Reckoning with the ferocity of the police
Welcome back to Flux, a twice-weekly newsletter from GEN about the powerful forces reshaping America.
I was 17 the first time I was arrested at a demonstration. I’d locked arms with other protesters to block traffic outside New York City’s City Hall in a bid to pressure Mayor Ed Koch to do more to fight the AIDS pandemic. “They’ll see it on the news, your gloves don’t match your shoes,” we chanted at officers who wore gloves to carry us into waiting trucks. (Trained in the art of nonviolent protest, many went limp as noodles as soon as they were touched by police — a tactic known as “passive resistance”). Like other women arrested that day, I was improperly strip-searched in a grubby lower Manhattan holding cell. Our lawyers later sued the city and won.
A lot has changed since the 1980s. For one thing, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in 2012 that makes that sort of strip search legal. And police who once confronted protesters with helmets, shields, batons, and the sort of rubber gloves that could have been used to wash dishes now wield the fearsome leftover matériel of our forever wars.
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“The more gear police have, the more deaths they cause,” Douglas Rushkoff wrote last week in a piece examining the long, slow march of militarization in America’s police departments, especially as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down. Is it any wonder that providing more deadly force to police leads to more deaths? “One study … showed that receiving a full supply of military equipment increases civilian deaths in a given county by 129%,” Rushkoff reports. “And it’s not just during demonstrations. The militarization of departments engenders a different approach to policing, including more racial profiling and an emphasis on ‘engaging and defeating’ over protecting and serving.”
Elsewhere, Morgan Baskin examined the history of the “nonlethal” weapons that we have seen repeatedly deployed against the Black Lives Matter protests. “The first thing to know about rubber bullets is the name is a misnomer,” she reports. “Among the 75 different kinds manufactured, relatively few are made of solid rubber. Some, called ‘bean bag rounds,’ are stuffed with lead pellets; others contain metal fragments and many have steel cores. … Together, rubber bullets, whose velocities can match those of live ammunition, have an estimated fatality rate of 3%, higher than Covid-19.”
Maybe we in the press should just start calling them what they are: weapons, pure and simple.
— Garance Franke-Ruta, Executive Editor, GEN
The protest that changed their lives
If you went to a protest over the past weeks, you probably expected to shout loudly, walk far, and communicate your beliefs passionately. But for a few protesters, the experience would turn violent.
•Sixteen-year-old Levi Ayala left his house in Austin on Saturday morning expecting to participate in a protest on I-35; at 5 p.m., while standing apart from the crowd, he was hit in the head by a “bean bag” bullet fired by police, suffering a severe head injury.
•Brandon Saenz lost an eye and seven teeth in Dallas when he was shot by police with a rubber bullet while peacefully protesting.
•“For two mornings in a row now I have woken up and remembered that I was shot in the eye and am now half-blind,” writes photographer Linda Tirado, who was shot in the face with a rubber bullet in Minneapolis. “I lost my vision to a nation wreathed in trauma and fire, to a system that sees accountability as discretionary, to a police force that fires into crowds and at journalists.”
Flux populi: More than a few bad apples
“The closer an apple is to rot, the more rot it spreads — one spoiling apple, in a crisper drawer or a fruit bowl, or a storage barrel or a cross-country shipping container, or even still hanging on the bough, speeds the rot of every apple it touches, and even of ones it doesn’t touch. …
The only way to avoid rot is to be proactive: check every apple, every tree. At the first sight of something amiss — a bruise or broken skin, a sunken place — toss that apple out, but don’t stop there. Scrub all the others and monitor them closely, but know that it’s likely already too late. Better to trim and burn the infected branch, or even the whole tree.”
Helen Rosner, “How Apples Go Bad,” (The New Yorker)
One more thing…
Just how big can a march possibly get? In 2017, the Washington Post attempted to measure the size of the Women’s March in the U.S., gathering numbers from “local news sources, law enforcement statements, event pages on social media, and, in some cases, photos of the marchers,” and coming up with an estimate of about four million people protesting in at least 653 different locations, making it the largest single-day demonstration in the country’s history.
But that was just one day. Protests against the police killing of George Floyd have persisted for weeks, with multiple marches happening each day in the biggest cities and peaceful demonstrations taking place alongside them in small towns, sometimes very small towns. In Pennsylvania alone, “Black Lives Matter protests have even emerged in smaller and whiter suburbs and towns in deeply conservative counties, including Chambersburg (pop. 20,000), Carlisle (19,000), Meadville (13,000), Waynesboro (11,000), Lock Haven (10,000), Carbondale (9,000), Punxsutawney (6,000), and two dozen similar locales” report professors Lara Putnam and Jeremy Pressman in the Washington Post.
Montana-based BuzzFeed writer Anne Helen Petersen has been collecting a Twitter thread of videos from the less publicized demonstrations since June 1 and recently wrote about what the protests mean in small communities. They “cut across demographics and geographic spaces,” she found. “They’re happening in places with little in the way of a protest tradition, in places with majority white population and majority black, and at an unprecedented scale.” These small protests are just one of many reasons why this time feels different.
