fueled by bees

Repeat after me:

In this picture, the undercover cop is wearing a dark suit and a hat, but is not wearing tzitzit, the religious garment that all men from this community wear pretty much at all times. Not only that, but he has peyot (side curls) but does not have a beard, which flies in the face of the entire religious reason for having peyot. Additionally, although it isn’t shown in the picture here, one of the cops was also wearing a cheap plastic kippah from a completely different movement of Judaism (because I guess all Jews are the same to them?) and was seen blatantly doing things which would be considered to break the Shabbos.

The combined effect is like seeing a woman wearing niquab together with a mini-skirt  – it’s not only extremely off, but it’s honestly rather offensive. It looks like they bought a suit and fake, costume peyot from a racist halloween store that also sells costumes of “Mexicans” and “geishas”. 

furthermore, the united states police system was created largely out of runaway slave roundup patrols, they never existed to protect people, they were created to protect “property rights.”

No one, especially not black folks who have been raised in the long and ever present shadow of state sanctioned oppression and racial violence against them, should have to be pulled over by an armed cop and wonder if that cop has killed before and would be willing to kill AGAIN. Why did they kill? Was there truly no other option? Did that traumatize this cop or did they…enjoy it? Is there something THEY might say or do that might make this cop believe they are justified in killing THEM? You don’t know. You cant know. Its always a threat. It’s a horrific form of subtle state violence that is inflicted each time ANY cop interacts with black people in this country.

Cops are not executioners. Killing “bad people” is not their job. Situations in which there is truly, honestly, 100% no way to de-escalate a situation or handle it non-lethally without SOMEONE dying are incredibly incredibly rare and normal cops shouldn’t be in that situation anyway (we have specialized SWAT teams for a reason), BUT saying “well, there are times when cops just need to be able to kill people without ANY consequences, not even having to move to desk duty” creates a VERY EASILY manipulated loophole that allows cops to kill and kill again. 

And the fact that those killings have a VERY clear racial disparity in this country also makes it very clear that this isn’t an issue of cops in unwinnable situations making the tough call. Cops take out armed, violent white men all the time without killing them, and kill black people regardless of whether or not they are actually armed at all even more often. 

I live in a small EU country. I’m not saying there are no issues with the police in my country but overall police has peoples trust. Here police as an institution is not associated with violence or racism in any way so if some violent incident happens, it’s treated like an act of an individual whose mental issues weren’t noticed on time rather then problem in the system. And  even those are super rare here. I couldn’t find a single case of police officer killing a suspect in the last five years. On the other hand, 10+ officers died on duty in the same period of time.

Here we have completely opposite issue then US - cops that are too afraid to use their guns at all (not talking about hesitation to kill but things like disarming a suspect who has a gun) and getting hurt or killed because of it. So as @apottergeek stated, I would trust a cop who killed a person to continue working because they probably they did that to stop a psycho from slitting a little girls throat or something. Of course if they are mentally able to continue their job and got proper psychological help. I would never think they did that because they wanted to. So yes, in this case paperwork sounds like a harsh punishment because we don’t think there should be a punishment in the first place. In my country cases like that get A LOT of media attentions and it’s highly unlikely that a cop with get away with killing someone is it was not actually justified.

The problem is that our police forces are built on the bones of slave patrols and function to protect the interests and property of the rich those folks (ya know , like slave patrols.)

The problem is that cops are trained to shoot first and ask questions later, but that generally only applies in situations where the person being impacted isn’t white.

The problem is that if a cop kills someone there are entire SYSTEMS in place, from internal investigations to public relations, that assumes the cop was justified in killing, ESPECIALLY if the victim was not white.

The problem is that police occasionally killing black people, especially non-violent unarmed black people, is a form of state sanctioned terrorism against communities of color, and anything, ANYTHING, that allows cops to kill and continue to serve is an extension of that terrorism.