rare handful of individual cases. And again with LGBT rights now that same-sex marriage is largely becoming possible in our society, as if the only thing left to do is wait for the older generations to die out. We have confused political emancipation, as it claims to be, with realized human emancipation. Our culture cannot change because it rests in its comfortable delusions of temporal supremacy, where the crimes are always those of others, of different places, people, or times, and never crimes of our own. There are people who do not want this conflict to be about race, all the while Oath Keepers offer to protect the white citizens of Ferguson from black, while Ferguson police are drawn from another department that was shut down for its gross racial violations and is still overwhelmingly white despite a black demographic majority in the city (and still non-negligible in the county), with police officers who go off on racist rants, with KKK members who join in the call of violent "defense" against the protests, and all of those complicit in building the narrative to defend these people or irresponsibly focus on the symptoms (riots) without addressing the cause (systemic prejudice and violence, no police accountability). There is a pattern here that people refuse to even acknowledge because doing so would lead to a more uncomfortable conversation for the one's in denial at the expense, in a wage far more brutally realized, of others. People cannot change if they do not believe what they are doing to be wrong. The racist police state cannot (effectively) change until the people do. Redress through our laws isn't nothing but by itself it is not sufficient for correcting the system.
Author
Topic: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice (Read 445230 times)