What Did You Think Was Going To Happen?

The helicopter in question certainly matched the silhouette of a chinook. Still, it was a quick glimpse and I don’t know anything about this sort of thing.

I write this on the morning of the 31st of May, after the second day of protests in Kansas City, shortly after a military helicopter (a chinook. I think? I don’t know much about military gear.) flew over my apartment building.

The country is on fire.

This was all kicked off by the murder of George Floyd, a black man from Minneapolis. Three nights ago, if I’m doing the math correctly, the third precinct – the precinct at which the murderers worked – was taken and burned by the protesters. In response the national guard was called in.

The same story is being repeated over and over again – but whispered and spoken, where Minneapolis shouted and screamed and raged. The government response has been the same everywhere: overwhelming force, military equipment, lines of identical riot cops protecting empty businesses from people giving vent to their rage.

You can find out more about it on Buzzfeed, from where this image is taken. I’m dead certain that they’re going to find the officer in question was acting within his rights, or some bullshit.

None of these protests started violent. The worst any of them did is throw plastic water bottles. In response, the police have pepper sprayed, they have fired tear gas. I saw pictures out of Seattle, a young girl wailing after having chemical weapons sprayed in her face, tended by adults trying to neutralize the pepper spray or tear gas that an adult man in military cosplay used on her.

If you’re wearing body armor, there’s nothing a child can do to you. This cop broke the Geneva Convention because a child startled him.

None of this had to happen. That’s the distressing part. George Floyd didn’t have to be murdered: he was being held down on the ground by two officers and Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck until he died. There was nothing he could do to protect himself. He died because he tried to pass a bad $20 bill. On the scale of things to do wrong, I’m going to guess that we can all agree that murder is worse than using counterfeit money. If you disagree, turn off your computer, because you lack the critical thinking skills to be allowed on the internet. I say this as someone who, at one point, unknowingly accepted a counterfeit bill and had to scramble to solve the situation.

And, instead of charging Chauvin and his collaborators immediately with first degree murder – there is some evidence that Chauvin and Floyd knew each other before the incident, and Chauvin has a history of being involved in fatal incidents – they were fired (I’m given to understand that, about 50% of the time, the police union sues to have officers rehired in such situations, so this is about as damaging to the cops as taking a vacation is to an hourly worker.) No one was charged until the 29th, after the police station was burned.

They could have immediately treated this as the heinous crime it is, but they decided to protect their own.

Image taken from Bring Me The News. This man obviously looks uncomfortable here, and some other possible provocateurs appeared to be wearing the same style of gas mask.

The response was a peaceful protest that turned violent – after possible agents provacateur became involved. I’m sure everyone has seen the video of the gas mask-wearing man smashing in the windows of the Autozone. He was identified as a member of the St. Paul PD (who, of course, deny that this was the case. They have a vested interest in it not being one of theirs, so I say to take that with a grain of salt.)

And what followed was days of rage.

It spread beyond Minneapolis. Every major city had protests, and many of them turned violent at one point or another. The police, wearing riot gear, respond with overwhelming force. The charitable interpretation is that they don’t seem to get that they’re the cause of the violence: it makes sense to have this interpretation – after all, if you view yourself as having moral authority, as being empowered by the state to wield life and death in the service of the law, then I can see how this would lead you to not see yourself as part of the problem.

But I think that’s too charitable. I think that, given that police only seem to have violence in their toolkit, they view every situation as something to which they need to apply either violence or the threat of violence. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that studies show that police officers have an unusually high chance of also being domestic abusers: I’ve heard figures in the 40 – 50% range, and that doesn’t paint a terribly friendly picture. It indicates that a significant portion of the police force is made up of people who like exercising authority.

Of course, they had a chance to prosecute Chauvin for a prior incident and then-prosecutor Amy Klobuchar refused to do so.

These are people who couldn’t take the actions necessary to preserve the status quo, and they’re led by people who aren’t smart enough to order them to try. If the police wanted the status quo, the Minneapolis Police Department would have arrested Derek Chauvin and his collaborators and charged them with first degree murder. If the police wanted the status quo, they would have kept their distance from the protests, giving them a wide berth and allowing them to make a spectacle. If the police wanted the status quo, they wouldn’t have sprayed children with chemical weapons.

If the government wanted the status quo – well, first, they would have taken a different approach to the still-ongoing public health crisis – they would have kept the police on a tighter leash. They wouldn’t give open season to fire live ammunition at civilians, including uninvolved civilians.

According to Wikipedia – I know, I know, not the most reliable source – there are approximately 300 law enforcement officers per hundred thousand Americans, or about 333 American civilians for every police officer. By responding with force, the police are galvanizing resistance to them. They are acting like occupiers – in my home town, Kansas City, the police department is under the control of the state, and thus behaves more like occupiers than elsewhere. Perhaps that’s why they were comfortable teargassing a demonstration and riling up the crowd: they didn’t see the crowd as their friends and neighbors, they saw them as an undifferentiated mass of them. The Other.

Which brings me back to the question at the top of this piece: what did they think was going to happen?

What do any of these police departments think is going to happen? Do they really think that a swift, brutal crackdown is going to magically make a dent in that 100,000:300 ratio?

I hate violence. I don’t think that’s a terribly controversial position. I hate violence in my community – I think that’s an even less controversial position. In this case, the police are the source of the violence, so I can’t look at them as anything but a threat from outside the community.

This isn’t going to stop any time soon, I’m afraid.

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It is now the evening of the 31st of May. I attempted to find a place to park to join the demonstration in Kansas City, and spent forty minutes or more circling the area. Frustrated and ashamed, I returned home and returned to this document.

I’m a terrible anarchist, I guess.

I’m so fucking tired.

The same neighborhood that this photo comes from, used previously on this website, but also mentioned elsewhere.

Down on the plaza – which is sort of like the central shopping district, which makes it kind of like a town square, if a town square was owned by an incompetent real estate firm – people I know are protesting. A guy I met doing stand up comedy and didn’t think much of has been out there every night, live streaming. Guess I was wrong about him. The members of my writers group who are able have showed up, too. Everyone’s throwing money in bail funds.

But I also see pictures of police snipers getting into position. I see videos of metro buses sitting where they shouldn’t be, away from their normal routes. I see the mayor, hoarse and stormy-browed, trying to calm people down.

This whole experience, bottom to top, is surreal to me. As I noted above, I don’t think any of this needed to happen, and I feel that the police are exacerbating things at every turn.

Nothing about this image says “de-escalation”

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And now, at the end of the night, to the relative safety of the tumbledown apartment building we live in, I am marshaling my final thoughts as the weight of state oppression comes bearing down on members of my community, not two miles from where I sit, typing.

The public health crisis is ongoing. People have been locked up in their homes, going stir crazy. It was inevitable that they would come out, should there be a reason to. They were given one, and the police escalated the situation – like cops always do. I want you to think back, and ask yourself how often they’ve deescalated the situation: if you can come up with more than maybe two instances, I’m going to guess you’ve got a higher net worth than the majority of people I spend time with.

For the record, this is Kettling. Image from Jonas Naimark, shared under a CC BY 3.0 license.

I check the news. The protest is ongoing. Tear gas has been deployed by the tennis courts. The cops seem to have started kettling people, and I can’t help but think about the image of a sniper getting into position. The president has declared that there are only two genders: fascist and terrorist (if antifascism makes one a terrorist, then that means that the only way to not be a terrorist is to be a fascist, doesn’t it?)

The stream shows tensions escalating, the reporters are trying to drum up sympathy for the cops, and I grow distracted.

I turn it off.

The country – the world – will still be on fire tomorrow. I want to say that the flames will die down some day, but the police, outside agitators, and our own government has decided to just keep throwing kindling on the flames.

But no fire burns forever, and someday we can try to rebuild from this. I just hope it’s sooner rather than later.

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In the light of the next morning, I have slept but have not rested. Nothing has changed about the light; but it feels like everything that it falls upon is different.

The White House went dark. Image from Common Dreams.

Last night, the President and his family were sequestered in a bunker. I’ve heard that it was because the protesters breached the gates and set fire to an out building. I don’t know if this is true, but it wouldn’t really surprise me.

Last night, the democratic nominee posted a milquetoast comment on Medium that supported nothing and did nothing to push an agenda other than him seizing power. It’s been noted that Minnesota is a blue state and all the officials pushing for violence against protesters bleed blue.

Last night, someone in my city was shot and killed near the protests. I don’t know the person, I don’t know their name or their inclinations. I do know that they didn’t deserve to die. I do not know if they were killed by the police, or their highway patrol and national guard support, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

This situation cannot be allowed to continue. I don’t know the way to end it, but I think I’ve outlined many (not all, good god, not all) of the causes. And diagnosis is the first step to treatment. Draw your own conclusions from here. I can’t keep working on this right now – and if you’re a regular reader, you should know that I don’t find myself at a loss for words often.

Stay safe.