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Judi Lynn

(160,218 posts)
Sun May 31, 2020, 04:55 AM May 2020

Dani Garavelli: Cheerleader for race riots Donald Trump creates perfect smokescreen


To watch the footage of George Floyd dying at the hands of a white US police officer is to shudder at man’s capacity for brutality. For Derek Chauvin to have kept his knee on the man’s neck even after he had passed out, even as bystanders begged him to check his pulse, is an act of depravity.

By Dani Garavelli
Sunday, 31st May 2020, 7:58 am

Sadly, neither the barbarity, nor the racism that fuelled it, is new. Floyd is the latest in a long succession of African Americans to die at the hands of police officers. Some of their names are well-known: Michael Brown; Tyrone West, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray; many more have faded into obscurity. But the toll keeps mounting. As Chauvin was squeezing the breath from Floyd in Minneapolis, protesters were demanding justice over the killing of Breonna Taylor, shot dead by police in her house in Louisville in March.

Nor are the riots that have swept the US entirely unexpected. It is common for police killings to light a touchpaper in cities with pre-existing racial tensions. As in Los Angeles after the attack on Rodney King, Baltimore after the killings of West and Gray, so too in Minneapolis, where the police precinct was set alight and, Louisville, where demonstrators were shot. The trouble follows a familiar pattern: peaceful demonstrations turn violent, and – once the city is in turmoil – opportunists start looting.

What is unprecedented is that the president should do so much to create the context for the killing and then seek to inflame the violence. When, 72 hours after Floyd’s death, Donald Trump called the protestors “thugs” and told Minnesota governor Tim Walz the military were with him all the way; when he tweeted, “when the looting begins, the shooting begins” – a phrase first used by Miami’s police chief Walter Headley during civil rights unrest in 1967 – he was playing to his volatile alt-right followers, in exactly the same way as when he defended the armed anti-lockdown supporters in the Michigan Capitol earlier in the month.

From the moment Trump announced his candidacy, he has been courting the white supremacist vote. He may have disowned David Duke, but if your slogan is Make America Great Again and you talk about walls and deporting Muslims, then you shouldn’t be surprised by a KKK endorsement. And if your response to the killing of a protester at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville is to suggest “there are fine folks on both sides” you legitimise that rally and justify the KKK’s faith in you.

Furthermore if you tell law enforcement officers not to be “too nice” to suspects, adding that it’s ok to allow them to bang their heads, then you share the responsibility when black suspects die as a result of excessive force.

More:
https://www.scotsman.com/health/dani-garavelli-cheerleader-race-riots-donald-trump-creates-perfect-smokescreen-2869754
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Dani Garavelli: Cheerleader for race riots Donald Trump creates perfect smokescreen (Original Post) Judi Lynn May 2020 OP
I think the only way we are going to see real change with the varies police departments is if they cstanleytech May 2020 #1
Accountable or dangerous scuciti May 2020 #2

cstanleytech

(26,080 posts)
1. I think the only way we are going to see real change with the varies police departments is if they
Sun May 31, 2020, 07:25 AM
May 2020

improve their selection criteria because all of the training in the world does not matter if you have shitty people as police officers.

scuciti

(33 posts)
2. Accountable or dangerous
Sun May 31, 2020, 08:36 AM
May 2020

If they are not immediately held accountable, and fired and put in jail - there will be a huge attraction for people with masochistic or anti social mental disorders to gain nearly unlimited access to committing violence against people. That is a big incentive for certain types. They will say the right things and act the right way while in training. They are smart enough for that.

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