Since last December I’ve kept a garish looking tumblr called Badge, located at beforetheybringthecurtaindown, where I aggregate incidents of police brutality and overreach. Sometimes I’ve kept up with the countless stories of aggression, abuse, murder. Other times I’ve let it slide. But they’re always there. Alway someone dying in a holding cell, wounded in a no-knock raid, harassed for reporting or protesting, having their dog killed, getting arrested and assaulted for not instantly obeying. It’s out of control everywhere, but it’s mostly black people getting murdered by the people whose job it is to protect and serve them.
I used the lyric “before they bring the curtain down” for my URL because you could tell the curtain was coming. After all, coordinated, nationwide, violent “law enforcement” action crushed a nonviolent protest movement in America, Occupy, just a couple years ago. Ferguson is just the place unlukcy enough where the two trends — abuse of minorities and abuse of dissenters — converge. Ferguson’s where they bring the curtain down.
Once you’ve created the conditions for force to be used, it will DEFINITIONALLY be wielded on those least equipped to defend against it. The subaltern, the underclass, the civilians, the noncombatants, the women, the children. With “war on drugs”/”war on terror” rhetoric, domestic availability of military weapons and tactics, and “keep us safe” fetishization, we dug a riverbed. When the water starts flowing, it flows downhill.
Tags: real life