It's really freaky to walk around my neighborhood and see the mutilated american flag in the form of the blue line flag. It's really popular and also there are lots of fliers posted high on telephone poles because people rip down the ones that get posted low.
It's not patriotic and it's also not right to support people who wield as much power as police unconditionally.
And herein lies the issue.
People like you and I see it as UN-patriotic. And the people who fly those flags see us as “domestic terrorists.”
I live in Northeast Philadelphia, where most of the city’s cops are from, and where they all live, and where they all die. This happens to also be the only part of Philly that skewed red in the election.
Lots of MAGA shit everywhere, blue lives matter and back the blue signs/flags/bumper stickers etc etc etc nearly everywhere you go.
All the people my girlfriend grew up with in this area all post the same shit when anything involving police brutality happens.
“There’s two sides to the story.”
“They’re risking their lives everyday. He had a knife.”
“They protect us from the bad guys!!!”
^ that’s their cop-out from critically analyzing issues like Walter Wallace’s shooting a few weeks back. His mother had called 911, explicitly requesting an AMBULANCE so she could 302 her schizophrenic son who hadn’t been taking his medication. The mistake she made was calling 911. The police beat the Ambulance there, called the ambulance off, then they left. Later the mom called again, and the cops came back and shot him.
Making matters worse, the police officer who can be visibly identified in the video of Wallace’s shooting was a young 20-something white boy from the SUBURBS. Other people in his graduating class from high school have since come out stating that he made tons of racist remarks and bullied people in high school. There is even online content posted by the man himself on Twitter that directly, explicitly espouses racist and murderous intent.
And now we get into copaganda.
In the wake of yet another viral video of police murdering a black man in America, this time on the Philadelphia Police’s hands, the police had to distract, take the heat off themselves.
The cops posted an image of a young female cop with a young black child in her arms, the image shows her “rushing” away from a commotion. It doesn’t say WHAT she was doing, why he was in her hands, or really any context at all. It’s just an image of a young, attractive female police officer rushing away from a crowd with a scared black boy in her arms. They used this to construe the police’s heroism, their humanity.
It was picked apart by the internet, and found through social media images/footage that the boy was actually in his parents’ car, and the police had actually surrounded the parents’ car, forcibly removed the child and the parents, and beat the fucking shit out of the kids’ parents.
The police are an instrument of oppression upon disenfranchised, disadvantaged, and economically insecure populations. Anyone who knows anything about American history knows that racism, both social and systemic, is one of the very pillars of our society’s foundation. Police enforce laws, and laws tend to be written by rich white men belonging to the Republican Party (aka the De Facto Fascists). Rich white men in the Republican Party tend to be racist, whether explicitly or under wraps.
Also, the cop that murdered Breonna Taylor is suing her boyfriend for defamation.
