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a friend of mine was a legal observer during the protests that accompanied the 200 rnc in philadelphia--he was assaulted by the philly cops for trying to get one of them to stop beating up someone else--the cop broke two of my friend's ribs, which required that he be taken to the hospital. because he had to be taken to the hospital, he was charged with aggrivated assault. this is routine in philadelphia, and gives a little sense of what "serve and protect" means when what is being served is the combined interests of the rnd--keeping the protests off television--and the city---keeping the rnc happy so they'll come back sometime and generate big convention cash for it.
if you interact with the police in a non-political situation, the institutional meaning of them can disappear---in a political situation, the police are the instrument of legitimate violence used by the state to protect itself against--well---you.
there's not much you can do if you are attacked except try not to get injured too seriously so you do not find yourself heading to the hospital accompanied by your new pet "assault on a police officer" charge.
i am old enough to remember the change in public attitudes toward the police from the middle 1970s to the present--the role played by those idiotic syndicated cop shows in particular--which is strange because when i was a kid there was "fbi" which tried much the same thing--something about the creation of paranoia around potential missing children enabled a change in perception to unfold across a change in the placement of collective emphasis meanwhile, as an aspect of a general reconfiguration of tactics police forces would use to deal with political protest was to make confrontation invisible to the greatest possible extent. that way, it's not political---it's just violence.
of course, we like to think the way we are told we like to think and so we think "serve and protect" and all that...who really needs to dominate in an old colonial fashion when the ideological context can do all the work for you?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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