At the pinnacle of the police unions is the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA), which is headquartered in Sarasota, Florida. Masquerading as a charitable organization, the IUPA is anything but “charitable.” IUPA’s tax category defines the group as a “labor, agricultural, or horticulture organization whose object must be the betterment of conditions of those engaged in the pursuits of labor, agriculture, or horticulture, which includes lobbying.”

The IUPA, which endorsed Donald Trump for re-election in September 2019, is nothing more than a political right-wing organization that describes the Democratic Party and Democratic office holders and candidates as “anti-police” and “anti-law enforcement,” which is a canard designed to increase its donations from other right-wing Republican organizations and individuals in the United States. IUPA joined the Fraternal Order of Police in endorsing Trump in 2016 and 2020. Unlike the Fraternal Order of Police, which is largely funded by union dues, most of IUPA’s contributions come from dubious phone solicitation fundraisers.

Trump has returned the favor of the IUPA’s endorsement by having his National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien, declare with a straight face on CNN, “I don’t think there is systemic racism. I think 99.9 percent of our law enforcement officers are great Americans.” As always with statistics and the Trump administration, simple mathematics prove O’Brien very wrong. Statistics show the percentage of U.S. police officers linked to systemic racism to be at least 20 percent.

In a 2006 report titled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement,” the FBI concluded that there was a concerted effort by white supremacist groups to infiltrate law enforcement communities or recruit law enforcement personnel.” In another report from 2015 the FBI revealed that “militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.” Under the Trump administration, the situation with white supremacist infiltration of police departments has greatly worsened.

The IUPA has been at the forefront of opposing police reform legislation and edicts at the national, state, county, and municipal levels. In many ways, the IUPA and its constituent member associations and unions act racketeering shakedown artists, threatening government officials who attempt to reform problematic police departments with political retaliation.

According to its tax filings, the IUPA has misrepresented the number of law enforcement officers it represents. The union association has claimed representation for over 100,000 police officers, but the actual number is 19,200. As a charity, the IUPA, which also does business under the names “Police Officers Support Association” and “National Emergency Responders Coalition,” was given a D minus rating by the Better Business Bureau and the “Tampa Bay Times” cited the police organization as one of the worst-run charities in the United States.

The union association’s leadership, working from their own building in downtown Sarasota, consists of an “international union president,” an “international union vice president,” and an “international secretary-treasurer.” The IUPA president, who is a retired detective with the Defiance, Ohio Police Department, has served in his present position since 1995 and as an IUPA official since 1988. The IUPA vice president is retired from the U.S. Air Force Security Police and Milwaukee Police Department. Nothing reeks more of a “good old boys” police network than the IUPA. The IUPA building in Sarasota hosts several front organizations that also conduct telephone fundraising scams. These groups have names like the Fairfax Deputy Sheriff’s Coalition, the US Secret Service Uniformed Division Officers Association, the Institute for Police Research, International Union of Police Associations – Florida Local 6000 – AFL-CIO, and the Law Enforcement Political Action Committee.

It comes as no surprise that for two of the police departments where the IUPA leadership once served – Defiance and Milwaukee — there have been recent “shoot first and ask questions later” incidents by the police. Sometimes, it is law enforcement officers who are on the receiving end of wanton police violence. For example, a Travis Air Force Base, California air policeman, Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo, was arrested during the recent civil strife across the United States for shooting and killing two law enforcement officers, a federal security guard outside the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland and a Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s deputy. Carillo, who was identified as a member of the far-right terrorist organization, “Boogaloo Bois,” also wounded five other law enforcement officers in his killing spree. The Carillo case pointed to white supremacist infiltration of both the military and law enforcement. Rather than purge their ranks of white supremacist police officers, the IUPA and other police unions hide behind their “blue wall” of silence and mutual protection.

As a part of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest labor union, the national labor federation has faced demands from other member union, particularly those with a large number of African-American and Hispanic-American workers, to oust the IUPA from the AFL-CIO. The “Drop the Cops” campaign intensified after the police murders of African-Americans in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky. One group of progressive labor activists, the Action Network, has demanded that the AFL-CIO expel IUPA. In a recent statement, The Action Network asserted, “Since their earliest days, police in the United States have repressed striking workers, brutalized marginalized communities, and fought against an array of efforts to create a more just society… The material interests of police as they presently exist in the United States are antithetical to the values of our labor movement . . . Across the country, police unions stand opposed to the broader aims of the labor movement. Shamefully, Donald Trump is endorsed by the country’s two largest police unions: the unaffiliated Fraternal Order of the Police and the AFL-CIO affiliated IUPA. In Minnesota — the site of George Floyd’s murder — Minneapolis Police Federation President Bob Kroll has amassed dozens of internal investigations and a record of inflammatory statements.” Kroll’s union, like those of New York City and Louisville are independent of both the IUPA and Fraternal Order of Police.

It has been avowedly pro-Trump law enforcement officials like Kroll and former Maricopa, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio (who received a Trump presidential pardon after his federal conviction on contempt of court) who have been at the forefront of brutal repression of minorities and it is individuals like them that the IUPA, Fraternal Order of Police, and Police Benevolent Associations have sought to protect all police officers under the guise of “labor union” safeguards. Joining them in ensuring the solidarity of the “blue wall” are police unions that are part of the International Brotherhood of Police Organizations/National Association of Government Employees and the Teamsters. In reality, police unions are not much better than Mafia organized crime enterprises that have been federally prosecuted pursuant to the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

Corrupt police unions have also helped foster links between the worst police offenders of civil and human rights and various white supremacist organizations, including many that engaged in “false flag” arson, looting, and vandalism during the recent Black Lives Matter protests around the United States.

A survey of certain constituent IUPA and other police unions, including the Fraternal Order of Police, reveals that many of the police forces they represent have had issues with racist police officers and employees, some with ties to white supremacist and other far-right groups. These include IUPA locals in Bel Air, Maryland; Fairfax County, Virginia; Indianapolis, Indiana; Sussex County, New Jersey; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Orange County, Florida; Anne Arundel County, Maryland; Boca Raton, Florida; and Salt Lake City, Utah. Over the past several decades there have been scandals involving racist law enforcement officers in departments ranging from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office and Los Angeles Police Department to Cleveland, Ohio and the Williamson County, Texas Sheriff’s Office.

In several police departments that have been plagued by white supremacist and neo-Nazi employees there has also been a very bizarre link to Israel. Many problematic police departments in the U.S., including those of Minneapolis; Atlanta; Orlando; Baltimore; St. Louis; Los Angeles; New York City; Boston; Las Vegas; Miami-Dade; Seattle; Oakland; Jacksonville, Florida; Washington, DC; Ferguson, Missouri; San Diego; San Bernardino, California; Anoka County, Minnesota; Gwinnett County, Georgia; Ascention Parish, Louisiana; Ventura County, California; Orange County, California; as well as the New York, Maine, Massachusetts, and New Jersey State Police and the Tennessee and Georgia Bureaus of Investigation, have received training in Israel, either courtesy of taxpayer-funded programs or enterprises funded by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. According to Amnesty International, this training, which includes the use of the often lethal “choke hold” and “neck restraint,” have been routinely practiced in both Israel and the illegally-occupied West Bank. Laughably, the ADL’s involvement in such police training involves its “Center on Extremism” and “Civil Rights Counsel.” Israeli police routinely commit human rights abuses against Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, Israeli Jews of North African and Arab descent, and Ethiopian Jews largely because Israel, today, is not much different than the segregationist Jim Crow-era U.S. South.

Responding to calls to end all U.S. police training with Israel, the Vermont State police; Durham, North Carolina; and Alameda County, California have halted all such programs and there are demands for other departments to follow suit.

The election of Trump as president made a bad situation involving white supremacists and neo-Nazis serving in U.S. law enforcement agencies much worse. It will take a major overhaul of law enforcement agencies from Maine to Hawaii by a future Department of Justice to even make a little headway against the rising tide of white supremacist police officers who are aided and abetted by their union leadership.

A reader sends in a link to this nine-minute New Yorker documentary about a woke young couple raising their child to be gender-neutral. I had to stop watching it out of pity for this kid. These loons are going to screw him or her up terribly, and he or she will hate them:

So many on the left today have forgotten human nature. In his sizzling monologue last night, Tucker Carlson featured a can’t-make-this-stuff-up moment. I’ve cued the monologue clip to that moment:

Here’s the tweet it came from:

The person lamenting the absence of the cops is Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting DC delegate to Congress. Gosh, it’s almost like if you defund the police, you will have no one to protect you from the violent and the crazy.

After the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, Ms. Albers, who is white, and many of her progressive neighbors have vowed to avoid calling law enforcement into their community. Doing so, they believed, would add to the pain that black residents of Minneapolis were feeling and could put them in danger.

Already, that commitment is being challenged. Two weeks ago, dozens of multicolored tents appeared in the neighborhood park. They were brought by homeless people who were displaced during the unrest that gripped the city. The multiracial group of roughly 300 new residents seems to grow larger and more entrenched every day. They do laundry, listen to music and strategize about how to find permanent housing. Some are hampered by mental illness, addiction or both.

Their presence has drawn heavy car traffic into the neighborhood, some from drug dealers. At least two residents have overdosed in the encampment and had to be taken away in ambulances.

More:

“I’m not being judgmental,” said Carrie Nightshade, 44, who explained that she no longer felt comfortable letting her children, 12 and 9, play in the park by themselves. “It’s not personal. It’s just not safe.”

On Friday, she sat in a shared backyard with four other women who live in neighboring houses. The women, four of whom are white, had called a meeting to vent about the camp.

Angelina Roslik burst into tears, explaining that she had spent the past four years fleeing unstable housing conditions and was struggling more than she cared to admit with the chaos the camp had brought into the neighborhood. Linnea Borden said she had stopped walking her dog through the park because she was tired of being catcalled. “My emotions change every 30 seconds,” said Tria Houser, who is part Native American.

The women agreed to let any property damage, including to their own homes, go ignored and to request a block party permit from the city to limit car traffic. Rather than turn to law enforcement if they saw anyone in physical danger, they resolved to call the American Indian Movement — a national organization created in 1968 to address Native American grievances such as police brutality — which had been policing its own community locally for years.

And:

Tobie Miller, Ms. Albers’s 34-year-old daughter, lives just a block away from her mother, but lately, she said, they have felt a world apart. Ms. Miller began a concerted effort last year to challenge her own privileges by taking a class on racial biases.

She worries that a lot of what has been written about the camp on community message boards has been influenced by racial profiling. To the extent that illegal activity is going on in the park, Ms. Miller does not blame the tent residents. “My feeling around it is those are symptoms of systemic oppression,” she said. “And that’s not on them.”

This progressive white dude was robbed at gunpoint by two black teenagers. He called the cops. But now he feels bad about it:

Two days after an initial conversation, his position had evolved. “Been thinking more about it,” he wrote in a text message. “I regret calling the police. It was my instinct but I wish it hadn’t been. I put those boys in danger of death by calling the cops.”

Read it all. Please do — it is a glimpse into the kind of America these progressives wants for us all. They are lunatics. Ideology has made them crazy and self-destructive. They want to hand our cities over to armed robbers and roving lunatics.

The Minneapolis City Council, all Democratic, has voted unanimously to defund the police. If you can sell your house and leave, now is the time. Or if not, it’s time to try to break away from the city and incorporate as an independent municipality, or join with a suburb. Cities run by progressives are going straight into the ditch.

The other night, Tucker Carlson mentioned that Donald Trump laughed about this kind of thing, and said something to the effect of let the progressive cities destroy themselves. Understandable, said Tucker, but inexcusable: no American president should talk this way. He’s right. Along those lines, no American should merely laugh this off. It came upon Minneapolis very fast. Do not take this lightly.

theamericanconservative.com

Pepe ESCOBAR

The Revolution Won’t Be Televised because this is not a revolution. At least not yet.

Burning and/or looting Target or Macy’s is a minor diversion. No one is aiming at the Pentagon (or even the shops at the Pentagon Mall). The FBI. The NY Federal Reserve. The Treasury Department. The CIA in Langley. Wall Street houses.

The real looters – the ruling class – are comfortably surveying the show on their massive 4K Bravias, sipping single malt.

This is a class war much more than a race war and should be approached as such. Yet it was hijacked from the start to unfold as a mere color revolution.

US corporate media dropped their breathless Planet Lockdown coverage like a ton of – pre-arranged? – bricks to breathlessly cover en masse the new American “revolution.” Social distancing is not exactly conducive to a revolutionary spirit.

There’s no question the US is mired in a convoluted civil war in progress, as serious as what happened after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in Memphis in April 1968.

Yet massive cognitive dissonance is the norm across the full “strategy of tension” spectrum. Powerful factions pull no punches to control the narrative. No one is able to fully identify all the shadowplay intricacies and inconsistencies.

Hardcore agendas mingle: an attempt at color revolution/regime change (blowback is a bitch) interacts with the Boogaloo Bois – arguably tactical allies of Black Lives Matter – while white supremacist “accelerationists” attempt to provoke a race war.

To quote the Temptations: it’s a ball of confusion.

Antifa is criminalized but the Boogaloo Bois get a pass (here is how Antifa’s main conceptualizer defends his ideas). Yet another tribal war, yet another – now domestic – color revolution under the sign of divide and rule, pitting Antifa anti-fascists vs. fascist white supremacists.

Meanwhile, the policy infrastructure necessary for enacting martial law has evolved as a bipartisan project.

We are in the middle of the proverbial, total fog of war. Those defending the US Army crushing “insurrectionists” in the streets advocate at the same time a swift ending to the American empire.

Amidst so much sound and fury signifying perplexity and paralysis, we may be reaching a supreme moment of historical irony, where US homeland (in)security is being boomerang-hit not only by one of the key artifacts of its own Deep State making – a color revolution – but by combined elements of a perfect blowback trifecta: Operation Phoenix; Operation Jakarta; and Operation Gladio.

But the targets this time won’t be millions across the Global South. They will be American citizens.

Empire come home

Quite a few progressives contend this is a spontaneous mass uprising against police repression and system oppression – and that would necessarily lead to a revolution, like the February 1917 revolution in Russia sprouting out of the scarcity of bread in Petrograd.

So the protests against endemic police brutality would be a prelude to a Levitate the Pentagon remix – with the interregnum soon entailing a possible face-off with the US military in the streets.

But we got a problem. The insurrection, so far purely emotional, has yielded no political structure and no credible leader to articulate myriad, complex grievances. As it stands, it amounts to an inchoate insurrection, under the sign of impoverishment and perpetual debt.

Adding to the perplexity, Americans are now confronted with what it feels like to be in Vietnam, El Salvador, the Pakistani tribal areas or Sadr City in Baghdad.

Iraq came to Washington DC in full regalia, with Pentagon Blackhawks doing “show of force” passes over protestors, the tried and tested dispersal technique applied in countless counter-insurgency ops across the Global South.

And then, the Elvis moment: General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, patrolling the streets of DC. The Raytheon lobbyist now heading the Pentagon, Mark Esper, called it “dominating the battlespace.”

Well, after they got their butts kicked in Afghanistan and Iraq, and indirectly in Syria, full spectrum dominance must dominate somewhere. So why not back home?

Troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, the 10th Mountain Division and the 1st Infantry Division – who lost wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and, yes, Somalia – have been deployed to Andrews Airbase near Washington.

Super-hawk Tom Cotton even called, in a tweet, for the 82nd Airborne to do “whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters and looters.” These are certainly more amenable targets than the Russian, Chinese and Iranian militaries.

Milley’s performance reminds me of John McCain walking around in Baghdad in 2007, macho man-style, no helmet, to prove everything was OK. Of course: he had a small army weaponized to the teeth watching his back.

And complementing the racism angle, it’s never enough to remember that both a white president and a black president signed off on drone attacks on wedding parties in the Pakistani tribal areas.

Esper spelled it out: an occupying army may soon be “dominating the battlespace” in the nation’s capital, and possibly elsewhere. What next? A Coalition Provisional Authority?

Compared to similar ops across the Global South, this will not only prevent regime change but also produce the desired effect for the ruling oligarchy: a neo-fascist turning of the screws. Proving once again that when you don’t have a Martin Luther King or a Malcolm X to fight the power, then power crushes you whatever you do.

Inverted Totalitarianism

The late, great political theorist Sheldon Wolin had already nailed it in a book first published in 2008: this is all about Inverted Totalitarianism.

Wolin showed how “the cruder forms of control – from militarized police to wholesale surveillance, as well as police serving as judge, jury and executioner, now a reality for the underclass – will become a reality for all of us should we begin to resist the continued funneling of power and wealth upward.

“We are tolerated as citizens only as long as we participate in the illusion of a participatory democracy. The moment we rebel and refuse to take part in the illusion, the face of inverted totalitarianism will look like the face of past systems of totalitarianism,” he wrote.

Sinclair Lewis (who did not say that, “when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving the cross”) actually wrote, in It Can’t Happen Here (1935), that American fascists would be those “who disowned the word ‘fascism’ and preached enslavement to capitalism under the style of constitutional and traditional native American liberty.”

So American fascism, when it happens, will walk and talk American.

George Floyd was the spark. In a Freudian twist, the return of the repressed came out swinging, laying bare multiple wounds: how the US political economy shattered the working classes; failed miserably on Covid-19; failed to provide affordable healthcare; profits a plutocracy; and thrives on a racialized labor market, a militarized police, multi-trillion-dollar imperial wars and serial bailouts of the too big to fail.

Instinctively at least, although in an inchoate manner, millions of Americans clearly see how, since Reaganism, the whole game is about an oligarchy/plutocracy weaponizing white supremacism for political power goals, with the extra bonus of a steady, massive, upwards transfer of wealth.

Slightly before the first, peaceful Minneapolis protests, I argued that the realpolitik perspectives post-lockdown were grim, privileging both restored neoliberalism – already in effect – and hybrid neofascism.

President Trump’s by now iconic Bible photo op in front of St John’s church – including a citizen tear-gassing preview – took it to a whole new level. Trump wanted to send a carefully choreographed signal to his evangelical base. Mission accomplished.

But arguably the most important (invisible) signal was the fourth man in one of the photos.

Giorgio Agamben has already proved beyond reasonable doubt that the state of siege is now totally normalized in the West. Attorney General William Barr now is aiming to institutionalize it in the US: he’s the man with the leeway to go all out for a permanent state of emergency, a Patriot Act on steroids, complete with “show of force” Blackhawk support.

asiatimes.com

Jim BOVARD

The brutal Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd has sparked violent protests, looting, and arson attacks in Minneapolis and St. Paul. A police precinct building was torched and destroyed and the Minnesota National Guard has been called out to restore order. But the killing in Minnesota is the latest reminder that politicians and judges—through federal law and judicial interpretation—have turned police into a privileged class that is most often unaccountable, if not entitled to oppress other Americans.

Almost everyone agrees that Floyd’s death was a horrendous injustice. President Trump, who urged police officers in 2017 to not “be too nice” to suspects they arrested, condemned what the police did to Floyd as “a very bad thing.” Former Minneapolis police chief Janeé Harteau said that the video of Floyd’s killing was “the most horrific thing I’ve seen in my career and in my lifetime.” Washington, D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham declared that the officers’ actions were “nothing short of murder.” Derick Chauvin, the police officer who killed Floyd was arrested today and charged with murder; he and three other police involved in Floyd’s death were fired earlier this week

Floyd was killed by Chauvin pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes after he was handcuffed and laying face down in the street. Floyd repeatedly declared, “I can’t breathe.” It didn’t matter. ACLU attorney Carl Takei told the New York Times that police departments that permit “chokeholds try to differentiate between cutting off the flow of blood, which renders someone unconscious, and cutting off the flow of oxygen, which is deadly.” This dicey distinction often goes amiss, as in 2014 when Eric Garner was killed by a New York City policeman’s chokehold. But how did government officials ever acquire a right to strangle people who fail to instantly submit to their commands?

Such killings would likely not occur without the sense of impunity conferred on police in much of this nation. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a top contender for Vice President candidacy for Joe Biden, was the chief prosecutor for Hennepin County (including Minneapolis) from 1998 to 2006. Klobuchar, who was nicknamed “KloboCop” by detractors,  “declined to bring charges in more than two dozen cases in which people were killed in encounters with police” while she “aggressively prosecuted smaller offenses” by private citizens, the Washington Post noted. Her record was aptly summarized by a headline early this year from the Twin Cities Pioneer Press: “Klobuchar ramped up prosecutions, except in cases against police.”

Minnesota cops also benefit from their state’s so-called “police officer’s bill of rights,” which impede investigations into killings by police and other misconduct.

Outrage over police abuses have become a regular occurrence in modern American life. In 1994, the ACLU and the National Rifle Association  jointly called for President Bill Clinton to appoint a national commission to investigate “lawlessness in law enforcement.”  In 2014, after violent protests over a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, Attorney General Eric Holder declared that “we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community.” But unjustified police shootings usually spark brief uproars and promises of reform— but no fundamental rollback of law enforcement’s lethal power and prerogatives.

Much of the media coverage quickly framed the Minneapolis killing as another example of systemic racism by police. There are many bigoted cops who have unjustifiably shot or otherwise abused innocent black citizens but people of all races, creeds, and colors are at risk from lawless lawmen. As the Washington Post noted, “In 2017, a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed Justine Damond, an Australian woman who had called police about what she believed was a possible sexual assault near her home.” The Montgomery County, Maryland Police Department continues to refuse to provide camcom videos or any other evidence on its predawn no-knock raid in Potomac, Maryland, in which police reportedly shot 21-year-old Duncan Lemp as he lay sleeping in bed in his parents’ house. The Lemp case has been largely ignored by the nation’s media (except for my American Conservative articles here, here, and here).

Focusing on racial bias also risks obscuring the fundamental problem: the Supreme Court has effectively given police a license to shoot, pummel, or falsely arrest ill-fated citizens across the nation.

In the wake of the Civil War, freed southern blacks were terrorized by lynch mobs and other attackers. Congress responded to Ku Klux Klan violence against freed southern blacks by enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1871 to authorize lawsuits against any person acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws.” But in a series of decisions beginning in 1967, the Supreme Court gutted that law by permitting police and other government agents to claim they acted in “good faith” when violating citizens’ rights. In 1982, the Supreme Court granted government officials immunity unless they violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”

Regardless of centuries of court rulings that clearly demarcated citizens’ constitutional rights, the Supreme Court decided government officials deserved “qualified immunity” unless a prior court case had condemned almost exactly the same abusive behavior. Federal judge Don Willett declared in 2018 that “qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly.”

The Supreme Court effectively added an asterisk to the Constitution that expunged much of the Bill of Rights. In a 2018 case absolving a reckless shooting that killed a motorist, Justice Sonia Sotomayor angrily dissented that the court’s decision “tells [police] officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”

How does the Supreme Court’s idealism on “good faith” G-men play out in the real world?  Courts have “approved qualified immunity for cops who allegedly shot people without cause, sicced a dog on a man who was surrendering, tased a driver who was stopped for failing to buckle his seat belt, and ordered a 17-year-old boy to disrobe and masturbate so they could take pictures of his erect penis,” Reason columnist Jacob Sullum reported in 2019. That year, a federal appeals court bizarrely granted qualified immunity to Fresno, California, police officers who stole $225,000 during a search of two businessmen.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said yesterday that his committee would hold a hearing on police violence to analyze “why does this happen, how often is it, is it an aberration.” Graham said the video of Floyd’s killing is “hard to watch, and I just imagine how many people died without videos.”

But Congress has, as usual, been asleep on the job. As Dan Alban, an Institute for Justice attorney and  the nation’s most effective litigator against asset forfeiture abuses, observed, Congress could pass legislation “clarifying that there is no qualified immunity” for civil rights lawsuits against state and federal officials.

But the problem goes far beyond qualified immunity. Politicians criminalize practically everything in daily life and then tell police “be nice”—or maybe mandate that cops attend  sensitivity training. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a blizzard of new mandates and prohibitions that further empower police. A video went viral earlier this month of a New York Police Department officer tackling and pummeling a young black man who was suspected of violating new dictates on social distancing. One wonders if there are a hundred such instances of idiotic brutality for each one that trends on Twitter today

Minneapolis City Council Vice President Andrea Jenkins announced yesterday that city officials will “create a healing space at the site of the [burnt-down] 3rd Precinct so that people can grieve, express their concerns, their anger, in a safe and humane way.”  It remains to be seen whether a  “healing space” will deter the unjustified looting and violence that has proliferated in Minnesota. But rather than pillaging Family Dollar, Aldi’s, and Target, folks infuriated by Floyd’s killing should focus their wrath on the legislators and judges who have effectively given police a right to kill.

theamericanconservative.com