The Bloody 'Bad Old Days': How the Specter of 1970s New York Is Used to Quash Dissent

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http://www.alternet.org/bloody-bad-old-days-how-specter-1970s-new-york-used-quash-dissent



The horrific ambush-style murder of two NYPD officers last Saturday stunned a New York already wearied by the Eric Garner grand jury decision. It also broke the right’s law-and-order contingent out of what had been a very uncomfortable corner. The shooting death of Michael Brown and subsequent failure to indict the police officer responsible had left the public divided. One side believed Brown was shot for the sole crime of appearing menacing to a white authority figure, while the other side was convinced Brown was a thug whose antagonism left an armed defender no choice but to gun him down.

The Garner case offered no such split. For at least a few days after the Staten Island grand jury decision, a rare bipartisan consensus emerged in the public sphere. Some on the right tried to deflect with tertiary statements about cigarette taxes, but these were half-hearted attempts. No one could locate any justification in the traditional reserves of law-and-order rhetoric for Garner's death. It was as pure a case of police brutality as had been submitted, and it left those who normally defend such tactics exposed.

“I suspect we would rather the film of Eric Garner's killing not exist,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic this week, describing the uncertainties of the Brown case as a release valve for talking points. “Then we might comfort ourselves with the kind of vague unknowables that dogged the killing of Michael Brown. (‘Did he have his hands up? Was he surrendering? Was he charging?’) Garner, choked to death and repeating ‘I can't breathe,’ trapped us.”

“But now,” Coates continued, “through a merciless act of lethal violence, an escape route has been revealed.”

[Warren Stupidity]

1. violent crime rates have dropped since their peak around 1980.

The post wwII rise and fall tracked boomer demographics and are otherwise independent of policing, incarceration, or other policies.

Lying liars don't care. They have an agenda and they use any means to achieve it.