It’s shameful that in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd—which triggered near-universal condemnation that could have been leveraged for bipartisan, actionable reform—that tragedy was hijacked by far-left activists, zealots, and opportunists who filled the vacuum left behind by a cowering national media.
News organizations could have done a better job scrutinizing the ludicrous proposals on the table (like defunding the police) and held agitators accountable. Explaining away the riots and disingenuously nodding along to absurd policy proposals was not only unhelpful, but it did nothing to help besieged urban communities. It may have even exacerbated the problems they're experiencing now.
Maybe Biden's initiative will move the Overton window back to a realistic place for reform, or hopefully deal with the actual problems on the ground.
Has anyone even read, for illustrative cases in point, the IG reports about Lafayette Square, or January 6th? How many individual police agencies were involved in those logistical comedies of errors, and how many different versions of who was supposed to be in charge would you have received from officers at the time? Try and make sense of those flow charts showing agency hierarchies and chains of command on-scene, and the one detail that is even legible is that the local DC Metro police force was not even any part of it, apparently by some mutual prior understanding.
Washington DC may be the most extreme example of the dismal failure of federalism as a philosophy of governance when it comes to administering law enforcement (how ironic is that? The American capital is the worst example of American local self-government there is....), but in any region at any time the jurisdictional turf battles not only between individual precincts but also between local and county, state or federal agencies conducting operations in the same locations at the same time create a labyrinthine nightmare of interagency relations which requires armies of lawyers and administrative personnel operating full time just to keep all the various agencies on speaking terms and out of each others' way.
There is every likelihood that any such scene as the infamous Floyd killing video, no matter where taken, would be so populated with players representing a clandestine divergence of real interests that no one on camera is there as what they appear to be. Any one of the officers present if not all of them could have been operating undercover for some other agency or task force, or even the department's own internal affairs bureau, and thus constrained from straying outside their affected roles on-camera. Any one of them could have been on one version or another of a 'take', owing favors and selective enforcement to whichever force or faction holds the note on them for gambling debts or other vulnerabilities for which their everyday obedience on the job is the continuous repayment. Anyone on the street could have been present for reasons not disclosed, carrying out some mission for any of countless federal agencies, state-federal task forces, legislative commissions, inspectors general or even private security firms. And speaking of security firms, why is it never held as relevant or meriting further investigation that officer Chauvin and citizen Floyd were both known to have worked as bouncers for the same crime boss for some time, and had been at least passing acquaintances in that arena for years? Stupidly assuming that the public ritual homicide the former carried out on the latter was some kind of purely racist lynching with presumed impunity is simply to decline to explore the obvious question of 'who gave the order?'
Nature abhors a vacuum, I'm told. Remove conventional, locally-administered, police forces from local streets and it is only a matter of time, like before sunset the same day type of thing, that multiple other forces and factions from both sides of the law will move to place their assets to best advantage within that vacuum and use them entirely in their own interest. This is because they already do, and have all along in American cities because of the very nature by design of the federalist system. No other country has the degree of separatism and presumptive sovereignty governing every conceivable form of jurisdictional procedures as the United States does, because every other country on earth has some kind of national police force which is divided into local districts all ultimately administered at least in theory by a central nationwide agency. Any such arrangement in the USA is not only traditionally inconceivable given our extreme divisions of official turf and the extreme measures both official and unofficial taken to uphold them, but actually unlawful owing to the provisions of the Tenth Amendment.
For better or worse, our ancestors set it up this way, where modern American law enforcement is a medieval tapestry of feudal fiefdoms large and small, all barely able to keep the peace even between themselves much less preserve law and order inside their own closely-guarded official boundaries. Such a system can and readily does lend itself to all manner of corruption and double-dealing at the highest levels just to get anything done between so many self-interested agencies, and among the rank and file promotes a currency-of-favors kind of procedural lubrication which has everyone owing someone something at any given moment.
The questions in crimes like the Floyd murder must be both 'who gave the order?' and 'who was obliged to carry it out?', in order to ever determine even for history's sake what really happened that day.
But those questions are unanswerable, and most likely never will be even asked, regarding that crime or any other crime in this country which might set events in motion whereby the vested interests of both official and organized-crime turf arrangements might be compromised.
All 'defund the police' can ever possibly mean in the real world of real live American federalism is that somebody else will be more than happy to take the funds instead, and use them in whatever manner they choose, same as your average feudal army passing as a local police department does today and has all along, to conduct their own business in their own way by their own rules and woe to anyone who comes to stand in their way. Obviously, that would describe both killer and deceased in the Floyd killing: each for his own reasons had been stamped as disposable by parties unseen, and each was dealt with in a manner chosen in advance accordingly.
Most folks have no clue who is really in charge of American cities, because they not only don't want to know but also because they know enough to realize that actually knowing who gives the orders could be unhealthy. And it will remain exactly the same no matter who is patrolling or not patrolling what streets in what uniform or under what chain of command. Traditional, true-blue American, Tenth-amendment feudalism itself is and has always been the order of the day in American law enforcement, because it was designed that way.
Right or wrong, we may as well grasp that working the problem does require correctly identifying what that problem itself is, and it is federalism.
"Unhelpful" is too soft. Harmful is the right word. Other than a correct verdict, I see nothing for which anyone can be proud and you are correct that the unfolding drama presented numerous opportunities for people to stand up for what was right and it should have been done in a bipartisan voice. Instead, we had bipartisan abdication of responsibility and bipartisan failure.
Defund WHICH police?
Has anyone even read, for illustrative cases in point, the IG reports about Lafayette Square, or January 6th? How many individual police agencies were involved in those logistical comedies of errors, and how many different versions of who was supposed to be in charge would you have received from officers at the time? Try and make sense of those flow charts showing agency hierarchies and chains of command on-scene, and the one detail that is even legible is that the local DC Metro police force was not even any part of it, apparently by some mutual prior understanding.
Washington DC may be the most extreme example of the dismal failure of federalism as a philosophy of governance when it comes to administering law enforcement (how ironic is that? The American capital is the worst example of American local self-government there is....), but in any region at any time the jurisdictional turf battles not only between individual precincts but also between local and county, state or federal agencies conducting operations in the same locations at the same time create a labyrinthine nightmare of interagency relations which requires armies of lawyers and administrative personnel operating full time just to keep all the various agencies on speaking terms and out of each others' way.
There is every likelihood that any such scene as the infamous Floyd killing video, no matter where taken, would be so populated with players representing a clandestine divergence of real interests that no one on camera is there as what they appear to be. Any one of the officers present if not all of them could have been operating undercover for some other agency or task force, or even the department's own internal affairs bureau, and thus constrained from straying outside their affected roles on-camera. Any one of them could have been on one version or another of a 'take', owing favors and selective enforcement to whichever force or faction holds the note on them for gambling debts or other vulnerabilities for which their everyday obedience on the job is the continuous repayment. Anyone on the street could have been present for reasons not disclosed, carrying out some mission for any of countless federal agencies, state-federal task forces, legislative commissions, inspectors general or even private security firms. And speaking of security firms, why is it never held as relevant or meriting further investigation that officer Chauvin and citizen Floyd were both known to have worked as bouncers for the same crime boss for some time, and had been at least passing acquaintances in that arena for years? Stupidly assuming that the public ritual homicide the former carried out on the latter was some kind of purely racist lynching with presumed impunity is simply to decline to explore the obvious question of 'who gave the order?'
Nature abhors a vacuum, I'm told. Remove conventional, locally-administered, police forces from local streets and it is only a matter of time, like before sunset the same day type of thing, that multiple other forces and factions from both sides of the law will move to place their assets to best advantage within that vacuum and use them entirely in their own interest. This is because they already do, and have all along in American cities because of the very nature by design of the federalist system. No other country has the degree of separatism and presumptive sovereignty governing every conceivable form of jurisdictional procedures as the United States does, because every other country on earth has some kind of national police force which is divided into local districts all ultimately administered at least in theory by a central nationwide agency. Any such arrangement in the USA is not only traditionally inconceivable given our extreme divisions of official turf and the extreme measures both official and unofficial taken to uphold them, but actually unlawful owing to the provisions of the Tenth Amendment.
For better or worse, our ancestors set it up this way, where modern American law enforcement is a medieval tapestry of feudal fiefdoms large and small, all barely able to keep the peace even between themselves much less preserve law and order inside their own closely-guarded official boundaries. Such a system can and readily does lend itself to all manner of corruption and double-dealing at the highest levels just to get anything done between so many self-interested agencies, and among the rank and file promotes a currency-of-favors kind of procedural lubrication which has everyone owing someone something at any given moment.
The questions in crimes like the Floyd murder must be both 'who gave the order?' and 'who was obliged to carry it out?', in order to ever determine even for history's sake what really happened that day.
But those questions are unanswerable, and most likely never will be even asked, regarding that crime or any other crime in this country which might set events in motion whereby the vested interests of both official and organized-crime turf arrangements might be compromised.
All 'defund the police' can ever possibly mean in the real world of real live American federalism is that somebody else will be more than happy to take the funds instead, and use them in whatever manner they choose, same as your average feudal army passing as a local police department does today and has all along, to conduct their own business in their own way by their own rules and woe to anyone who comes to stand in their way. Obviously, that would describe both killer and deceased in the Floyd killing: each for his own reasons had been stamped as disposable by parties unseen, and each was dealt with in a manner chosen in advance accordingly.
Most folks have no clue who is really in charge of American cities, because they not only don't want to know but also because they know enough to realize that actually knowing who gives the orders could be unhealthy. And it will remain exactly the same no matter who is patrolling or not patrolling what streets in what uniform or under what chain of command. Traditional, true-blue American, Tenth-amendment feudalism itself is and has always been the order of the day in American law enforcement, because it was designed that way.
Right or wrong, we may as well grasp that working the problem does require correctly identifying what that problem itself is, and it is federalism.
"Unhelpful" is too soft. Harmful is the right word. Other than a correct verdict, I see nothing for which anyone can be proud and you are correct that the unfolding drama presented numerous opportunities for people to stand up for what was right and it should have been done in a bipartisan voice. Instead, we had bipartisan abdication of responsibility and bipartisan failure.