A View From The Left-IT’S OFFICIAL: THERE NEVER WAS A ‘WAR ON COPS’

IT’S OFFICIAL: THERE NEVER WAS A ‘WAR ON COPS’

This year will go down in the record books as one of the safest for police officers in recorded history, according to data released this week from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. There were 42 fatal shootings of police officers in 2015, down 14 percent from 2014, according to the organization.  Overall, 124 officers were killed in the line of duty this year. More than one third of those deaths were due to traffic accidents, the largest single cause of officer fatalities. Thirty other officers died of a variety of other causes, including job-related illnesses… But they contrast sharply with a narrative we've been hearing about a "war on cops" in the wake of demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere in protest of fatal shootings by police. The narrative has been especially popular among Republican presidential contenders… Even though it's squarely at odds with the facts, this rhetoric has an effect: A Rasmussen poll in September found that 58 percent of Americans said that there's a war on police in the United States today.   More

 

TA-NEHISI COATES: The Paranoid Style of American Policing

Two days after Jones and LeGrier were killed, a district attorney in Ohio declined to prosecute the two officers who drove up, and within two seconds of arriving, killed the 12-year-old Tamir Rice. No one should be surprised by this. In America, we have decided that it is permissible, that it is wise, that it is moral for the police to de-escalate through killing… When policing is delegitimized, when it becomes an occupying force, the community suffers. The neighbor-on-neighbor violence in Chicago, and in black communities around the country, is not an optical illusion. Policing is (one) part of the solution to that violence. But if citizens don’t trust officers, then policing can’t actually work. And in Chicago, it is very hard to muster reasons for trust.   More

 

America’s Incarcerated Population, Largest in World, Grew Even More Last Year

The federal government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has released new numbers detailing how America’s incarcerated population — already the world’s largest — grew even bigger in 2014.  The bureau’s researchers report that the number of individuals incarcerated grew by 1,900 people over the course of last year — “reversing a 5-year decline since 2008.” … Their report found that just seven jurisdictions “accounted for almost half of the U.S. correctional population at yearend 2014,” with Texas topping the list with 699,300 offenders. Overall, “about 1 in 36 adults in the United States was under some form of correctional supervision at yearend 2014.”  More

 

TY BURR: The most important movies of 2015 were not in any theater

To me, the most important movie of 2015 was the police car dash-cam video of the July arrest of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, in Prairie View, Texas. Not just the three minutes or so of the altercation with a white police officer that resulted in Bland’s being taken to the local jail, where she allegedly hung herself three days later, but the entire 52-minute expanse of the tape… Nor was this hardly the only “found footage” of note in 2015, video imagery that is so much more worth your time and thought than — I hate to say it but I have to — a new “Star Wars” movie… They’re the latest in a horrifying hit parade that includes videos of the deaths of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice in 2014 and Ricardo Diaz-Zeferino in 2013… England’s The Guardian has a helpful, if horrifying database of US police killings this year — www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database — that parses the numbers in varying ways. Of the 1,103 Americans shot and killed by police, 537 have been white and 272 have been black. (Hispanic/Latinos account for 170 deaths.) But those numbers translate to 2.7 white deaths for each million versus 6.5 black deaths per million… But this was a year in which, for people whose unacknowledged privileges give them a hall pass allowing them to move freely through America, it became impossible to look away, or to forget, or to hurry on.    More

 

Terror Fear Trumps Populist Anger: a Corporate Media Triumph

A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll notes a recent development in the opinion and focus of the United States electorate.  

“Heightened fear of terrorism is rippling through the electorate, thrusting national-security issues to the center of the 2016 presidential campaign…, Some 40% of those polled say national security and terrorism should be the government’s top priority, and more than 60% put it in the top two, up from just 39% eight months ago… Never mind that everyday Americans are more likely to be killed by an asteroid than by a terror attack.  Or that those Americans are at much greater risk to mortality from the nation’s current savage “New Gilded Age” levels of economic inequality – a leading factor behind the recent striking rise in white middle aged and working class mortality in the U.S…   The polls are ironically juxtaposed with a recent Pew Research report on the economic disparity that ends and ruins far more American lives than Islamic terrorism.    More

 

GLENN GREENWALD: Free Speech Limits to Fight ISIS Pose a Greater Threat to U.S. Than ISIS

In 2006 — years before ISIS replaced al Qaeda as the New and Unprecedentedly Evil Villain — Newt Gingrich gave a speech in New Hampshire in which, as he put it afterward, he “called for a serious debate about the First Amendment and how terrorists are abusing our rights… In a follow-up article titled “The First Amendment is Not a Suicide Pact,” Gingrich went even further, arguing that terrorists should be “subject to a totally different set of rules,” and called for an international convention to decide “on what activities will not be protected by free speech claims.” … Fast forward to 2015, where the aging al Qaeda brand has become decisively less scary and ISIS has been unveiled as the new never-before-seen menace. There are now once again calls for restrictions on the First Amendment’s free speech protections, but they come not from far-right radicals in universally discredited neocon journals, but rather from the most mainstream voices, as highlighted this week by the New York Times.   More

 

 

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