As we head into what is probably the final week of testimony in the Derek Chauvin trial, when the defense will put on what it can of a case for this killer, we've just had a weekend with news from Virginia of Black Army Lieutenant Caron Nazario, who was maced and assaulted by a cop for driving while Black, and now that of Daunte Wright, a Black 20-year-old man shot and killed by a cop in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center this afternoon. Police in riot gear are there escalating the situation even as I write this.
The video of the cop screaming at and assaulting Lieutenant Nazario is heart-rending. But there are already white cop-apologists blaming him. It's incredible.
As Navy intelligence veteran Naveed Jamali put it on Twitter,
Why is it that the “you must comply with police orders” people are the same ones who don’t want to follow mask-wearing rules?
To which Phillip Atiba Goff responded with this meme graphic to sum up that world view:
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I usually don't trust things that run in Newsweek these days, but this story appears to be based on actual reporting about the police department involved in the Nazario assault.
2 comments:
“Why is it that the ‘you must comply with police orders’ people are the same ones who don’t want to follow mask-wearing rules?”
Thank you for highlighting that tweet — it captures the contradiction perfectly.
Here in Illinois the governor recently signed the SAFE-T (Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity —Today) Act, which, among other things, restricts police use of force. Details here. That’s the first thing I thought of when I read about this latest police violence in Minnesota. Firing at a car because the driver has a warrant (for what?), and when there’s another person in the car? And using a dangling air freshener as a pretext to stop someone?
I will read about the SAFE-T Act. Pretextual stops have to stop. Philando Castile had a "wide nose" that could be seen from a distance and made him resemble a suspect from a robbery several days earlier, remember? And a tail light that was supposedly out.
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