Friends on Facebook are posting support for the Black Lives Matter protests going on around the U.S. A few brave souls post selfies from the (daytime) protests themselves (the vast majority prefer to show their support by updating their Facebook status!).
My stupid question for today is why city-dwellers need to protest to obtain the changes that they seek. The typical American city in which protests have occurred is ruled by a single political party voted for by a population that overwhelmingly identifies with that one party. If the people who live in a city want a different mayor, want the police department to be disbanded and started over from scratch, etc., why didn’t they already just vote for that? What obstacle was in their path?
Consider a few of the cities that have been in the news lately. My friends on Facebook are saying that the protests are necessary #BecauseRepublicans.
- Minneapolis City Council: no Republicans
- Boston City Council: no Republicans
- Los Angeles City Council: no Republicans
- San Francisco Board of Supervisors: no Republicans
If the single-party voters and politicians in the above cities want to change something, why does anyone have to protest? Why can’t they just change whatever they want to change? Nobody from a different party is opposing them.
I tried asking the Facebook righteous this question. Here are some responses;
Jack is suggesting only Republicans will make the argument that black people need to be more aggressively policed. The prediction is true (regardless of your view on the merits of the argument, because some arguments are only made by one party or the other.)
(What difference does it make what arguments Republicans put forward? Why would the Mayor or the City Council of any of the above cities listen to an argument from a Republican?)
Republicans are the Core of Trump’s supporters, White Supremacists, and folks who never questioned the most bizarre acts of Trump.
(But if those Republicans live and vote in the suburbs, how can they stop the people of Minneapolis, for example, from voting to disband the police department, fire the city employees involved with management of police, replace the mayor, hire a new police force with different objectives, etc.?)
What’s it like for folks who are just trying to live in these towns? A friend in Venice, California (on the border with Santa Monica):
LA looks like a zombie movie. Every business boarded up and spray painted. Mobs with picket signs constantly. Everyone wearing masks. Never seen more thieves in a city in my life. People attempted to rob my house on a Friday at 930p while we were home.
In the chat group, a San Francisco resident responded to the above with security camera footage of a dark-sunglasses-wearing thief sifting through the day’s Amazon and UPS deliveries on his doorstep and taking a package.
A more rural Californian responded: Your stories make me feel better about my decision to live with the plane fueled up and the guns loaded. Lucky for us we are in a highly armed gated community. My father just bought a gun for the first time since when we were in Russia in the 1990s. [She speaks with an accent, so I assume she is an immigrant.]
To all of them, a member responded “Wyoming awaits.”
Separately, from a physician friend: “I bet Canada feels like they live in the apartment above a meth lab.”
Readers: The mayors of the big cities where protests are occurring have come out to support the goals of Black Lives Matter (example from San Francisco). If almost everyone in a city agrees that particular changes need to be made, why can’t they simply make those changes?
Related:
- “Critics denounce Black Lives Matter platform accusing Israel of ‘genocide'” (Guardian, August 2016): The policy platform titled A Vision for Black Lives, is a wide-spanning document that was drafted by more than 50 organizations known as the Movement for Black Lives. … In the Invest/Divest section of the platform, the group criticizes the US government for providing military aid to Israel. “The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” the platform says. “Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people.” (If the U.S. police kill only the occasional citizen while Israel is committing “genocide” against millions of Palestinians, why is BLM bothering to protest anything being done in the U.S.?)
- L.A. Protest Draws 50,000
Camden is reported to have done just that in 2013: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/revisiting-camden.html (note this is a repost from a year ago – not like the topic was unknown before 2020!)
But presumably whoever wants this change needs to (1) win over the wing of Democrat Party that likes unions in general, and (2) squash the existing police unions (in the case of Minneapolis headed by a Republican who is literally the nemesis of the chef of police: https://www.businessinsider.com/minneapolis-police-union-department-reform-kroll-arradondo-george-floyd-blm-2020-6?r=DE&IR=T).
Note this is not an easy task as the cops sometimes seem to be literally willing to riot to uphold the union privileges, e.g. the privilege not to be investigated (https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/rudys-racist-rants-nypd-history-lesson ). Attempting this task in normal times would require a lot of political capital (and might not bring any significat changes in the end, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Department_corruption_and_misconduct#Mollen_Commission), but the existence of a widespread movement helps focus the energy of city council members on this topic.
#1 – The protesters do not actually represent a consensus view of the population. As an actual percentage of the population, the protesters are actually a tiny minority.
#2 – Democrats are just coming to terms with the fact that supporting liberty and equality for minority groups is probably not compatible with blind support for public employee unions. Particularly police unions.
Some city council members in Minneapolis have tried to take on the police before. The police responded by slowing down call response time in the member’s ward. I imagine that probably caused residents to get upset and the council member gave up because of pressure from their constituents.
The protests are giving the council members a few things. One, it’s a public demonstration that enough of the people in their ward are pissed off that they (the ward residents) are willing to suffer the consequences of taking on the police. Two, the protests have also pushed police brutality into the news, especially mainstream media, which I think has led to the current all-time low public opinion of the police in surveys. Three, the fact that this is happening across many wards all at once helps the council members coordinate on the timing.
So in the past wee saw a top-down effort (from the council member down), probably supported by activist groups in some wards, but it hadn’t become a “big” enough issue to garner really broad support and appetite for the consequences in the broader populace. The protests have turned this into a bottom-up effort, which makes the process politically feasible.
The big question for me is how long this momentum will be sustained. The police union will no doubt drag this out as long as possible in the courts, while at the same time doing everything they can to make the populace suffer for their impudence. How long will city residents be willing to accept that in the pursuit of change?
I suspect we’ll end up in some sort of in-the-middle compromise where the MPD isn’t totally disbanded, but the union contract is rewritten and includes major changes to training, consequences for brutality, and a budget shift moving a fair bit of MPD money into social services.
The big question, as @DK above alludes to, is how the single-party, big-city places are going to handle their relationships with police unions in everything from hiring to training and termination. Gov. Pritzker in Illinois doesn’t even mention police unions because presumably all of this is going to take place behind closed doors, without cameras, with as little reporting as possible to avoid showcasing the huge rift exposed by Democrats having to take on one of their most crucial public employee union constituencies.
Pritzker is a leading indicator, and he calls defunding the police: “a messaging obstacle…a poor use of words to describe what many people really want.” So Pritzker is going to reframe the issue and tell people what they really want, and there’s no mistaking why: this entire fight has to be coordinated *with* the police unions and their cooperation. Period.
Phoenix is actually worse than all those cities for Police brutality. We had a higher police shooting rate per million than any city in the US in 2018. Phoenix and the surrounding suburbs have had dozens of police murders over the last decade. Only a 1-2 police have been charged with any crimes. See below. There have been huge protests about these various shootings several times. There is a big peace full protest happening now. Some rioting happened a week ago so the Republican Governor put in a 8 PM to 5 AM curfew to quell the problems. Phoenix proper is Democratic but the suburbs are total Republican. The overall state is Republican but moving to Democratic recently.
https://www.azcentral.com/in-depth/news/local/arizona-investigations/2019/12/30/phoenix-police-shootings-officers-use-of-force-decline-2019-henry-rivera/2612466001/
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/06/09/arizona-police-almost-never-prosecuted-convicted-george-floyd-shootings-use-of-force/3154963001/
https://www.google.com/search?q=phoenix+politics&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS689US689&oq=phoenix+politics&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l7.7391j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
bill: Sorry to hear about the situation there. But what difference does it make if there are Republicans in Arizona if Democrats are in control of the City of Phoenix? Can’t the Democrats who control Phoenix reorganize the police department if they want to? If necessary, fire everyone and start over? Say that, in order to prevent citizens from being murdered with impunity, they are going to refuse to recognize or negotiate with any union? (if state law won’t allow the city to do that, then simply contract with private firms for security, just as companies tend to block unionization among nighttime cleaning staff by hiring a vendor to “do the dirty work”)
Bradley effect?
Doesn’t matter Trump will win in a landslide.
White Lives Matter!!!!!
My stupid question for today is why city-dwellers need to protest to obtain the changes that they seek. The typical American city in which protests have occurred is ruled by a single political party voted for by a population that overwhelmingly identifies with that one party. If the people who live in a city want a different mayor, want the police department to be disbanded and started over from scratch, etc., why didn’t they already just vote for that?
All you have to do is think about this a little. It may appear in the news that there are a lot of people out on the streets in quite a few cities, but there’s no reason to assume that they represent a majority of the population. Also, there are opinion polls on national issues that show that majorities of Americans would like to see significant changes to things like healthcare which politicians and commentators in DC say are politically impossible. Republicans often explain that this is quite reasonable because we’re a “republic, not a democracy”.
People are stupid.
The more of them that gather together, especially if they are of the same mind, the stupider they get.
If they disagree with each other, there is a chance their stupidities will cancel each other out and some intelligent action will result.
You left out NY, which is solidly democratic from the local level all the way up to the Governor’s office. Our state legislature “reformed” the bail laws so predators needn’t fear being locked up for looting, destroying other people’s property and so on. Consequently our venerable Macy’s celebrated by holding a big sale to support the BLM movement. https://nypost.com/2020/06/09/video-shows-suspected-looters-breaking-into-macys/ All the while our Mayor has been doing some serious reflecting on his “white privilege.” https://nypost.com/2020/06/09/de-blasio-says-daughter-confronted-him-about-his-white-privilege/ His daughter was arrested in the festivities and he says he is proud of her.
In Phoenix the Democratic city council and mayor did a lot of City Police reform in 2019 and the shootings went down a lot. BUT the other police agencies in the surrounding suburbs are solidly Republican and have put no reforms in place. So the shootings in Mesa, Glendale, ICE, Highway Patrol, Sheriffs, etc. are still bad. These groups have killed several unarmed adults with impunity in the last few years and done no reform. The AZ Highway Patrol does not even have car or body cameras. A patrolmen killed a guy for parking on the freeway road side two weeks ago and have no evidence besides the cops statement.
So yes there are still of issues in lots of “police agencies” that need to be addressed .
bill: Thanks for the update. It looks like at least one of the objectives of protesters in the City of Phoenix is specifically regarding the city’s own police department (i.e., not a police department in a Republican-contaminated suburb):
Community groups came together to “demand” Phoenix city leaders to defund the police department.
https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/phoenix-community-groups-rally-to-defund-police-during-city-council-meeting/75-0502f74f-f3df-42f9-a469-0b48f5810dca
From Chicago this morning: here’s an interesting update on the way big-city governments actually work internally during a crisis. The public is told a story that is diametrically opposed to what is happening behind closed doors. Politicians worry about nothing but their brand and their optics to the public while ordinary people in the streets suffer. Heated exchanges and expletive-laden tirades dominate the “civilized discourse” as competing interests come to the fore. And this is in a city with a 50-member City Council in which 46 members are Democrats and 4 describe themselves as “Independent”. Six members of which describe themselves as “Democratic Socialists” although that’s not reflected in the wikipedia chart ( https://www.bettergov.org/news/what-the-gov-what-does-it-mean-to-have-six-democratic-socialists-on-the-chicago-city-council/ )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_City_Council
Mayor Lori Lightfoot is furious. One of the aldermen, Ray Lopez of the 15th ward, dared to question Lightfoots complete lack of a plan to keep the neighborhoods safe from rioting and looting, yelling that he had “gangbangers out here with AK-47s” and demanding Lightfoot come up with a plan to keep order, other than an ineffective curfew.
She told him: “I think you’re 100% full of shit, is what I think.” And it gets better from there. Listen to the audio at the link.
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/06/10/mayor-lori-lightfoot-lashes-out-at-alderman-for-illegally-recording-call-leaking-profane-argument-over-looting/
I remember Chicago being pretty bare-knuckle and sharp-elbowed during the time I lived there around 15 years ago, but it was nothing like this. The Lightfoot administration has absolutely no plans to protect anyone except Lori Lightfoot and her image as a pro-Socialist bottom-up grassroots “reformer of the status quo.”
It’s a well-worn cliche that all politicians lie. They do, and everyone knows that. But Lightfoot was literally dismissing this alderman who was calling in to express his outrage and exasperation that his ward was literally burning.
It’s most interesting to note that one thing has not changed since I lived in Chicago, instead it has gotten worse. Lightfoot’s plan to combat the rioting focused primarily on wealthy areas of the city near the Loop: downtown, parts of the Gold Coast and Lakeview areas, etc. The areas west and south of the Loop have always been trouble spots, in many cases effectively ceded to the control of gangbangers with a thin veneer of targeted policing activity, here and there for the newspapers. This has always been the source of the conception that the wealthy, whiter areas receive preferential treatment, and that the City effectively runs a “balance of power” act between the wealthy people who buy the drugs and the poor who supply the drugs, with the cops enforcing little more than a buffer zone between them.
Ray Lopez represents Ward 15, on the SW side of the city, west of I-90.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-politics/get-to-know-your-ward-15th-ward/1998310/
Total Population: 51,501
White: 4.74 percent
Black: 22.27 percent
Hispanic: 71.6 percent
Asian: 0.98 percent (Source: WBEZ)
One of the Ward Experts referenced in the CBS link is Aysha Butler, presdient of Resident Association of Greater Englewood (RAGE).
I know firsthand that the residents of Englewood deserve better than hearing: “I think you’re 100% full of shit, that’s what I think.” from the mayor in whom they’ve placed so much hope:
https://ragenglewood.org/become-a-member-of-rage/about/
Santa Monica has an airport and all gun stores within 50 miles are out of guns and ammo. Some people in the area are buying them. Pre shutdown Big 5 had a line at the shotgun counter.