The following is a guest editorial by Mark Crispin Miller, no blood relation to Mark Channing Miller of this blog. He puts out a daily email service called News From Underground, to which anyone may subscribe for free. The message below is the latest dispatch, received at 6:37 tonight Eastern Standard time. It may seem unrelated to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, their causes and consequences, the main topic of this blog, but it isn’t. — MCM
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U.S. Cops Kill Citizens at Over 70 Times the Rate of Other First-World Nations
[That rate is] from five years ago. What is the rate today?
If “our free press,” and/or our liberal Democrats, cared at all about this routine carnage, they would be pushing some reforms that might curtail it, if not end it.
* They would demand a thorough purge of all U.S. police department, to rid them of the white supremacists who have been signing up for years—as the FBI reported in 2006 (a report that was declassified a few years later, at which point “our free press” largely ignored it).
* They would demand that all U.S. police departments train their officers in martial arts, so they need not use guns (and tasers) as their first means to defend themselves.
* They would demand a crackdown on the widespread abuse of anabolic steroids, which turn cops (and troops) into rock-hard killing machines. (On this lethal epidemic, see John Hoberman’s Dopers in Uniform, published by the University of Texas Press.) This “war on drugs” would also benefit cops’ wives and children, since steroid abuse also contributes heavily to domestic violence.
* They would demand that the recruitment of police officers take place largely in the neighborhoods policed, as opposed to having them commute to work in areas whose people they don’t know or like.
* They would raise the standards for recruitment, insteade of lowering them, and pay the cops accordingly, treating them as elite public servants, not as grunts in place to keep rich people protected and their property intact.
Why is there no discussion of American policing, and how best to improve it—as opposed to ritually playing up the most egregious killings in our streets, and leaving it at that? Why is there so much more press emphasis on gun control—control of guns used not by the police, but only those used by the citizens—than on the policies that make our cops so dangerous to all America’s have-nots? Why has no presidential candidate said anything about this grievous problem, ever? How many mayoral candidates from coast to coast have ever said a word about it? Any?
The subject isn’t raised by “our free press” or liberal Democrats because they don’t care enough about it—that is, about us—even to discuss the issue, much less take the necessary steps to make us safer from those officers who ought to be protecting us, instead of blowing some of us away, to keep the rest of us in line.
MCM *
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*Again, the above guest editorial is by Mark Crispin Miller, not to be confused with the Mark Channing Miller of this blog.