The Widening Maw of Racialized Police Violence

As an abolitionist, I definitely think there’s a debate to be had about the overall effectiveness of consent decrees, or really any type of police reform at all; in a capitalist society founded in white supremacy, and shaped by colonial genocide, chattel slavery, and stolen generational wealth, security forces engaging in racialized violence against marginalized people are doing the job they were hired to do, even if some of them get caught exceeding the state’s ability to cover up their criminal violations from time to time. The important point to understand for the moment however is that Trump’s Department of Justice is purposely abandoning legal enforcement cases against police abuses and violence, and that the government has for all intents and purposes already won. After intense public outcry and as part of an almost impossible war to hold violent murderpigs accountable in America, the Biden Justice Department conducted months-long investigations into these two police forces and determined that yes, they were engaging in systemic violations of civil rights along racialized lines and required federal oversight to be forced to institute reforms. As anyone who has studied the appalling and openly racist behavior of either the Minneapolis Police Department or the Louisville Metro Police Department can tell you, federal oversight was the pro-police compromise on the table here; disbanding either force entirely would have been the more just, and entirely reasonable option, given the level of police criminality and abuse on display. Furthermore, although I can’t speak to the specific cases against the other police forces the Justice Department was investigating or prosecuting, the systemic and nation-wide nature of racialized police abuses in America makes me suspect that none of them deserve a get out of jail free card from the Trump administration either.

If there is an upshot here, it’s that the Trump regime can’t actually make a municipality tolerate abuses by its violent racist police department. As the article indicates, both the MPD and LMPD will continue to operate under reforms mandated by local governments, which means that in at least those two cases the Trump administration’s decision to empower civil rights violations and violent police abuses is more or less performative. So why are they doing this? Well part of the answer is certainly that the Trump regime and its Justice Department are stacked to the gills with copsucking cracker authoritarians who actively support racialized police violence; this administration is by no means above petty racist displays of white nationalist dominance and antipathy. You can certainly bet that racism was a factor in the timing of the decision, coming only days before the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder.

Frankly however, these nazis have already demonstrated an obsession with using the whole cow, so I suspect there is also a much more dangerous logic behind the regime’s actions here. Despite his ability to employ ICE as his personal Gestapo, simple logistics dictate that Trump cannot ultimately accomplish his implied goals of either mass deportations, or the total suppression of his political opposition under something akin to martial law, without an army; the federal forces he does control now simply aren’t large enough for either of those tasks. I suspect that the regime’s original plan was to invoke the Insurrection Act and use the National Guard or even the Army proper to accomplish Trump’s goals, but a series of courts insisting that the US Constitution isn’t merely an advisory document, and the inept performance of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, makes that an extremely unlikely option at this point. This then leaves American murderpigs and the police forces they work for as the logical recruitment choice for a Trump administration that needs a sufficiently large and militarized enforcement arm to conduct their fascist agenda, which in turn explains Trump’s obsession with praising cops, and attempting to legalize extrajudicial police violence at every possible turn. By encouraging local law enforcement to collaborate with federal agencies conducting a mass deportation, signing an executive order to “unleash the police” under a state of pseudo-martial law, and cancelling DOJ investigations, prosecutions, and ongoing oversight of violent racist police departments all across the country, Trump is signaling to American murderpigs that he has their back as long as they’re doing racialized fascist repression, and they should support and enforce his agenda even if the local governments who fund their budgets don’t agree. For the Trump administration, cancelling these consent decrees and closing investigations is essentially a recruiting project.

Naturally, not even Downmarket Mussolini can just come out and admit he’s trying to seduce a nationwide army of violent, racist, murderpigs to install a patchwork fascist dictatorship, so you’d expect the administration to lie about why they’re doing this. In this particular instance however, the Department of (In)Justice chose chose saying the quiet part out loud over insultingly obvious deception; the official reason given for the regime’s decision to drop investigations and federal enforcement of consent decrees against violent abusive police force is that preventing police violence isn’t in the public interest.

“After an extensive review by current Department of Justice and Civil Rights Division leadership, the United States no longer believes that the proposed consent decree would be in the public interest,” said the Minnesota motion, signed by Andrew Darlington, acting chief of the special litigation section of the justice department’s civil rights division. “The United States will no longer prosecute this matter.” 

The statement is of course, outrageous on its very face. Setting aside the fact that rich white nationalists and their broligarach donors clearly don’t give a flying fuck about the “public interest,” a country that only five years ago saw massive nationwide protests against muderpig violence and racist policing practices (protests which themselves were met with targeted police violence in many cities) sure as shit has a “public interest” in investigating and preventing civil rights abuses by law enforcement, unless the state wants a perpetual war in the streets against its own population. Furthermore, I would ask Mr. Darlington if he understands that the public itself probably considers “not being murdered by a legally-immunized police officer tooled out like he’s about to enter Fallujah” to be in the public interest? I ask because despite all the outrage about consent decrees, milquetoast reforms, and a defund the police movement that caused virtually no actual police to be defunded, the number of police killings actually rose in the five years after George Floyd’s murder. Let’s take a look at this Julianne McShane article for Mother Jones, published on the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by convicted murderpig Derek Chauvin, to find out more.

Report: Police Killings Rose in the Five Years After George Floyd’s Murder

“Five years ago today, George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed Black man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, in Minneapolis. The harrowing footage of the murder—in which Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes after a nearby store clerk alleged he tried to purchase cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill—sparked nationwide protests over police brutality against Black people, and the persistence of anti-Black racism more broadly. Chauvin was found guilty on all charges in the case and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison; three other officers who were also on the scene and failed to get Floyd help as he struggled to breathe were found guilty of federal civil rights violations and sentenced from 30 to 42 months in prison. But a new report from the New York Times, coupled with recent actions from the Trump administration, suggests that whatever progress appeared to come in the wake of Floyd’s murder was not lasting.

A New York Times analysis published Saturday, based on data from the Washington Post and the database Mapping Police Violence, found that the number of police killings nationwide has risen every year since 2020—with Black people constituting a disproportionate number of the victims. Last year, for example, there were a total of 1,226 people killed by police, an 18 percent increase from 2019, the Times found. While most of the victims killed by police reportedly were armed, some, like Floyd, were not. Last year, 53 unarmed people were killed by police, compared to 95 in 2020, according to the Times analysis. Over the past decade, Black people have been killed by police at more than two times the rate of white people. (Native Americans were the racial group with the highest rate of police killings, according to the Times data.)”

In other words, Darlington and the folks running the (un)civil rights department under Trump and Pam Bondi can sincerely go fuck themselves. Not only are the pigs killing more people even after the 2020 nationwide George Floyd protests and years of winger fulminating about disrespecting and victimizing the police, but that lethal violence continues to be inarguably racialized; disproportionately affecting all nonwhite people, with Black and Indigenous Americans being victimized in particular. Racists and police apologists will howl about the gun possession data in the surveys but please keep in mind that the Second Amendment exists and these people love it more than life itself, so there’s no reason to take those arguments seriously. Given the government’s justification and the fact that they absolutely have access to all the same statistics the public does, it’s clear that the regime isn’t exactly “lying” here so much as straight up admitting they think racialized police violence is a net positive for the type of society they’re trying to build at the end of a riot baton.

Okay, so Trump’s a racist pig and wants the cops to help him install an ethno-nationalist dictatorship; case closed, right? Not so fast. I chose to share this article, and quote these statistics both because the bipartisan support for a militarized police state means we as a society need to move the discussion beyond just the overt racist authoritarianism of the Trump regime, and because as senior editor at The Atlantic Vann Newkirk once noted, “a system cannot fail those it was never built to protect.”

The reality is that Downmarket Mussolini has only been back in the White House for four and a half months, and these police killing statistics go back years into a Biden administration that was elected in part, to specifically stop racialized police violence in response to the protests; the city where George Floyd was slowly murdered on camera by a sociopathic cop is in a Democratic-controlled State, run by one of the most progressive Governors in America. For a larger liberal establishment in the United States that had no answer for Trump at the ballot box to point at the Kelpto Kaiser’s racist authoritarian regime and declare the movement against police violence and white supremacist policing has failed, is one part deflection, and one part scapegoating. It is ultimately reductive to argue that the 2020 George Floyd protests were by themselves responsible for the broader fascist “white-lash” driving Trump’s second rise to power in an already white supremacist America, and disempowering to believe organized resistance against that white supremacy accomplished nothing merely because a state that was never designed to protect racialized people, or the labor class in general, refused to take meaningful action against police violence. Those hard-fought hours in the streets opened a broad swathe of society’s eyes to the racist and violent nature of American policing, taught communities across the globe how to organize in the face of state-sanctioned repression, and helped make so many young people “woke” that the fascist Trump regime is trying to make “wokeness” illegal. We cannot un-see what we have observed, or unknow what we learned during the uprising, and the affliction of knowing cannot be cured with rubber bullets and tear gas.

Despite broad public support for reforms, good faith demands forwarded by activists for police accountability and the appropriate distribution of government funding between social programs and militarized murderpigs, were met with more violent police repression in the years that followed the 2020 protests, as reflected in data generated long before Trump slithered back into the White House. Take for example this August 28th, 2024 article by Sam Levin, writing for the Guardian that talks about the rage inducing use of force statistics generated by American murderpigs across the first Trump administration, and the first half of the Biden presidency.

US police use force on 300,000 people a year, with numbers rising since George Floyd: ‘relentless violence’

“Police in the US use force on at least 300,000 people each year, injuring an estimated 100,000 of them, according to a groundbreaking data analysis on law enforcement encounters.

Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group that tracks killings by US police, launched a new database, policedata.org, on Wednesday cataloging non-fatal incidents of police use of force, including stun guns, chemical sprays, K9 dog attacks, neck restraints, beanbags and baton strikes.

The database features incidents from 2017 through 2022, compiled from public records requests in every state. The findings, the group says, suggest that despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.

The data builds on past reports that found US police kill roughly 1,200 people each year, or three people a day, a death toll that has crept up every year and dramatically exceeds rates in comparable nations. The nonfatal force statistics and accompanying report illustrate how the killings are just a small fraction of broader police violence and injuries caused by law enforcement.”

To say that the numbers get pretty bleak when you expand the figures out to include most forms of murderpig violence would be an extraordinary understatement, and the story doesn’t get any better if you dive deeper into the data either. As Levin notes, Mapping Police Violence estimated another 200,000 people in the United States were threatened with violence each year in the dataset, and in 2022 Black people were the target of force during police encounters at a rate 3.2 times that of white people. Not every police force makes it easy to obtain this kind of data, and many of them refuse to collect it altogether, but two additional figures from smaller sample groups also stand out here. First, 83% of the people catalogued by 31 agencies who report whether someone subjected to force by police was armed, were actually unarmed. Second, while only 13 agencies disclosed what immediately preceded a police encounter that resulted in the use of force, less than 40% of the incidents reported in that disclosure originated with reports of violence. Taken together, these figures paint a clear picture of a violent, racist, and repressive American police state operating with near legal impunity, regardless of who happens to be in political power at the time.

All of which then brings us back to the Swine Emperor, his efforts to court an army of racist murderpigs across America, and the new McCarthyism the fascist Trump regime is employing to target dissenters or political opponents of the Trumpenreich. The story of George Floyd’s murder, the 2020 nationwide protests that spawned out of it, and the ultra violent response of those very same militarized police forces to that protest movement, is inherently racialized, but, as plenty of white liberals with a conscience who joined the protest learned, neither their skin privilege nor respectability politics prevented them from being targeted by violence themselves when the cracker police were the ones actively rioting. Now, with a Trump regime that’s prepared to classify anyone who opposes it as a terrorist under Project Esther, a crooked Justice Department that promises to defend rather than prosecute violent cops who violate the US Constitution, and a fascist cracker President who is trying to empower local police forces to enforce martial law across the nation, you’d better believe the very same militarized, violent police state unleashed on Black Lives Matter protestors and countless nonwhite murder victims like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, is coming for the entire American left. This includes any bougie white liberals who won’t learn how to goose step, and believe without evidence that a policing culture this foundationally fascist can still be reformed.

If the second rise of Trump means anything, it’s that there are no longer any civilians on the opposite side of the police lines. Everyone who doesn’t want to live under a fascist dictatorship will have to stand together before the widening maw of the white supremacist US police state, or we will surely be devoured one after another, long before the ouroboros of fascist demonization and scapegoating forces these nazis to turn on each other. Electing Trump didn’t end the war on violent murderpig abuses, it merely opened up new frontiers where the very literal battles against fascist policing and assaults on our civil rights will be fought. If nothing has improved since the day George Floyd was murdered, that means everything has to change going forward; Trump isn’t the only one who can put an army’s worth of people in the streets, because that is what it’s going to take.