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Pierce writes: "Over at Josh's joint, he has an interesting study of how virulent the reaction from police unions has been to the recent spate of peace officers who are forced to make people dead who were unarmed entirely, or armed only with the arsenal also available to the kid in A Christmas Story."

Police officer pepper sprays UC Davis demonstrators. (photo: Louise Macabitas)
Police officer pepper sprays UC Davis demonstrators. (photo: Louise Macabitas)


American Police Unions: Why Mess With What Works?

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

17 December 14

 

"A policeman hit me."

-- Lee Harvey Oswald, November 23, 1963

swald was taken alive. Oswald got a press conference. Oswald got to claim police brutality in front of the assembled media. There were people still cleaning John Kennedy's brains off their wingtips, and Lee Harvey Fking Oswald, who they believed had murdered the president, was alive enough to talk to the media, even after having pulled a pistol on the arresting officers in the Texas Theater. Just sayin'.

We continue.

Over at Josh's joint, he has an interesting study of how virulent the reaction from police unions has been to the recent spate of peace officers who are forced to make people dead who were unarmed entirely, or armed only with the arsenal also available to the kid in A Christmas Story. As Josh points out, this reaction has ranged from Australian wildfire to thermonuclear. There has not been an ounce of reflection or pause in it. He quotes a professor who seems quite baffled by it all.

"It strikes me as being very strident, more strident than usual," William King, a criminal justice professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas, told TPM in a phone interview of the Cleveland police union's statement specifically. "Normally, it's a very procedural justice message: 'Just wait and see what the investigation finds,'" he continued. "These messages are different. They seem almost, perhaps, maybe, just a little bit antagonistic."

(Here would be a nice time to point out that one of the primary witnesses supporting that bag job of a grand jury finding in the killing of Michael Brown has been shown to be a bullgoose loony racist of the first rank. Well done, Bob McCulloch. The Black Sox were pikers compared to you.)

If I may be so bold as to offer an explanation to the professor, in their response to the bloody mayhem brought by some of their members, the unions are walking a trail very clearly marked by groups that have come before them. A long time ago, I mentioned that the basic philosophy on the American right -- which is pretty much where we find the unions in question, and almost all the support for the trigger-happy policin' of recent weeks -- can be summoned up by Stalin's order to the Red Army when the Germans came calling. "Ni shagu nazad."

Not one step backwards.

You could see how successfully this strategy works in all those long, poignant retrospectives in the newspapers and on television on the occasion of the anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre. There was palpable momentum in the aftermath of the shootings behind sensible, if limited, gun control legislation. Instead of supporting this legislation, or meekly departing the scene for a moment, the NRA and its followers doubled up the intensity, tripled up the crazy, and fed Wayne LaPierre some mad mixture of crystal meth and Romulan ale and sent him out to rave and denounce all over the country. And, by and large, it worked. The Teachable Moment was exhausted trying to keep up, and there are now lots of places where you can carry your AR-15 to the pharmacy to pick up your anti-anxiety meds.

You can see how successfully this strategy works in the sad, awful polling data that has emerged since the Senate torture report was revealed. This data comes in the context of the various American war criminals who have embarked on their No Apologies tour, the lead act being Dick Cheney, who stated quite clearly that he simply doesn't care that we brutalized innocent people.

Six in 10 Americans say the CIA's treatment of suspected terrorists was justified, more than half think it produced important, unique intelligence - and 52 percent say it was wrong for the Senate Intelligence Committee to issue a report suggesting otherwise.

What we did was justified, but don't tell us about it because it will disturb the Exceptionalist diorama that we have built in our heads.

If the public has demonstrated its willingness to eat the omelettes without learning how the eggs were broken on these two obvious public policy disasters -- and that is being incredibly kind to their architects -- why wouldn't they Support Their Local Police in these times of trouble and woe and obvious danger? The unions have every right to feel confident that the public, eventually, and not necessarily slowly, will come around to their way of thinking. One of the chief ingredients that are crucial to the narcotic concoction that is American Exceptionalism is the idea that everything the country does is for the purposes of moving it toward...something, some hazy Utopia in The West where all will be forgiven and all will be justified by their faith in the fable alone. Therefore, any of the episodes of the country's basic brutality-- slavery, the genocide of the Indians, Jim Crow, the bloody reaction to the Civil Rights movement, the killing of a 12-year old boy by a cop who wouldn't have passed the competency test to be a crossing guard -- are seen as hurdles to be overcome on the golden road to some vague land of redemption, and not as demonstrations of a fundamental moral deficiency in the entire experiment that desperately needs to be examined before the country can move forward at all. We love the Teachable Moments as long as we don't have to learn anything from them.

Ni shagu nazad.

Not one step backwards.

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