The Great Nothing.

In 1991, the video of Rodney King being mercilessly beaten with batons and tased repeatedly sent shockwaves through the country. In 1992, those officers were acquitted of all charges. LA burned for five days. 

32 years later, because of the advent of the camera phone, a new video of police brutality is a monthly, sometimes weekly occurrence. What was possibly the largest protest movement in American history erupted in response to the obvious lack of value given to Black lives, especially by police. Those protests were met with a response as brutal as the actions in the videos which inspired them, often by the same departments whose officers were in the videos, but rarely just those departments. Cities across the country struggled with using every possible tactic they could conceive of to just get people to go and stay home, out of the streets. 

It's been thirty years. Almost a decade of Black Lives Matter. Nothing changes. 

Yesterday, the video of another murder committed by police was released by the Memphis police department. Tyre Nichols last words were "I'm just trying to go home." Five police essentially beat him to death. I'm sure there are more technical terms for the physiological description of what lead to his expiration, but the reality is, he was beaten to death. 

Body cameras. Surveillance cameras in the area. The police obviously know they're wearing body cameras. They also know there are city surveillance cameras, traffic cameras, etc. It hasn't stopped the bodies from piling up. 

We know the whole playbook at this point. Before the video was even released, the apologists for every variety of police malfeasance were already at work trying to undermine what our own eyes show us. It works on too large a population of the country, every time. As horrific and horrible as this video is, it's still going to work. It always will. There is already disinformation circling about "antifa planning riots." It probably won't take more than a week for representatives of police unions and fraternal organizations to start blanketing the press with stories about officer morale taking a nose dive, and vague threats that police will stop policing. Maybe they'll be a little humbled by the particular viciousness of the murder of Tyre Nicholls, and they'll wait two weeks before turning to that old chestnut. 

We'll get arguments from Democrats who don't want to appear soft on crime, saying police need sensitivity training, de-escalation training, training, training, training, training, blah, blah, blah. What that really means is bigger budgets. It has the added benefit of being a thumb in the eye of the activists on the ground calling for defunding the police or for the abolition of the police and carceral state. Reformists will just continue acting like they're not being manipulated by the same people who want all of us to not admit what our eyes have been seeing so regularly for 30 years now. "Progress takes time." 

We're not even getting progress. In spite of all this, these 30 years of undeniable proof of something within the institution of policing being unfathomably rotten, we've gotten no progress. What we've gotten, in fact, is the problem getting worse. At this point, why shouldn't it get worse? What reason do police have for changing anything? Their budgets have grown, despite all of this. It's still exceedingly rare for a police officer to face a convictions, even as they're committing more killings. What incentive is there for police departments to change? Realistically, none. Sure, union and fraternal order reps will take to the media to wax poetic about the toll public anger takes, but in reality, the places most heavily policed are the ones most likely to be adversarial to police, in part because police continue to respond to that adversarial atmosphere with even more violence. This loss of the public's faith obviously hasn't stopped them from killing people or even lead to some kind of significant overhaul to use of force policies. 

Maybe if we broke it down in cold, hard numbers it would matter. If we took the number of people killed by police and compared that to the increase in the budgets of law enforcement nationwide, we could figure out just how much more police get paid for every person they've killed. Maybe the number would be sufficiently horrifying to demonstrate how cheap life actually is, as we keep listening to a small majority who use the self description "Pro-Life" drone on about all the reasons it's just fine cops kills us by the thousands each year, it would make a difference. Probably not though. 

Maybe it'll make a difference when some attractive young, upwardly mobile white woman is killed in the midst of being taken into custody on a warrant for allegedly having an abortion. These are, after all, the same cops who are going to enforce all of those laws. Maybe it'll be a librarian who refused to stop stocking books that happen to have LGBTQ+ characters and just didn't comply quickly enough or a teacher who was willing to risk arrest for teaching Black history. Maybe if it's someone who looks like Krysten Sinema, terrified and dying on our phone, table or laptop screens, that would matter. I doubt it though. 

Honestly, I don't even have the energy to be furious anymore. I'm tapped. My anger is all spent. I want to be angry. I know this is a reality that is morally reprehensible. I know the fact that nothing of substance has even been attempted should be infuriating. I'm worn the fuck out though. 

All I have is this feeling in the pit of my stomach, that what the institutions of policing and their fascist enablers have learned in the last thirty years has implications for our future that are abjectly terrifying, and yet I know not even that is enough to engender a sense of urgency in this country. It's not our problem, until it's our problem, and by then, it's going to be far too late, and it will be an entirely different variety of fight.