Anything I say or do doesn’t give you the right to murder me

My Sunday movie was Tig on Netflix. This is a documentary of the stand-up comedian Tig Notaro, released in 2015. About a decade ago I heard on the news (NPR) that Notaro had done what people were calling an amazing stand-up act, one that was brave and out there. She started by saying, “Hello. Good Evening. I have cancer. How are you?” She was brave for both talking about it and making it funny. I had heard this documentary featured that act, so I wanted to watch. The movie’s story begins a few months before that famous act. Notaro had come to realize stand-up was what she was meant to do. Then in quick succession she had an acute digestive illness, her mother died, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer. And she did that act. The club where she did that act had a rule against video recordings. Some of the audio is included in the movie and all of it was released as a CD (there is a segment of less than four minutes on YouTube). But that’s an act that can be done only once. And it took Notaro several months to figure out what came next. Some of the story is finding her way back to the stage. Some was her trying to have a baby through surrogacy – even producing eggs after breast cancer is risky. And some was falling in love with another woman, one who was sure she wasn’t lesbian. There are a lot of news stories about the killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. He was black. The five police officers who beat him are black and they’re now in custody facing murder charges. The police released the bodycam videos that showed the horrific beating (I won’t watch it and won’t link) and also show others, including firemen, who could have stepped in and didn’t. I’ve collected several posts about police being involved in incidents that have ended badly. Some of these posts are about police and black people. Others are about police and mental health, which was not the case in the Nichols beatings. Ari Shapiro of NPR spoke to Phillip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity and chair of African American Studies and psychology professor at Yale University. Their conversation was about recommendations to lessen police violence. The top item is to “use police for less.” If a person is having a mental health crisis or contemplating suicide, don’t send a badge and a gun that has had maybe eight hours of mental health emergencies and could make the situation worse. Don’t send a badge and a gun to deal with someone unhoused. Don’t have police stop a person for a low-level nonfatal traffic incident (which is what Nichols was pulled over for). Instead, send a ticket through the mail. Goff said:

Policing is set up to do a set of things. It does that with ruthless efficiency. It is not set up ideally for community safety because, to do that, you need to do investment. And so there are people who would say policing hasn't gotten better, but it hasn't gotten worse because it continues to do those things efficiently. ... There are very few major city police chiefs who should be taken seriously who won't tell you that we have failed to invest in certain communities, and those are the communities that they get called to. And they get blamed for what they do. And no one is, at the same time, blaming the corporations or the white flight or the banking investment in any of that. While it's fair for law enforcement to be held accountable for what they're doing, it is incredibly shortsighted of us to think that fixing law enforcement prevents the death. Because, as much as there is incredible violence from policing and incredible violence within these communities, all of that is within the context of the violence of poverty and deprivation, and those are policy choices usually made by people who never have to see that violence up close.

In a post that has been hiding in my browser tabs (and waiting for me to remember to include it) since January 2022 Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos also discussed how to get out from using police when there is a mental health crisis. One issue is setting up a different phone number (since then the national 988 crisis line was announced) with non-police people to staff it. Along with that is how to fund it. Some federal money may help. Even so, at the time programs were being implemented in Ann Arbor, Denver, San Francisco, and Eugene, Oregon. In a post from June 2022 Irna Landrum of Kos discussed the call to “Defund the police” and how some are saying it is an unwise goal. Dismissing that phrase as a stupid slogan dismisses the thought, research, and advocacy that has gone into the call. Landrum lives in Minneapolis. She discussed the problems in her city’s police force, then wrote:

The Minnesota Department of Health found that no policy change would be sufficient to root out this corruption, and that deep cultural change—the kind that chiefs and politicians have been pledging for years yet failing to deliver—is what it would take to even slightly reform this police department.

Of course, Minneapolis is not the only city with this problem. Add to that the tight connection between law enforcement and white nationalism, which the FBI has been warning about for more than 15 years. Top it off with police not being effective at preventing or solving crime. In spite of the propaganda (including every cop show in the entire history of TV) police solve about 4% of crimes.

Whether you mean "defund the police" by diverting a significant amount of funding from their coffers toward more tried-and-true community interventions, or you mean "defund the police" by eventually starving them of resources so that it is no longer possible for them to exist as our primary public safety agency, defunding the police makes sense. ... Even those of us who advocate defunding police down to nothing recognize that abolishing police is a disaster waiting to happen, if we are not also investing in life-affirming institutions.

John Stoehr, who edits the Editorial Board daily newsletter that discusses politics in plain English, tweeted a thread. It started with columnist Rex Huppke saying wanting to know the motive of the shooter is a diversion. Stoehr says even that misses a bigger point. We have accepted mass death as an outcome of legitimate political disagreement. No one, at least in public, says anyone has a right to kill another person. But we’ve created a false equivalence of “mass death versus rights.”

Mass death is a consequence of legitimate political disagreement as well as a consequence of sadists using legitimate political disagreement to mask their sadism. Truth is, lots of Americans don’t mind mass death as long as it’s visiting “those people.” Even if it’s visiting them and their kin, however, it’s still OK. A few dead Americans are a small price for maintaining the white order. I’ve gone blue in the face talking about how being pro-gun is being pro-white power. My point today, however, is that desensitization – or being “insured to America’s murderous rhythms” – is not necessarily rooted in seeing terrible things happening over and over. Just as likely is that desensitization is rooted in indifference to suffering or the perverse pleasure of seeing the suffering of “those people.”

In a comic from September 2022 Keith Knight of Kos takes on the claim that only some cops are “bad apples.” Some of what is in his comic:

If you bit into an apple & saw it was rotten you wouldn’t put it back with the others. And I’m sure the rest of the apples wouldn’t rally around bad apples & defend like cops do. If there are so few bad apples like cop defenders claim wouldn’t it be easy to weed them out? Real good cops, the kind who report bad policing, are the true unicorns!

Cop shows introduced us to our Miranda Rights, the stuff the cop reads off when one is arrested that begins, “You have the right...” Christopher Weyant of the Boston Globe, shows a black man reading Miranda Rights for Police to a frowning cop standing beside his car, “I have the right to be treated as a human. Anything I say or do doesn’t give you the right to murder me.” Michael D’Antuono tweeted a cartoon of a hoodie standoff. A cop in a Klan hood aims a gun at a young black boy wearing a hoodie who is offering the cop some candy.