Thread on announcement that Biden DOJ is opening an investigation into Louisville police based on close study of Obama DOJ reports... 1/x

Obama DOJ reports on Ferguson & Baltimore police were as good as it gets with liberal critiques of police

they reflect how police brutalize Black & poor people & serve white & wealthy ppl

how legal actors collude in neoliberal/carceral violence exploitation gentrification 2/x

Building on the ppl's rebellions and organizing in those cities, including @ArchCityDefense report on muni courts, the reports arguably contributed to deepening liberal critique of police and carceral fines and fees. The B'more report even reflected findings from #SayHerName 3/x

But when it came to their frameworks for moving forward, the reports defaulted to conventional reforms that for decades have 1. failed to dent police violence; 2. worked to relegitimate and 3. expand the budgets of police. 4/x

In Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel ran with one of the DOJ's recommendations to build a 2nd training facility for CPD -- which in turn provoked the @NoCopAcademy campaign. 5/x

The reports engaged in troubling double speak when it came to legality. Most police violence & exploitation is perfectly legal, and yet the framework for these reports was to conform the police to the same constitutional law that legitimizes and normalizes policing. 6/x

I am curious to learn from organizers in the many cities where the DOJ has investigated local police what this has meant for local communities who bear the brunt of police violence, apart from millions of dollars for policing rather than health care, housing, schools. 7/x

. @LawProfButler has written powerfully about the limited to negligible effects of DOJ consent decrees in terms of curtailing police violence 8/x https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/fcj/vol2019/iss1/6/

That's not to say these reports cannot help to document police violence for elites and lawyers, and point to increasingly irreconcilable contradictions in liberal approaches to reform. 9/x

The reports are a product of people's rebellions raising fundamental questions about the legitimacy of police, at the same time that they attempt to relegitimate police. 10/x

The reports are extensions of liberal reform efforts.

They will not and cannot srsly abate police violence or budgets or the carceral state.

That comes from organizing and uprising, a combination of extraparliamentary action and non-reformist reforms. 11/end