Pawn:
1. one of the chessmen of least value having the power to move only forward ordinarily one square at a time, to capture only diagonally forward, and to be promoted to any piece except a king upon reaching the eighth rank
2. one that can be used to further the purposes of another

In the previous post, Fuck the Police. Defund the Police, I detail a trait that, historically, follows police officers from its ancient origins to American officers today. Most cops aren’t very smart nor well educated. Before this starts to sound like some elitist bullshit, I’ll take an example directly from the U.S. military.
There are two classes of military personnel: officers and an enlisted soldiers. Enlisted soldiers are responsible for completing military missions and carrying out orders. Officers act as managers to those soldiers, giving orders and creating missions to be carried out by enlisted soldiers. The enlisted soldiers, for the most part, don’t have jobs that require executive function; they’re the grunts, they do the dirty and bloody work; they follow orders, no questions asked. The officers are the managers. They’re the military’s doctors, lawyers, engineers, project managers, and generals and so-on. You get the idea. What’s the main difference between enlisted soldiers and officers? Officers have four year degrees. Annnnd that’s pretty much it. Well, not quite. An enlisted soldier can become an officer, but he or she needs to be plucked from the enlisted ranks and recommended by a commanding officer and sent to Officer School -or- he or she needs to go to college and get a four-year-degree. Furthermore, it’s practically impossible for officers who started as an enlisted soldier to become a general or admiral. The bottom line? Officers are the decision makers and enlisted soldiers are the pawns, and that’s the way it is.
OK. This is some elitist bullshit because it’s a microcosm of the unjust way that society treats those without college degrees. After all, we know people who’ve never stepped foot in a college classroom and can out-think people with master’s degrees. But more importantly, it’s an indictment of the education system in the United States. How the fuck is it that people who graduate from high school, in what’s supposed to be the greatest country on the planet, are not taught to think for themselves, are not expected to be able to, and sadly, are not able to.?

Taking the military example to the the American streets, cops are the equivalent of enlisted soldiers. Detectives, lieutenants, captains, and so-on are the equivalent of military officers. What differentiates them? Regular cops only need a high school diploma or GED to become a cop. Annnd that’s it. Well not quite. In order for a cop to earn any rank in the police force (for the most part), he/she would need to get a college degree. The bottom line is that built into these systems is the idea that the majority of these non-college-degree pursuing individuals will do whatever is asked without thinking; without questioning authority, because they’ve never been asked to think. As a result, like the majority of field soldiers, cops are mindless killing drones. And like enlisted soldiers, cops are pawns.

Why does this matter? In order for capitalism to survive, it needs to exploit. It needs to exploit the environment, for example, which carries into environmental racism -but that’s an essay for another day. It needs to exploit an underclass upon which to build more capital, in order to create more wealth for the wealthy. In the United States, the system exploits black and brown people, indiscriminately, because society wants black and brown people to be the underclass -despite the fact that there are far more poor white people than non-white (though poverty rates per capita is higher for non-whites). Like in ancient Greece and Rome, which had enslaved people as police forces, cops in the United States are uneducated or under-educated, so that, by-and-large, they simply take orders and don’t ask questions. They’re given orders to harass and arrest homeless people or black and brown people. They’re given orders to club, teargas, and shoot rubber bullets at innocent protesters. In their five-month-long training programs, they have a visceral fear drilled into them, that at any given moment, they can be killed -mostly by black and brown people. All, without thinking. If a cop starts to think and show any conscience, a fellow officer will admonish them, or worse. The message being: don’t think, just do. And they’re taught to dehumanize and neutralize anyone who even remotely looks like a threat.
And I cannot stress this last part enough. The most instrumental part of their training is the use of handguns in conjunction with long-spread, and misplaced propaganda that they are constantly in the cross-hairs of people out to kill them. They’re taught that literally anyone can be a killer. Like 12-year-old Tamir Rice. They’re taught that, despite data that shows otherwise, that they’re being targeted, and that the only thing that can kill a killer, is a killer. So they kill, with impunity.

This seven minute video is absolutely worth your time.
It’s actually 6mins, 52secs and I strongly suggest you watch it now, and share it far and wide.

It’s published by The New Yorker, and it’s a view inside how police officers are “trained”, philosophically, to kill. At 1:05, Dave Grossman, an ex-Army Ranger says that they want to turn violence in soldiers, on and off, like a light switch, by creating a conditioned response: Fear.
For the past 20 years, Grossman has been invited by police departments across the United States to teach his “philosophy of killing”. He says, in so many words, that this instillation of fear is they only way to short-circuit humans’ natural resistance to killing their own kind. He literally runs brainwashing sessions where he teaches cops that they’re better off being sued for killing an innocent person, than to be sued for not killing, for derelict of duty or malfeasance. Which sounds like complete bullshit. And the fact that police brutality costs tax-payers billions of dollars in settlements, tells you that the philosophy is not working.
He’s booked 200 days of each year and not coincidentally, Jeronimo Yanez, the cop who murdered Philando Castile in Minnesota attended Grossman’s course.  Also, non-coincidentally, what’s the defense cops use time and time again when they kill innocent people, even when the individual is running away from the cops? They say that they were afraid. Up until today, they’ve gotten away with murder, just about every time. Qualified immunity is a hell of a drug.
Couple Grossman’s training with the need for racist systematic oppression, and sprinkle in centuries’ old fear of black men and it starts to make sense why so many innocent and unarmed black men are killed each year. It’s a conditioned response. The description of enlisted soldiers and cops as mindless killing drones is not a stretch.

I’ma tell you like my poppa told me. Stay sucka free and fuck the police.

We’re at a moment in U.S. history where a growing portion of the masses are awakening to the reality of capitalism’s exploitative nature, and the levers of the system of white supremacy are being exposed. In what feels like an important inflection point, incremental changes to dismantle these old systems will not be enough. There is no amount of bias training that will reverse the pervasive culture of fear that drives police departments’ bloodlust.
Capitalism creates ‘crimes’ of desperation and necessity, which in turn feeds the cycle of exploitation. If there were enough resources to guarantee that every individual is at least able to live comfortably, even if at the bottom two rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, people wouldn’t need to sell drugs; people wouldn’t need to steal. By the measure of the inequitable distribution of wealth, where on one hand, there are people with more money than they can spend in a lifetime, and on the other hand there are people who sleep on sidewalks, a time of reckoning is overdue.

Cops are pawns ordered to arrest anyone who dares to veer outside of the guardrails the system has constructed for them. Think of Eric Garner selling loose cigarettes. What he was doing shouldn’t have been an arrestable offense. But since cigarettes are extremely expensive in NYC (and I get it, making it prohibitively expensive makes it less likely that young people pick up the habit), it created the need for a black market. Eric Garner saw an opportunity to enter that market, presumably, because he had a job that needed supplemental income. I mean, why would someone want to sling cigarettes in the streets, hand-to-hand? All of these conditions combined to create a volatile encounter between the Garner and the cop who used excessive force to subdue him, and killed him.
OK, first, the tobacco companies should be bankrupted; it’s unfathomable why it’s still legal to sell an extremely addictive product that brings with it a high probability of death by that product. Big Tobacco, in capitalism’s brilliance, is allowed to legally exploit people despite everything we know about it. I digress, again.
Eric Garner should not have needed to sell loose cigarettes to make a living. Every person should be guaranteed a living wage. The police shouldn’t have bothered him, at all. It actually wouldn’t be surprising if NYC issued a directive for cops to crack down on loose cigarette dealers. The economic reason cigarettes are so expensive in NYC is that the city taxes the shit out of them. So enterprising individuals figured out that it could be profitable to buy cigarettes outside of the city and sell them on the black market, inside the city. They’re supplying a product to ease the financial burden on folks who just need a a couple of cigarettes. And it’s not like they’re selling crack cocaine or heroin. It’s tobacco, a completely legal substance. But enterprising people like Garner cut into the city’s tax revenue, so, you effectively have a war on unauthorized tobacco sales in the same mold as the war on drugs, which continues to transfer wealth from black and brown communities to the wealthy. And at least one black man died as a result. Police are unwitting participants in a system puts them on the front lines of a bloody class war.

Here’s an infographic that’s been making its way through social media. It describes the cycle of how poverty is criminalized in the U.S.. It’s expensive being poor. Being mired in debt to the state and ultimately being incarcerated, can start as seemingly innocuously as being pulled over for busted headlight or speeding ticket.

Don’t be fooled by the cops cuz they just hate us, want to see us locked, fam, man, they wanna see us rot

You’ve probably heard people call police the country’s biggest, most dangerous, gang. For years, while I never objected to the characterization, I always thought it was just a simple comparison: “Yeah, yeah, they run around with their guns and billyclubs and fuck people up, and pew pew pew. I get it.” But when you think about gangs and the psychological reasons for their membership, the comparison starts to make makes sense.
If you accept the premise that many gang members lack a support system in their own homes, so they find support and emotional refuge in their respective crews; you can conclude the same about police officers and their respective police forces. While it’s impossible to characterize every single officer as growing up, lacking a healthy support system (even though they act like it), the toxic co-dependency they create with their fellow cops is irrefutable. And it’s a self-perpetuating lie they tell themselves.
Cops have a bond with other cops that extends beyond their respective precincts. They’ll give cops who are complete strangers a “professional courtesy” and let them off if they’re speeding or even driving under the influence simply by flashing a badge. The fraternal order, as they call it, teaches them that the only person who know what it’s like to be a cop, is a cop. So they look out for their own, unequivocally. Their fear-conditioned training and constant reinforcement that at any particular moment, any rando can kill them, is stressful. So they lean into their own ranks, much like gang members find family and brotherhood in their crews. And much like gang members would kill rival gangs, for simply existing as a threat, police do the same, to anyone perceived as a threat. Gang members don’t snitch on other gang members. The blue wall of silence ensures that any crimes committed by anyone in their ranks doesn’t leak outside their ranks, or rather simply: snitches get stitches.
If you’re unfamiliar with collective trauma, it’s the condition where individuals share a traumatic experience with other people, and that event becomes a common identity that bonds them. Think survivors of a terrorist attack or mass-shooting (I know, same thing). Cops recreate that traumatic experience each and every day they’re on the job when they patrol the streets. They constantly remind each other of the dangers in the streets to keep their killers’ on/off switch on a hair-trigger. The stress takes an emotional toll, so they often have PTSD, drinking problems, and 40% of cops’ families live in a den of domestic abuse. All of this because of some deceitful and cunning training. And all of this so that they can do the dirty job of keeping the underclass in its place to protect an unjust, white supremacist, capitalist society. Ironically, most gangs aren’t this evil.

In my previous post, I argued that the police should be defunded and outlined specific steps that should be taken as part of that re-appropriation of financial resources. But I truly believe that police departments across the United States need to be burned to the ground.

• Abolish the police. Create reimagined systems of justice that actually protect people with an emphasis on people’s inherent individual humanity -not wealth or place in society- to prevent, solve and prosecute real crimes.
• No former cops can be justice officers how whatever they’d be called in the new paradigm. Cops are poison and it’s not worth screening any of them to assume new positions in the re-created system. After all, whatever screening they’re doing today isn’t working. If you can watch the New Yorker video on Dave Grossman’s training program and think that any bit of that brainwashing can be rolled back, I have some swampland to sell you. Assume cops are all all bad apples and let them all find new trades.
• Crimes should be redefined so that appropriate measures can be taken to actually reform offenders and allow them to be better citizens than they were before their offense.
• Tear down the prisons and rebuild centers to benefit communities in their stead.
• Training, like Grossman’s fear-based training should be completely eliminated. Families of innocents killed by the police should sue him. All of them.
• Every person in the U.S. should get a living wage. American corporations and the ultra-rich pay far less than their fair share of taxes. Ensuring that they pay taxes equitably, would fund that living wage. Read up on Andrew Yang’s idea of the Freedom Dividend. I’ll continue to say that Andrew Yang is the president that the United States needs, but doesn’t deserve. Because, racism and stupidity.
• Eliminate the conditions that create “crimes”. Society would actually exist as a system of justice, as opposed to needing a “justice system” that does nothing more than exploit, and destroy the minds and bodies of black and brown people in America. The days of accepting incremental changes are done.