Tag: end militarized policing

What we’ve seen from rioting police … is an assertion of power and impunity. In the face of mass anger over police brutality, they’ve effectively said So what? In the face of demands for change and reform — in short, in the face of accountability to the public they’re supposed to serve — they’ve bucked their more conciliatory colleagues with a firm No. In which case, if we want to understand the behavior of the past two weeks, we can’t just treat it as an explosion of wanton violence, we have to treat it as an attack on civil society and democratic accountability, one rooted in a dispute over who has the right to hold the police to account.

“The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It.” by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times, 5 June 2020. 

In mythology, the myrmidons were a warrior race that, eventually, came to fight at Troy under the command of Achilles, who sulked in his tent but did not huddle in his bunker. Down through the millennia, the concept of the myrmidon has come to mean a mindless tool of authoritarian terror and destruction. From the start of this awful time, from the moment Derek Chauvin’s knee found George Floyd’s neck, we have seen this evolved concept of the myrmidon rise to angry life, clothed in the color of law and shielded by the badge.

Charles P. Pierce, for Esquire, in a blog post titled “All Weekend, All Over the Country, We Saw a Police Riot.“