Whether It Is ICE or Local Police, the U.S. Has Normalised Anti-Democratic Law Enforcement Practices-The Grotesque Excesses of ICE Sit Within the Broader Context of Police Brutality by Sherrilyn Ifill
From Peter Birkenhead via my daughter Peter Birkenhead
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It sickens me that the conversation about the murder of Renee Good is so decontextualized. We wouldn’t discuss a murder by the Gestapo of a German citizen bearing witness to a roundup of Jews in 1938 in terms that paid any respect to the legal justifications for the presence of the Gestapo in the first place.
It would seem obscene to us for anyone hearing the story to question, say, wether or not the citizen’s car made incidental contact with an officer, or micro-parse the degrees to which she sufficiently complied with his orders. We wouldn’t spend any time pretending that these questions had any moral weight at all.
And please don’t tell me the comparison isn’t fair. The gas chambers at Auschwitz didnt start their terrible work until 1942. The Gestapo in 1938 was engaged in exactly the same activity that ICE is today: the rounding up of people on the basis of race and sending them off to concentration camps.
It’s not just that Jonathan Ross had no cause to fire a gun at Renee Good. He had no moral authority to carry that gun in the first place, or even be on that street.
ICE “agents” like Ross are not police officers, or deputies, or FBI agents. They are not law enforcement officers at all. Yet, with the capture of the American government by a band of fascist thugs, they have been magically endowed with a vaporous authority to brutalize whomever they choose, whenever they want.
They don’t have that right. They are extra-legal mercenaries, goons, leg breakers for a crime boss. They shouldn’t have been in Renee Good’s neighborhood in the first place. Their presence alone — in Minneapolis and in every other Americn city — will be seen by future historians as a great crime, and the actions of anyone brave enough to defy them, or even to merely bear witness to their despicable work, as heroic.
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