White Pigs
Bad apples.
That’s what we always hear when cops kill unarmed Black folk or beat the living shit out of a Black person who doesn’t immediately accept their absolute authority. We always hear that these criminals with uniforms, guns, pepper spray, and a license to kill are bad apples.
Well, if the video of the brutal New Orleans police beating of 64-year-old retired school teacher Robert Davis teaches us anything about bad apples, it’s that the whole goddamned barrel is rotten already. Every one of those cops waited for their opportunity to dive in and get their licks on this elder.
I want to say something clever, but I don’t feel clever after just having seen the whole videotape on television. These fucking white pigs didn’t just abuse Mr. Davis, who didn’t do a fucking thing wrong except resist being handcuffed by a bunch of cops who had just punched him in the back of the head seven times in a row, each time slamming his face into a concrete wall. (We just attacked you and now we demand that you make our continued attacks easier.) They started attacking the witnesses, too.
And you know what? Because I know what!
Those pigs will all be exonerated. Mr. Davis will be charged and convicted of resisting arrest. Black people looking for food during the floods were called looters, while New Orleans pigs were stealing cash and cars as if they were Capone’s gang on meth. Bob Dylan said it, “where black is the color, and none is the number.”
Just convinced me that working class Black folks need to get armed. Lots of them. Concealed carry permits, and patrol the community just like the Panthers did. Twenty legally-armed, well-trained, disciplined Black folk would have changed some shit around at that scene. Davis would not have been charged, and those fucking ruthless pigs would have thought twice before they even stopped a man who posed no problem to anyone, much less beat him down.
Brother Davis hadn’t had a drink in decades, but the cops are claiming he was drunk… in the French Quarter of New Orleans! Hello? If drinking were something to be jailed for in the Quarter, New Orleans and half the rest of the country would have been depopulated.
White cops should no longer be allowed in African American communities, and they should no longer be allowed to speak to or touch African Americans at all. They should require passports to enter majority Black precincts, municipalities, and counties; and they should be required to surrender their weapons, and have an armed Black escort wherever they go.
The outstations should be razed and burned, and replaced with outposts attended by the security forces of African America, in the wake of the African American intifada. Block by block, liberated territory…
This never changes. Geronimo Pratt, Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima… the list stretches on and on, political and non-political… it’s all political. And politics is about power. The people who have power are those who take power.
I have to wonder how this will play for thousands of young African American soldiers now in Iraq and Afghansitan, and how many will think — as they watch this video — if only I were there… then realize that the treatment meted out to Robert Davis is little different than the treatment meted out to Iraqis by American occupiers. Go there, beat down Iraqis. Come home, you can BE the Iraqis.
Welcome home to the United States of White America, where white fucking pigs and white fucking politicians can do any damn thing they please..
frank:
Right on SG,
My lady Betty and I agree that the Panthers were viable- at the least a deterrent. At least a neighborhood with the resource to defend themsleves against brutality. I wish more folks would stand up - Americans have become soft, easy, but no one stood UP , when this guy was beaten?
14 October 2005, 2:50 amWWCD? What would Conan Do?
White Pigs…what to do? as a fellow enlisted “swine”, I can’t help thinking that their piggish eyes will only see a target, hands raised or unarmed; best to be quick, care for those less capable and hope that you don’t get a bullet in the back for your time.
Myles:
Great post. A Panther-esque movement is called for. I even think that G8 protestors etc. should be armed to resist mass brutality of cops. Of course the deterrent is such resistance makes you killable in the eyes of the law-despite whatever right to self defense rhetoric is on paper.
Peaceful protests and letter writing campaigns dont cut it. Power grows from the barrel of a gun? In some cases.
14 October 2005, 7:43 amStan:
I was pissed when I wrote this, as anyone can see. So there is a lot more expression than instrumentality in it.
But there are questions of self-defense that have to be addressed in any colonized/occupied nation. They can’t be addressed through simple armament (though Amadou Diallo was “killable” with or without a gun).
Collective self-defense cannot be simply an expression of anger or (far worse) machismo by individuals. I would also argue that for G-8 protestors it would be counter-productive and even risk suicidal adventurism. They are an issue-community with no territory.
The Panthers combined it with the other needs of the community — self-defense being one need in a longer list — breakfast programs, street repairs, garbage collection, etc. Armed self-defense (which might also involve policing of predatory criminality inside the community) is only viable as a form of resistance in the larger context of liberating territory… liberation meaning above all autarky, not armament. This doesn’t happen without conscious leadership *selflessly* responding to the felt needs of a community.
That’s why bourgeois-controlled and funded NGOs and faith-based initiatives, etc., are so important to the ruling class and the imperial nation. The bourgeois has far greater capacity to deliver services than independent community-based initiatives, and they will do so enough to ameliorate community rage and co-opt the local intelligentsia as issue-advocates. A perennial dilemma. This is where self-defense becomes pivotal. This is the one area where the bourgeoisie can NOT do better than the community (if the community is properly organized and trained), because policing is the armed expression of class, gender, and national interest.
14 October 2005, 9:00 amJosiah:
Wow…This really made me angry. It reminds me of something that happened while I was living in Seattle a few years ago. A car accident occurred at a busy intersection in the Central District, a formerly black but gentrifying neighborhood. A car crashed into a parked car, and two pedestrians who were playing basketball across the street, both black men in their early twenties, ran to the wreck to help the survivors, a driver and a passenger. A squad car showed up, and when the cops saw the black men reaching into the windows of the car, they assumed they were robbing the car, and tried to cuff them. They started to argue, and the cops grabbed one of the black men and threw him against the smashed-up hood of the car, while the survivors were still inside. It turned out that the car was stolen, but the two men of course didn’t know this. A crowd of eyewitnesses gathered to attest that they were just trying to help, didn’t know the driver or the passenger, but the cops didn’t listen. They were arrested for “resisting arrest” (interesting logic) while the crowd chanted “they’re innocent! they’re innocent!” Long story short, the actual car thief escaped from the driver’s seat of the wrecked car while the innocent men were being cuffed. They ended up sueing the Seattle Police Department and losing. The point is, “liberal” cities like Seattle are just as shitty towards black folks as cities down south. Everywhere I’ve been in this fine nation, from Oakland, CA to Philadelphia, PA I see the same pattern of casual police brutality in black neighborhoods. Officers with bad records get “dumped” in these neighborhoods by their superiors, and they blame the residents for their failure to get promoted. Most don’t know any black folks, and are just as rattled as American soldiers in Iraq who don’t know any Arabic. The whole “shoot first ask questions later” phenomenon comes a pissing-in-their-drawers fear of being outnumbered by those they are “protecting”, or that revenge will be had. It’s a vicious cycle that happens in every occupation.
14 October 2005, 9:18 amrsklnkv:
My brother is one of these guys. Well, not in New Orleans, but here in my town. I live in a primarily African American community, not what I would call poor, but certainly not wealthy. The businesses are mostly white-owned. The rentals are all white-owned. Most of the men my age that I’ve met either have been to prison themselves (including me) or have a relative there.
My brother lives about forty-five minutes away, in a suburban, white middle-class neighborhood. He tells me he’s not racist and how could he be considering he “…had a black friend in college…”. He’s been in law enforcement for over a decade. Here’s the most recent local new bit on him :
http://www.wweek.com/story.php?story=6459
He is described in the first entry, if you follow that link.
I could go on into the nasty details of abuses I’ve heard about either directly from him, or from activists friends who are quite familiar with his activities. He spent nearly a year on administrative leave (paid through the “Golden Coffer” as they call it) during an investigation. He’d reperatedly hit a guy in the stomach claiming he’d witnessed the man swollow some dope. Did I mention that the guy was already in a holding cell and restrained? Oh, and did I mention he was black? Or that as a the result of the invesigation he was given a month off unpaid that he was able to offset by using vaction time he’d already earned? He once joked with me about how funny it was when he punched this black guy in the face when he tried to stand up during an arrest : “His big ol’ lips just exploded on my fist! Blood sprayed everywhere!” He could hardly keep a straight face. And then there’s abusing animals when he’s angry and threatening his own wife “You know I could break your back like a twig!?!” She didn’t stick around. Nor the second one (Three kids later…) I don’t want to forget his involvement in the beating of a gay man during a drunken night out.
Shall I stop now? Cause let me tell you, I could go on for hours. I remember going to his bachelor party years ago before his first marriage. It was all cops except me and one other guy who was an old high-school friend of his. Now, I’d been to prison by this time, but I can’t express how shocked I was by the filth coming out of these guys mouths. Everyone reffered to their wives or girlfriends as ‘bitch’. All jokes revolved around race and class. But really, they weren’t jokes at all. Then they hit the strip-club. I couldn’t habdle it and left. Kinda ironic, if I think about it : The felon goes home to reflect while the cops act like the ’scum’ they so adamently condemn.
The process is pretty striaght-forward, in my mind. Take a middle-class white kid, install in him contemporary masculine values and encourage the worst parts, like violence, racism, sexism. Throw in a lot of extreme. right-wing Christianity, and consider the resulting hulk-like, confused and ignorant fascist a success. You have exactly what the system needs to maintain status-quo. I watch the police come in here to our community and arrest the young men and women here for doing drugs and fighting, then watch them go back home and essentially mirror the things they are throwing folks in jail for (my brother, in particular, was using GHB for years as a recreational drug and has beaten more people up than I care to imagine).
What kills me inside is the fact that there were so many people watching what happened to Robert Davis but had no power as citizens to actually do anything about it. They just felt like they had to stand around and watch. How is it that we’ve allowed the police to grab so much of our power as people? How is it that the values of ten or twenty cops outweighs the values of entire communities?
As someone who himself can’t even find a way to get through to his own brother, I certainly have no answers. Only frustrations, it seems.
Here are a few of my favorite (and very telling) quotes from my big bro :
“It’s the rights of the scumbag versus what the police are allowed to do. Because the Liberals are so concerned about racial profiling (which is a myth) and police abuse they are willing to dodge the crackheads if they want to go to dinner downtown.”
“…I want to say something about anger. We deal with the lowest of the low out there. Sometimes officers get angry. As much as some idiots want to say we are dealing with “Customers” we do not work at Nordstrom’s. We do not fold pants in our spare time. As long as the anger is controlled it is not a bad thing. This is for all you liberal knuckleheads looking for police misconduct around every corner. Just go back to smoking your weed, eat some ho-ho’s and stay out of our way.”
“Just because an Indian walked eighty-feet across some grass doesn’t mean they owned it!” (In reference to the genocide of Native American Indians and property ownership)
“You’re trying to tell me that Jesus was a against war!?! Have you never heard of Revelations!?!” (In reference to an unfortunate conversation we had about Christianity and the use of religious ideologies to further political agendas, ala Iraq. He seems to believe that we are in the midst of the rapture, and that GWB is assisting god in speeding things up.)
“Most of those people have killed their own people, it’s not the [U.S.] soldiers!” (Regarding a discussion about the death of civilians in Iraq)
When these pieces are put together, and considering he’s really just another guy on the police force, I am left sniveling in the corner in disbelief. Most of these quotes are documented. Here’s another link :
14 October 2005, 12:55 pmhttp://www.portlandcopwatch.org/PPR31/rapback31.html
Stan:
Damn.
This copwatch notion is a good idea. Need one in every city.
14 October 2005, 1:07 pmDirk:
Just as a remark about the “Bad Apples”-Nonsense. The following is a quote from Rudolf Hoess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz, at the Nuremberg Trials:
“This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees.”
Hello from Germany,
14 October 2005, 8:20 pmDirk
peggy:
rsklnkv says:
“…The process is pretty straight-forward, in my mind. Take a middle-class white kid, install in him contemporary masculine values and encourage the worst parts, like violence, racism, sexism. Throw in a lot of extreme. right-wing Christianity, and consider the resulting hulk-like, confused and ignorant fascist a success….”
But what I don’t get is, this guy is your brother. The two of you were raised in the same environment, I’m assuming. But you didn’t turn out like him, and he didn’t turn out like you. What happened?
From the outside, I can only guess that the police in many places are self-selected thugs. They join the force because they like to beat people up, and they expect that being a policeman gives them plenty of opportunities to do just that. If you have a city where most of the police are like your brother and his friends, someone with other motives for joining doesn’t stand a chance.
I wonder if police and military organizations are alike in that way.
14 October 2005, 11:57 pmpeggy:
p.s. Another thing that gets me is that rsklnkv’s story, the newspaper article he cites, is from Portland. Portland, Oregon. Had to double-check to make sure.
Last time I heard, Portland was supposed to be a “nice” city. One of the most desirable places in the US to live. That makes it even more scary.
15 October 2005, 12:03 amdeang:
This was so disgusting and, as many of you probably know, an everyday occurrence in Black communities in the US. About the same time this occurred in New Orleans, here in Austin, TX, nine white cops in the Black part of town attacked Michael Clark, a Black man who was clearly unarmed and non-threatening. They tasered him three times for five minutes at a time. Witnesses called into a local community radio station, KAZI, to say that the cops were splashing water on him while they tasered him. The man died later in the day in hospital. Some local white journalists are suggesting the police may have been justified in torturing and murdering him if he was drunk. Meanwhile, no one does anything about it.
Like rskinkv, I’ve got revolting right-wing US cop relatives in my family and have heard similar quotes to the ones he related. One cop friend of the family from Dallas would frequently brag about how many people he’d killed, and this was a guy who as a child was always getting into trouble because he wouldn’t stop bullying people. In the US, it’s common if you have a kid who’s overly aggressive and has violent tendencies to suggest to him that maybe a good career might be in the police or military. I don’t know what to do about it either, but I confess that I wish these people violent ends and wish that armed insurrection were a realistic possibility to end their destructive influence. Unfortunately, the ones most likely to be armed and motivated to overthrow the established order at this point are the right-wingers we’re talking about.
Peggy, though Portland has a large Asian population and generally votes Democratic, it also has a history as a center for white supremacists and skinheads. A friend and I considered moving there several years ago until we visited and were stunned at how white it seemed to us. It was just an impression but a strong enough one that we changed our minds.
16 October 2005, 10:23 pmE Schongar:
Does anyone have a count of how many unarmed people are killed by police each year, and what % are black? Here in Newark it is common enough that it do NOT always make the news. I would take numbers from any city, state, or the US.
17 October 2005, 11:59 amPhil Carsten:
I want to thank you for all your efforts in the cesspool of politics.
It’s refreshing to hear the term “white fucking pigs” again. I grew up in L.A. in the sixties. My dream has always been to see “Fuck Authority” spray-painted on every billboard and cop car in this country.
I never cared about skin color. I’ve always cared about good people. I’m a registered nurse at a state hospital. Sometimes I even have to care for really bad people. But that’s OK.
There are only two kinds of homo sapiens on this planet. Good people and fucking misogynistic, backstabbing, power-hungry, entitled, sociopathic, cruel, mendacious, assholes. I won’t even call them pigs. Pigs are smart beings. Not at all sociopathic. And they don’t stink.
Our problem now is that most of the good people are asleep, having nursed at the TV/teet of Mammon(World Government Inc.) for far too long. Only the assholes seem awake and active in their pandemonium.
I pray to the gods that the real humanity will wake up.
I think that anyone black in this country is either brain dead or really pissed. Whitey should be pissed too. This kind of thuggish behavior by authority figures is inexcusable. On any level of the American Brutocracy.
Just like President Pig and his Pentacostal Prick Pals, these Asshole Cops feel they can fuck anyone over with impunity. For God’s sake, this gentleman just had his ctiy destroyed by a hurricane. Probably lost friends and family. So they beat the crap out of him? Un fucking believable!
I believe in the second amendment of the constitution. It doesn’t mention color of skin. Well armed, trained, and motivated black militia in the neighborhoods? Sounds good to me. As long as they don’t start acting like these cops. Animal farm is a cool book.
So much for my opinion.
Aloha from the Sovereign Nation of Hawai’i,
Phil
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
— Thomas Jefferson
17 October 2005, 10:08 pmComandante Gringo:
Gee. I knew I wasn’t alone, but it’s sure nice to see so many who’ve had it with this scum-sucking system.
Makes my own dangerous life well-worth it.
Solidarity komrads! As long as the mass of the community understands the need, these goons can be fended-off.
25 October 2005, 6:23 pmThe end of capitalism is that light at the end of the tunnel, dontcha know.
rsklnkv:
RE: E Schongar
I don’t think something like this exists for public scrutiny here in Portland, but Copwatch has some of the most comprehensive info available on their site :
http://www.portlandcopwatch.org/listofshootings.html
Unfortunately details are few, but you can get a general idea from what’s there. I’ll tell you right now, it barely makes the news here anymore, unless you read indymedia.
26 October 2005, 9:21 pm_____
In response to the comments about Portland, it’s true that nazi activity seems to be gaining ground again. I saw a women walking her child in a stroller the other day wearing a Volsfront tee-shirt (http://www.volksfrontinternational.com). This was right downtown at the transit mall. Bold, I’ll give her that. It’s certainly true that this was most likely because few know what Volksfront is, but the act itself is something I’d thought was in Portlands past.
Fortunately, nearly every racist rally that’s been organized lately has been countered by anti-racist demonstrations, whose numbers, noise and ornery behavoir faaar outweighed the nazis. We had major problems with these folks back in the 90s and I suspect that many simply went underground. I know that Nations (a racist training camp in Utah[?]) and M.O.M. (Militia of Montana) both recruit and sucker young folks from around here into their ranks, or at least have ties to some of the more active racists here in Portland.
Overwhelmingly, however, Portland has a very progressive counterculture, many anti-racist organizations (ranging from non-profits orgs to loosely organized groups of gang-like youngsters who base their beliefs in combating racism.) Rare is the time you will see a professed racist on our streets. More likely, they come in to cause trouble from the more rural parts of Oregon, (I would guess) particularly from Salem and Eastern Oregon. Being an admitted conspiracy theorist, though, I have my suspicions about what REALLY lies just underneath the skin here in this city. It ain’t pretty:(
If anyone is really interested in Portland racist history, I recommend reading ‘A Hundred Little Hitlers’ by Elinor Langer. It deals primarily with the murder of an Ethiopian immigrant years ago, but does a particularly good job at giving a description of the atmosphere here in PTLD.
Pearl:
I absolutely agree. I have personally witnessed bad cops in action and they are multiplying fast and furious in number. I attended a public forum in which two males- one a reporter, one an African American police officer, both complained of illegal activity among police departments in NY, to include charges of rape while on duty- to the attorney general’s office {whom I might add, was rather uninterested in hearing the complaints}. I have also been retaliated against by them for whistle-blowing to their chief. I have been subjected to theft, destruction of property, illegal trespassing and illegal entry, as well as the poisoning deaths of two pets. I have become a true believer that police officers have carte blanche to do absolutely anything they want! And sadly- their behavior is condoned by every entity above them! {I write from Syracuse, NY; the highly questionable in ethics and principles, village of Solvay}
2 November 2007, 9:45 am