Purple Heart? WTF? What’s next? Three-gun salutes? Burial at Arlington?
And this is one of the reasons why policing in the U.S. is so horrible: militarization.
Members of law enforcement like to pretend they’re in the military:
They give each other titles like captain, sergeant, lieutenant, etc.
They dress up like commandos. I’ve even seen instances where they will apply camo face paint.
They purchase (or are gifted) weapons used by the military. Many of which are more applicable for offensive use vs. defense use.
Ever talk to a cop? Even during a consensual encounter? If so, you probably noticed how their speech was not “normal.” I am not sure what the speech style is called. Let’s call it “official authoritarian,” and it’s very off-putting.
They refer to you as a “civilian.” It’s bullshit, because this term should only be used by the military. Factually speaking, the cop is also a civilian. (And if you tell him that, his head will explode.)
Every military has an enemy. Cops think they’re in the military, which means they need an enemy. Guess who the enemy is?
In a larger sense, Americans are indoctrinated into holding both the police and the military in some sort of esteem reserved, in the past, for royals and the aristocracy. Do people in other countries sport bumper stickers or fly flags that say “Support the Blue” or display the Thin Blue Line graphic? It’s disgusting.
Good question. And I want to add to my previous post: the militarization of the police in the U.S. is so common & systemic that people are conditioned to see it as normal. But it’s not normal. It shouldn’t be normal.
Yeah no shit. I watch a lot of foreign YouTube content where they talk about things about America that are confusing or off-putting. This playing the national anthem before sporting events, replete with men and women in military gear holding the flag on the field, and F-16s flying overhead – it’s like America is puking on its audience.
He wouldn’t have gotten those injuries if he hadn’t escalated the situation to the point of murdering the guy. I’ve seen the body cam footage of the entire encounter. The cop continually antagonized the guy until he needed an anti-anxiety med. When he put the pill in his mouth, the cop yanked him out of the car, threw him on the ground, yelled “stop resisting” and shot him three times. Absolutely murder.
And the resistance is the normal reaction to someone being dragged out of a car and shoved face first into the ground. Trying to orient oneself, to protect the head and face, and the fact that joints don’t bend the way the cops are bending them all seem to be forms of “resistance” that cops will use an excuse for further escalating a situation.
Remember-If he asks the question over and over again (usually increasing the volume and intensity) and you calmly repeat your answer, you are escalating the situation.
Lisa Edwards flew from Rhode Island to Tennessee. Once she got there, she started feeling ill, so she went to a Knoxville hospital. They discharged her after brief treatment. But she still wasn’t feeling well, so she went to another hospital, which discharged her quickly, too. But this time, she said she wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to leave the hospital. So the hospital called the cops, who arrested her and took her off in a cop car, where she suffered a stroke. The cops took her back to the hospital, where she died.
Surprisingly, she was white.
