As I sit here sharpening the points of my pitchfork and adding a couple quarts of fuel to my XL Tiki torch, in preparation for tonight’s Trump rally downtown, I’m reminded again of the angriest and funniest book written so far on The Trump Degeneracy.
“Everything Trump Touches Dies”, by longtime Republican campaign strategist/hit man Rick Wilson, is a pitiless, acid-tipped dagger assault on Trump and every know-nothing tribal toadie who ever signed on to the reality TV huckster’s bald-faced racism, corruption and incompetence. Sadly, that’s a sub-set of people that now includes at least a portion of the Minneapolis Police Department. (Wilson gets off a hilarious, coffee-out-the-nose line every other page.)
Whether some of Minneapolis’ finest are actually stupid enough to show up downtown tonight wearing their “Cops for Trump” t-shirts, (it is a bit chilly), it almost doesn’t matter. The fact that their union president, Bob Kroll, everyone’s caricature of a right-wing thug cop, has made a point of his and his
“brotherhood’s” full-throated support of Trump is all that matters.
I mean the t-shirts could just as easily read: “Cops for Career Criminals”, “Cops for Shameless Racists” or “Cops for Any Fool Who’ll Stick it to the Libtards.”
Over the past couple decades a few groups in particular have seriously degraded their credibility with the general public. Along with (white) evangelicals blind to the sexism, racism and sewer-level morals of Trump and his ilk, American cops have done a startlingly effective job of discrediting their profession and the pretense that they are politically neutral public servants.
A couple days ago I was listening to (yet another) Ezra Klein podcast, this time with New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell on the event of his latest book, “Talking to Strangers.” At one point Gladwell dives into the serious problem American cops have properly and reliably interpreting the demeanor of people they stop and confront. (Gladwell emphasizes that far too many of the stops are for reasobns that amount to “ticky tack bullshit”.) The case of Sandra Bland, a thoroughly innocent Texas woman stopped (mainly because she was black, let’s be honest) and who later hung herself in jail, is a key drama Gladwell explores.
He dives into the rippling effects of The Kansas City Experiment, an early ’70s protocol that did prove successful in driving down crime in tough neighborhoods. Key was a more intrusive, predictive brand of policing that had the person-to-person effect of treating every police-citizen interaction as a criminal erncounter.
Gladwell
‘s larger point is that the “Minority Report”-like concept of stopping crimes before they happen has seriously mutated over the years into the kind of militarized, nakedly-racist profiling now seen in dozens of “cop-involved” killings across the country. I refer you to Philando Castile here in Minnesota, an interaction that also involved the average not too well trained/inexperienced cop’s role as a revenue-producer for his municipality.
Gladwell points this out as well as a key part of the perversion of police work in recent years. (Over the last 14 years of his life Castile was stopped by cops 46 times, resulting in several thousand dollars of fines. You’re free to check it out and decide how “ticky tack” most of these stops were and ask if any white guy in a Mercedes would have been stopped even once.)
Bad as all that is, Kroll and company’s unabashed, in-your-face-pointy-headed-liberal-wusses “Cops for Trump” move reasserts to every Minneapolis citizen the high likelihood that the cop cruising down the street is carrying a heavy baggage of greivances, along with a badge and a loaded gun. Far from being apolitical and color blind, “Cops for Trump” strongly suggests a fellow traveler/sympathizer with not just appalling corruption and criminality, but what history will eventually conclude is the most open and unapologetically racist Presidency since, well, since Andrew Jackson.
By so shamefully linking themselves to Donald Trump, Bob Kroll’s Minneapolis cops have significantly accelerated the death of their own legitimacy.