Red

as I stick my hand into a newly opened bag of M&Ms, a part of me I like to pretend doesn’t exist hopes to pull out the color red.

I know that inside they’re all the same sweet, cheap chocolate

that made Mars Inc. rich,

but like a weed that leaves its roots behind, something so deeply lodged inside my mind my bare hands cannot pry it loose suggests, 

so quietly most of the time I forget to notice, 

that red is best,

better than any other color in the bag,

for no reason other than it happens to the uninvited guest that has so rudely imprinted itself into the back of my eye, glaring like the flag at a bullfight,

and I wonder why my tastebuds cheer the color red,

red of blood,of gunshot wounds in chocolate skin undeserved,

served by those charged to protect,

the red of anger aimed at every other color,

the scream of silence as the trigger is pulled

red,

the color splashed across the headlines of CNN

when yet another life has been slammed shut before the last page, because of the color of the cover,

red,

the red of my own lips, partedas my throat tries to open and let words pass,

but finds that it is too tight,

because underneath the red on the M&M is a white candy shell,

so easily crushed

between the teeth of a nation that feeds discrimination and makes it great again,

where cruelty trumps kindness,

and walls border more than our minds,

and red, the red that catches my eye when I hang my head in shame, painted onto my nails, a concoction of corrosive chemicals that harden when exposed to the light and air,

and red,the red that I have been infected with, the disease

coursing through my veins,  that seeps out when my wrists are sliced open.

Now, as I stare at the red M&M in my hand, sticky from being rubbed between my fingers,

I realize that maybe I’m only one person, but each ocean begins with a single drop. I let the red M&M fall to the floor, and watch it fade,

 then reach into the bag again. 

this time I close my eyes.  

feamyng:

seriously-though-wtf:

officialmacgyver2-deactivated20:

bass-borot:

glozirina:

Some ya’ll who are younger need to google Frank Serpico and read about his time in the NYPD and what the cops did to him and attempted to do to him up until the late 90′s. He literally had to go into hiding in Italy and Switzerland and multiple times people tried to kill him. He only came back to America after the mafia (who hated the NYPD a lot, obviously) said “you’re under our protection.”

Damn, NYPD is so bad, Mafia started protecting good cops

Dorner tried to report his partner for police brutality. The LAPD retaliated. He retaliated.

No matter the circumstance, there will always be people trying to blame black men for being killed by the police.

yoursuziekins:

20th of March, 2022. It’s been 736 days since Breonna Taylor was killed by the LMPD & Brett Hankinson, Jonathan Mattingly & Miles Cosgrove haven’t faced charges or been arrested for her death.

royalhandmaidens:

hayatin:

honestly speechless

may the occupation and it’s evils come to an end, ya rabb

western news sources already calling this “clashes” as “violence broke out”

watch the video again.

what about any of this is a clash?

was it a clash when the sniper’s bullet hit her in the face? was it a clash when they shot at anyone trying to get to her as she lay in a pool of her own blood? was it a clash today, when they forced a young boy to take off his clothes in public and a young woman to take off her hijab while they filmed it? when they bombed a civilian’s home in jenin today? when soldiers shot grenades at civilians trying to hold a funeral? when they ripped a kuffiyeh off shireen abu aqla’s dead body?

how long will the world call genocide and ethnic cleansing a clash?

palipunk:

The level of evil it is to shoot a Palestinian journalist in the head, falsely claim you didn’t do it, and then send the military to attack her funeral, the mourners, and forcefully rip the Palestinian flag off her coffin. It’s monstrous.

While all of this is happening: 

Israeli police tried to force a Palestinian Muslim woman to remove her headscarf because it “matched the colors of the Palestinian flag”

And in Hebron, busloads of settlers have taken over a building and run towards it with sleeping mats, all from just today. 

ID: Tweet one by Yara Alafandi @/ AfandiYara reads:  Israeli police forcing a Palestinian woman to take off her hijab because it’s the same colours as the Palestinian flag and you’re still arguing that Israel isn’t an apartheid state? #Shereen_Abu_Aqleh

Tweet two by disorientalist @/ princessmlokhia reads:  Colonizers in Hebron took the collective Palestinian mourning for Shireen as a chance to sieze a new building in the city. Look at them, bold and pathetic. When we say Israel is a settler-colony we mean it in the most literal sense.

queeranarchism:

daggers-drawn:

kidzbopdeathgrips:

budas-wagon-deactivated:

madrantings:

budas-wagon-deactivated:

bien-cansada:

queeranarchism:

madrantings:

liberals be like: who wants to get evicted at gun point because your poor, but by a goodcop!!!

Our Pink Cops will evict you at gunpoint, but they’ll be LGBT-friendly about it!

A cop, pinning me to the wall and dislocating my shoulder: WHAT ARE YOUR PRONOUNS WHAT ARE YOUR PROUNOUNS

Lmao, yall joke, but when I got arrested and ziptied being lead to the paddywagon the cop was askin info on the way and he’s like: “what’re uh…yer pronouns and all..”

And I was like “wait what…..why do you need that?” Nd he’s like “errr uh we have to ask.”

So many people never ask and just assume, so I almost fell for the trick, I really was like almost giddy about being asked completely forgetting where I was, but then I had to jump back into the closet cuz i realized it didn’t seem right, so I said “uh……he”.

I found out later that other GNC people who gave their true pronouns were all placed in isolation and subjected to worse treatment than the rest of us, including assault.

Liberals are our enemy too.

yuuuuuuuup! I was asked my pronouns when arrested too and same deal trans prisoners are put in solitary so fuck that shit!

A BIG ANGRY

literally kill every cop!!

Same actually, except that they were going to check my genitals and stuff me in with the men if I didn’t come out as trans to them. They also spent a good 10 minutes making fun of me and making jokes about my dick while processing me.

Oh, and they literally moved a female prisoner to the next cell to put me in solitary.

Frankly like, death to cops fuck the system.

Yeah, this. We were all only ever joking in the ‘it sounds funny but only because if I don’t laugh i’ll cry or punch things cause it’s true.’ way. LGBT-inclusiveness means nothing for most of us in an oppressive state.

armed-joy:

unbossed:

If you do want to go toe to toe with cops don’t do it at the main protest in your area. Start shit across town and split the cops’ resources. “Open a second front” so to speak and take some of the heat off of the people they have absolutely no qualms about harming. Split up and open up a third front, a fourth. Keep moving and keep them moving.

even the cities with the largest police budgets only have enough force multipliers for one big containment

Please be careful out there. Black Lives Matter. Love and solidarity.

bombnails:

heytherefellowsapiens:

Another black man was murdered by the police.

Rayshard Brooks was shot by Atlanta police last night (06/12/2020) during a traffic stop. The 27-year-old was transported to the hospital where he would die.

According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, this will be the 48th case of police shooting in 2020 that they are being told to investigate.

as of tonight ( june 13, 10:11 pm ) Atlanta protestors are reporting that police are becoming more violent and detaining people. Please donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund to support them in their fight for justice for Rayshard.

Atlanta Solidarity Fund

jackandniall-deactivated2021100:

here’s the link to donate to george floyd’s official memorial fund if you are able to contribute. if you can’t donate, please share. being black shouldn’t be a death sentence.

illbeoutback:

If you’re protesting abortion, the Supreme Court says you can get right in women’s faces and scream at them on their way into the clinic. Because freedom of speech.

But if you try and protest the murder of a black man, you get tear gas fired at you.

androphilia:

“When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con.”

—Ta-Nehisi Coates,Nonviolence as Compliance, April 27, 2015

“AMERICAN NIGHTMARE,” read the coverof the Australian newspaper the Daily Telegraph in response to news that an Australian woman, Justine Damond, had been shot and killed by police in Minneapolis.

As a former police officer living in Australia, I was shocked at the news. Twenty-eight years in law enforcement in Queensland has given me some insight into how and when police need to use lethal force. In this case, the shooting just didn’t make sense.

This incident has again placed the use of lethal force by police in the United States in the spotlight. Minneapolis Police Chief Janeé Harteau stated what many observers were thinking: “Justine didn’t have to die. … I believe the actions in question go against who we are as a department, how we train and the expectations we have for our officers.”

What made Damond’s shooting stand out even more to me was its atypical nature further underlined by the Black Lives Matter movement. Black men are disproportionately affected by police violence in the United States, yet in this case, the victim was a white woman shot by a black police officer. Harteau has now been forced to resign, and the mayor is coming under increasing pressure to address the culture of policing in the city.

In my current job as a criminologist at Bond University in Queensland, I study the effects of policing and gun laws on crime and homicide rates. The Australian police shooting rate is considerably lower than in the US — our country has an average of five deaths per year in police-related incidents.

The US average is around 400 according to the FBI, with estimates that the number is actually much higher, potentially twice as much, due to poor data. When accounting for population differences, that comes down to roughly six times more deaths by police shootings in the US than in Australia. And that’s when using the likely lowball estimate on the US side.

What accounts for this difference? I believe the answer comes down to two things: gun culture and laws and the culture of policing in the United States. Justine Damond’s death is a needless tragedy. But I can’t help but question if it would have occurred if Damond had been in Australia as opposed to the US when she made that police call. It’s time to look at what can and should be done to prevent such shootings — both here in my own country and in America, where the problem is more severe.

My experience with police shootings

During my time as a police officer, I was involved in one shooting of a suspect and the investigation of fatal and non-fatal shootings by police. It occurred during a raid on an officer of an outlaw motorcycle gang — a high-level threat.

Upon entry, the suspect appeared from a doorway appearing to hold a long-arm weapon. We later learned it was an underwater spear gun, a tool used for recreational fishing. Nonetheless, in that split second, one of the police on our team judged the situation to be life-threatening and shot the suspect, wounding him. The shooting was justified by a later investigation as self-defense.

It’s a moment I look back on with regret. Still, I realize that in situations like this, instinct takes over for police in threatening situations. It made me realize the importance of adequate, realistic training in dealing with potentially life-threatening situations. As a police officer, your reactions must be second nature and should be based on appropriate training responses.

Australian police follow national guidelines on the use of lethal force that underpin police training methods. This include use of firearms only in the case of self-defense or defense of others against imminent threat, to prevent a serious crime with grave threat to life, and only as a last resort in all of these cases.

But in the United States, lethal force laws vary from state to state and in some areas are more relaxed — an Amnesty International report found that some state laws allow lethal force to “suppress opposition to an arrest” or to arrest someone for a “suspected felony.”

Standards of training need to be universally enforced

We’re not perfect in Australia. We have our own police shooting fatalities. I don’t think there’s any police officer out there who wants to kill another human being. But compared with the US, our situation is considerably better. To see the differences in American versus Australian policing, it’s worth looking at several big factors.

The first is training standards. In Australia, there are highly centralized large policing services in each state that all share a common standard of training and protocols. And in Queensland in 2014, when there was a series of fatal police shootings, the commissioner ordered a review of police training and concluded “…changes would be made to how police officers were trained to emphasize using minimal force to de-escalate situations.”

That’s not the case in the United States, where police services are often small municipal departments that lack both resources and a standard of training. Take the police in Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was shot in 2014: Among its scant 72 personnel, 18 are civilian support staff for a city with a population of nearly 21,000. With limited resources and numbers, small police services don’t have the same wide pool of experience and expertise to help train responses to encounters.

In the case of Justine Damond, the former Minneapolis police chief has already identified training and a failure to follow protocols — specifically, the failure to use body cameras — as issues in her death. Just the presence of a body camera can provide a level of awareness that discourages shooting. And even in the event of the shooting despite use of the camera, evidence of what happened can help provide justification or otherwise for the officer’s actions — and assist in future prevention tactics.

There’s also the fact that the officer fired from inside a car, across his partner. What was the threat that the officer reacted to? They were not responding to an armed offender. They had been tasked to assist a woman possibly being sexually assaulted.

But will this result in any top-down changes?

The influence of American gun culture is a major difference

American gun culture, I believe, affects the approach of police in their interactions with the community. In Australia, police simply do not expect members of the community to be armed threats. In the US, it seems the opposite is true. When my police team shot an unarmed suspect in that raid, it was because we were convinced that he was armed.

Just look at the rate of gun ownership and gun-related homicides. A 2016 US study estimated that more than a third of households had guns. In Australia in 2005, the rate was just 6 percent, and this had been steadily declining since 1998. While US gun ownership is also declining, the rate of ownership remains high when compared with Australia.

InAustralia the murder rate has now dropped to an all-time low of 1.8 per 100,000 people in 2013-’14. By comparison, in 2012 the murder rate in the US was 4.7 per 100,000.

You could dismiss this as having nothing to do with guns. But the data says otherwise. In Australia, restrictive gun ownership laws were introduced after the Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were killed and 23 wounded by a lone gunman using automatic weapons. Since that time, the number of firearm-related homicides has decreased—they now make up only 14 percent of homicides in Australia.

While the number of firearm-related homicides has gone up since 2005, they remain at historically low levels. There has been some debate as to the effect these restrictive lawshave had on the homicide rate, but generally it is accepted that the laws, while not the only factor, have had a strong influence in driving down these homicides.

In the US, firearm-related homicides have also gone down since the early ’90s. But firearms account for most of the deaths in this country — in 2014, 68 percent of the murders in the US were by gun. So while the number is going down, guns are still the weapon of choice for murder in the US.

This high level of gun ownership within the community creates a threat environment that is simply not present in Australia. When police do a traffic stop in Australia, there is no reliance on firearms as a method to force people to comply. It could be argued that this is not the case in the US, and this in turn leads to the high level of police shootings. It helps explain why although police deaths and firearm-related homicides are down, police shootings don’t seem to be declining.

The warrior cop: the move toward militarization of the police

The question as to the use of weaponry is not just limited to criminals. The rise of the “warrior cop” also a concerning trend. Such a culture lends itself to an “us versus them” approach to policing. The blurring of the line between the military and the police, especially in the US, is now on the political agenda.

Walter Olson, of the libertarian American think tank the Cato Institute, criticized the rising militarization of law enforcement as illustrated in Ferguson:

Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards?

Olson was not alone in his criticism of the heavy-handed response of law enforcement in Ferguson. Politicians from left to right as well as activist groups such as Black Lives Matter criticized the overuse of police force. Republican Sen. Rand Paul used the Ferguson case to argue for a reversal of the current US trend of supplying military hardware for law enforcement purposes.

Author Radley Balko has catalogued the rise of the warrior cop and the increasing convergence of military and policing operational doctrines. He illustrates how SWAT teams have proliferated since the mid-1970s in the US: “The country’s first official SWAT team started in the late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units. Today, there are thousands.”

SWAT teams deployed in police raids in the US increased from 3,000 per year in the 1980s to approximately 45,000 by 2007. Firepower has overtaken the role of community engagement. In Australia, specialist teams are only used in high-threat situations. The use of military type weapons is not available for general policing.

The shooting of Justine Damond is indicative of many policing problems, not just in Minneapolis but across the US. There appears to be a level of preparedness to use lethal force in many situations that in Australia would not elevate the police response to that level. Part of that, I believe, comes down to a heavily armed population. Part of it is lack of standardized training. And part of it is a shifting culture in the US police force — one full of SWAT teams and camo.

Damond’s family is entitled to answers to the numerous questions that surround her death. They are also entitled to justice if there is wrongdoing on behalf of the police response. That alone will cause society to reflect on how improvements could be made to our law enforcement responses. Australian police aren’t perfect.

But Justine Damond’s presence in the US put her in heightened danger for no reason. We’ve all got to do better.

Terry Goldsworthy is an assistant professor of criminology at Bond University. He was a detective inspector with the Queensland Police Service and has 28 years of policing experience. He is an avid commentator in all forms of media in relation to criminal justice issues.

luciferlesbian:

alexseanchai:

hedgewitchcat:

fucktheflagandfuckyou:

themintycupcake:

poltergeist-the-anti:

umblrgumblr:

glowstone:

ecthedeadbeat:

glowstone:

vaguelyconcernedtriangle:

glowstone:

the only reason cops are at pride now is to intimidate gay people into not making it a riot again and i will stand by that fact until the day i die

If the occasion should arise and I attend a pride festival, I would also like it to not become a riot.

imagine being this guy

arent they there? to stop any attacks from the anti lgbt groups?? yknow the ones that ALWAYS gather there???

contrary to what this newer generation of lgbt people think, cops are a new addition to prides. only within the past 10/20 years have they actually started “protecting” pride. aka standing around and intimidating the general public. historically, lgbt people have protected ourselves and eachother during pride events. from police in a lot of cases actually. ive been to pride events where the anti lgbt protesters were the ones being “protected” from the pride crowd… the cops arent there for us. theyre there to boost the image of the police force and make us think they care. the only people who feel safe around cops are the classes that they are meant to protect and people who are uneducated about police. (theres a heavy overlap as well.)  you may feel safe around cops but many people do not. theyre literally dogs to the upper class. 

2018 Baltimore pride was crashed by terfs who marched with the cops. pigs protected them.

In hamilton ontario the cops let neo nazis attack people and said they didnt help because people didnt want them there

I was at NYC Pride a couple of years ago and a massive section of the main route was completely dedicated to cops. The sight of a prison bus driving by with rainbow flags on it made me sick. That was the year that Toronto Pride asked the police not to bring guns to pride. And so the NYPD invited them to our parade, marching through and proudly brandishing their guns. Back at the Stonewall Inn, people who were protesting the commercialization of Pride were beaten by police. I used to buy some of what the commenters above are saying about protection, but after seeing all of that Pride needs to be anti cop.

they literally just showed up and arrested pride participants like a handful of days ago after being told they weren’t welcome

[Image description: The image right before the above link is of the linked article. It’s a Vice News article titled, “Cops Were Banned from NYC Pride. They Showed Up With Riot Gear.” The subtitle says, “Eight people were arrested on Sunday after skirmishes between the New York Police Department and people celebrating Pride in New York City.” The article has a photo of cops harassing civilians. One cop is pulling the arm of a pride attendee while other attendees try to stop him. Another cop has cuffed someone on the ground. End ID.]

what do y'all pro-cops-at-Pride people think the zeroth Pride, the Stonewall Riots, were about?

spoilers: it was police brutality against the queer community

and in any case, do y'all know who does the ACTUAL protecting against hate groups at these events? at my first pride over a decade ago, it was butches. it was trans people and bears and quite a few leather folks. it was volunteers who stood on that line and made themselves barriers between us and those that came to protest and hate us, because nobody else was going to do it, and that year the protesters outnumbered the attendees.

and as of the last pride i attended a few years ago in the same city, do you know who stood in the dead center, away entirely from protesters and violent people, openly brandishing RIFLES? it was the fucking cops.

your local butch will keep you twice as safe as a cop will, if the cops aren’t the very ones making it unsafe in the first place.