Alex Vitale, Chase Madar and Shahid Buttar on Racist Policing

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New York Times (5/26/20)

This week on CounterSpin: The May 26 New York Times reports that authorities are looking into “the arrest of a black man who died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by an officer’s knee.” Police murder yet another black person in broad daylight, and the Times can’t bring itself to use active verbs. George Floyd was killed by a police officer who remained on the force despite a record of violence and complaints, his murder was covered up as a “medical incident” by the police department, and when people protested the killing, police tear-gassed and shot at them with rubber bullets. Now law enforcement will investigate law enforcement.

Seeing all this, again, more people are coming to consider that racist policing cannot be “reformed” with an occasional lawsuit and some implicit-bias classes. CounterSpin has had unfortunate occasion to discuss the issue many times. We talked about the history of policing with professor and author Alex Vitale. We hear some of that conversation this week.

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Many hold out hope for justice from the courts for police crimes. We talked about the problems with that path with civil rights attorney and author Chase Madar. We revisit that as well.

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And: Without the bystander video, we’d only have the police version of George Floyd’s death. We wouldn’t know he said he couldn’t breathe, that multiple people pleaded with the cops to stop what they were doing. The New York Times calls that “video raising questions about the police narrative”; actually, it’s communities desperate to be believed when they say law enforcement doesn’t value their lives, using one of the few tools left to them. We talked about supporting these critical witnesses with Shahid Buttar, then-director of grassroots advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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