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People in Baltimore have long called the police an occupying army. People are now seeing that is everywhere.
There was the illusion in the white community that they were there to protect and serve us, so white people looked away. As long as we remained segregated—and Baltimore is a very segregated city; America a very segregated country—we mostly didn't notice
Cameras allow white people to see the way policing really works—without doing much to end segregation. And Trump's openly white supremacist authoritarianism makes it even more clear how things work.
We saw all of this in Baltimore 5 years ago, before Trump. I pitched a story to magazines about how Baltimore was the future of America. No one wanted it because the news cycle had moved on.
But now with national unemployment at roughly the same level as it was in Black Baltimore in 2015 and with more aggressive cops not giving a fuck everywhere, with National Guard on the streets, we are there and worse.
With the daily escalation of police violence—people are not only protesting the murder of George Floyd, but the tear gas and rubber bullets; NYPD running people over; etc—the nature of state violence becomes increasingly clear to people who had been insulated
What comes next is not so clear. However the immediate conflagration ends, there will likely be promises of reform followed by a long and slow retaliation. Police will become more insular and "slow down." They will cause chaos and use that to call for more $ and power
In Baltimore, GTTF actually increased the crime and chaos and then used that to get more leeway and more overtime—while committing a whole slew of other crimes and enriching themselves on the side.
The way the press covered crime in Baltimore made white people scared again and made city leaders even more willing to look the other way to police abuses, as long as they were bringing in stats to prove that they were "winning the war on guns."
They used the rhetoric of a war on guns to justify the same abuses to Black people that the war on drugs had previously justified. If white people are serious about ending state violence against African Americans, they might have to rethink their positions on gun control
Writing a book about GTTF crimes caused me to modify my thinking about gun control because the right-wing fantasy about jack-booted thugs kicking in your door to get your guns in very real for Black people in Baltimore and a planted gun justifies anything
When Baltimore Police shot Keith Davis Jr. in June 2015, jut after the uprising, "police say" he had a gun and the press that had been so eager to cover protests, largely ignored the case (it is still going on, here's story I wrote at the time) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/18/surviving-police-shooting-baltimore-freddie-gray
@notrivia and I wrote about how the liberal war on guns has replaced the war on drugs as a way to both seem like you are reforming while actually restoring white fear in order to make us all look the other way again https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/opinion/police-guns-baltimore.html
So however the current nation-wide police riot ends, we should watch out for a counter-insurgency playing out all over the country, differently in each city but with the same logic. Crime is good for cops. It is how they regain authority
Any increase in crime will be blamed on rioters and will benefit police and other right-wing forces of control. Now, we also have emboldened white nationalists who are eager for race war and will likely make this worse.
@notrivia and I have a book coming out with all the insane details of how this happened in Baltimore. You can pre-order it from radical bookstore @redemmas https://redemmas.org/titles/34329-i-got-a-monster--the-rise-and-fall-of-america-s-most-corrupt-police-squad
