Page 115 - Flaunt 171 - Summer of Our Discontent - Lili

n flagrante delicto. They were caught in the act. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, the countless unnamed dead, imprisoned, lost lives. In LA alone, the LAPD is responsible for 901 unresolved murders—and make no mistake they are murderers. The LAPD doesn’t have a leg to stand on, or kneel. We know what they’ve done.
These protests, not violence but anti-violence, are enacted on a rule of law that defies the unsaid social contract that has been broken. And the POTUS wants to in- voke the Insurrection Act of 1807, and yeah, maybe it is an insurrection. An uprising. The LAPD alone, not to mention the other 17,985 U.S. police agencies in the United States have systematically, over time, become the antithesis of their original prem-
ise “to serve and protect”. To serve whom, and protect whom? A laughable paradigm since when have they ever served anyone but the tax evaders that dumped tea into the Boston harbor? The original White Anglo-Nationalists that just wanted to keep more money, and enlisted the rest-of-us in their tom-foolery.
The police are a paramilitary force within our cities, counties, states, and even the national front which supposedly upholds our Constitution—the one that says, we are “all created equal.” And for whom do they serve? Not the 13% of our largest designated (another laughable term, as we are all Americans) minority, who has been under the microscope of policing since the Civil War. Do we really have to tell them BLACK LIVES MATTER? Evidently we do.
My Kentucky uncle told me at 13 that the reason the Klan was invoked was to chase runaway wives. I guess that means sexism can fit in here too. It’s all connected. Even the word ‘race’ implies a competition, a fear that someone can and will be better than you. They are fearful.
This paramilitary force called ‘The Police’ was newly empowered in the 21st century by The 1033 Program—a government program that transfers excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement agencies and since 2014, almost half of the police agencies in the US have participated in it. $5.1 billion dollars has transferred from the coffers of the local PD to the Pentagon in a program that has been deftly plagued by waste, fraud, abuse and corruption that holds no bounds. Former Presi- dent Obama signed an Executive Order limiting 1033 and in August 2017 President Trump rolled that order back.
We are, and have been, under siege. As my old teacher Amiri Baraka once said to
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