Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am all right. I am angry and upset. Tired of this shit. There needs to be one of those German words for “totally surprised but also totally not surprised.” This is how I feel about a 26-year police veteran “accidentally” pulling out her gun instead of her taser and killing a man. A man who had been pulled over for the crime of having an air freshener hanging from his rear view mirror. Or maybe because he had expired tags, during a pandemic, where the state was experiencing delays in issuing tags. Both totally reasonable reasons to pull someone over. Because in America, if the Supreme Court says something is legal, police departments immediately start doing it all the fucking time, because heaven forbid they show an ounce of restraint with any power given to them.
Running from the cops? Soooooper dangerous to society. Better just shoot ‘em.
Two misdemeanor charges? Definitely just shoot em.
And then there’s this complete and utter bullshit in the US where if we get mad about these things, and decide to protest, the very organization whom we are protesting gets to decide, unilaterally, if our protest is legal or not. Because the constitution doesn’t matter here, what matters is a series of increasingly tortured Supreme Court decisions that everyone knows have absolutely no bearing on fairness or reality. So if you’re mad at the police and gather outside a police station to protest, which is exactly a thing the constitution says we should be allowed to do, well, that selfsame police department can just “call a curfew” — out of the blue, that day, even if no one is committing a crime, even if no one has gotten hurt. And then, if you decide that you are going to ignore this curfew, since, you know, it’s your constitutional right and it really is kind of bullshit that a police department can just call a curfew on any protest about that police department, well, then you’re a criminal and they get to shoot tear gas at you, and arrest you. Even if you are a reporter.
Super reasonable. Super fair.
It feels like there’s an entire political party in the US that wants to reduce the conversation to the right to bear arms and the right to yell fire in a crowded room and no other part of it really matters.
(This is an aside, but I have to mention it: Now having read through my life, oh I don’t know, ten or so books about the various founding fathers, including Michael Waldman’s The Second Amendment: A Biography, it really becomes vividly clear how little the founding fathers and drafters of the constitution gave a shit about guns. They just did not care. These people were graphomaniacs. They were writing machines. They put me to shame. Every day they wrote dozens of pages to one another, for their whole lives. They relentlessly documented the constitutional convention. They wrote and wrote and wrote. But you know what they barely ever wrote about? The right to bear arms. They did not care. It is obvious.)
It’s all around us, every day. We have our basic ideals we explain to kids and then immediately break them. Every kid is taught that in America we have freedom, but then in no time at all every kid sees that this is not especially true, and we just offer a bunch of BS explanations to our exceptions.
“Mommy I thought in America we could protest.”
“Well, Tommy, that one guy shook the fence and that other guy over there lit a firework so the police are now allowed to use overwhelming force and fire tear gas into the crowd, even though most of the hundreds of people there didn’t shake a fence or fire a firework.”
I wonder how many governmental and quasi-governmental organizations in the United States have the legal authority to suspend our constitutional rights and declare a curfew with zero oversight. I bet there are plenty of non-governental institutions that can. I bet the Port Authority can. I bet there are dozens if not hundreds of private university police departments that can.
But anyway. That’s not my main topic for today.
One small part of this I am focused on today: Why is it police departments get to investigate themselves? How is this okay?
In 1931 beloved football coach Knut Rockne died in a plane crash. America lost their shit. It was like when Prince died or something. He was even knighted by the King of Norway. And the CAA, the precursor to the FAA, investigated the incident, but back then they didn’t really feel the need to publish their findings. America didn’t like that and complained vociferously. Politicians back then had this weird habit of listening to the public — this was before one of the major political parties realized it could totally govern without actually listening to its constituents or passing laws its constituents wanted. It took five years and the death of a US Senator, but Bronson M Cutting’s death, and the ensuing report, put the bill over the finish line.
And with that, the National Transportation Safety Board was born.
The NTSB is part of the government. It is, also, however, as de-politicized as parts of the government can be. It is its own separate agency — it’s not part of the Federal Aviation Administration, because of the theory — get this — “No federal agency can properly perform such (investigatory) functions unless it is totally separate and independent from any other ... agency of the United States.” The “board” is a five person bi-partisan board that oversees the department. It oversees the investigation of every plane, train, boat, and pipeline accident, along with certain types of highway accidents and accidents involving chemicals. It cannot pass laws, but it can make recommendations — both legislative recommendations but also recommendations to operators. And while these findings are not legally binding, woe betide to any company that ignores them and then faces civil litigation. Their recommendations are not ignored. It operates Its findings are universally respected. Seventy three percent of its 14,000 recommendations historically have been accepted, including air bags, seat belts, positive train control and ground proximity warnings.
Now, even before the Gipper’s coach died in a plane crash, plane crashes were already a damn site more fairly and reasonably investigated in the US than police shootings: at least they were being done by the national government. The plane manufacturers weren’t doing the investigations themselves. But afterwards? It’s not even close.
So far this year, two hundred and sixty eight people have been killed by the police in the United States. By comparison, last year worldwide, all year, a similar number of people died in plane crashes. It’s hard to find exact statistics for 2021, but it looks like maybe 20 or so people have died in plane crashes in the US this year. Every one of those twenty people received a thorough, depoliticized investigation by experts. A massive government infrastructure was ramped up, and investigators were on the scene — anywhere in the US (and even worldwide)— within hours. It was not handed over to the locals, it was not handed over to the people responsible for the accident. Almost without exception, the results of these investigations are trusted. They are as trusted a government institution as is possible to have in the United States.
But when the cops kill an American? Forget it.
This absolutely needs to change. Every single police shooting in the US needs to be independently investigated by an independent, apolitical Federal agency. Yes, shooting. Even if there is not a fatality: the NTSB does not just investigate accidents that result in fatalities. Yes, certain types of police shootings can cause the Federal Government to intervene — Obama famously did this in the Michael Brown shooting. But these investigations are still run by cops. This agency cannot be a division of the Department of Justice, let alone part of the exact same police department that just killed someone.
None of this is to say that racism doesn’t play a part — of course it does. And none of this is to say that purely technocratic solutions will solve the problem. They are only a part. The frustrating thing is that they are a small part, but a completely doable part. This is something that should not be controversial. This is a concrete step we can take that Republicans — those supposed defenders of personal liberty and opponents of state oppression — ought to be in support of.
Here’s a quote from George Washington, from the book I’m reading now about how all of the founding fathers were completely disillusioned by the country they brought about. No real reason why I’m reading it just seemed fun. Not related to real life at all, nope:
“if the Laws are to be so trampled upon—with impunity—and a minority (a small one too) is to dictate to the majority there is an end put, at one stroke, to republican government; and nothing but anarchy and confusion is to be expected thereafter.
It is maddening how broken this country feels. It’s maddening that we pretend guns aren’t part of the problem. It’s maddening to see what our police have become and have no ability to change it. It’s insane that people have turned something as so self-evidently logical, true and good as Black Lives Matter into something nefarious. That there are people out there so hell-bent on nihilistic ruin. There are signs of hope, but they are few and far between.
It’s laughable to think an NTSB for police shootings will solve all of our problems. But it’s laughable to think that it wouldn’t help. It is a no brainer.
Seems dumb to write about anything else today. Here is am mix for you, though. We should stick to that. Of course I’m wearing a tux it’s after five what am I, a farmer?
I am going heavy on the Doctor Death’s compilations for the next few days. The entire C’Est La Morte label was so influential to me, and there were so many great bands on them, and they’ve been absent from Spotify for so long. All of the actual albums by these bands are still missing from Spotify, but I’m so happy these comps are here. I was writing a bunch of this to the last song on here, by the Moon Seven Times, and it should have been massive cognitive dissonance, but it kind of worked, a quiet, melancholy sketch of a song to go with my sadness about the times we live in.
Came for the lamentation of the state of our law enforcement system; stayed for the non sequitur 30 Rock quote.