After last week’s police-involved fatal shootings in Baton Rouge and suburban St. Paul, Rolling Stone’s Jeb Lund argued that such deaths happen not because of a few racist cops, but because over the past five decades millions of voters have rewarded politicians who propose and enact racist laws.
In an article that appeared Thursday prior to the murder of five police officers in Dallas, Lund declared, “From Nixon's racialized post-1960s backlash law-and-order politics, to the Democratic Party tacking so hard toward white resentment that 2016's 'progressive' candidate talked about 'superpredators' in the 1990s, both parties figured out just how much of a can't-lose proposition it was to call for more cops, harsher interdiction and zero tolerance, all while finding new drugs, new addicts and new terms for low-income criminals that broadcast one general image to voters: Bad black people.”
Yes, Lund noted, some officers are violence-prone bigots, but “there are racists and mean, small people in every job. More importantly, cops enforce mandates, not draft them…And what a mandate we gave them…Even if we're not conscious of it on a national level, we reinforce it time and again on a local one. Just look at Nextdoor, a social media site [which] often becomes a festival of white and middle-class narcissism and paranoia – petty grudges and dog-whistling anxieties from commenters for whom life is an Odyssey of minor inconveniences escalating toward apocalypse.”
Lund opined that average Americans endorse a double standard when it comes to policing: lenient where they live, fierce where the Other live (bolding added):
When the poor or minority citizens we target complain, we point to the high arrest rates where they live and blame not the policing we rain down on those neighborhoods, but the people who live in them. (Assholes among us point to how much we pay in property taxes therefore our concerns should take preceden[ce].) We do not ask ourselves how much a shock-and-awe of arrest warrants would pulverize our families if all our kids who got high and fucked around and all our dads who cracked open tallboys on the drive home from work got pulled over and hassled half as much as the "wrong” sorts of people in the wrong sorts of neighborhoods.
And when the cops fuck up, we're ready to understand…Local and national media furnish every extraneous negative detail of anyone abused or shot, beginning a process of police forgiveness that's already abetted by our tendency to automatically treat police as Premium Citizens…
Alton Sterling and Philando Castile are collateral damage as real, as silent and implacable as a black-and-white drone video of a Hellfire missile streaking toward a Yemeni wedding party at the same moment some hyena in the CIA is drafting the paper retroactively designating every piece of resultant Muslim hamburger a terrorist.
