Caveat: Cruelty Replaces Compassion
In the greater context of cultural forces, today, under the aegis of class warfare, we see the corporatists extracting wealth from the working class, as our governors have substituted a “culture of cruelty” for a “culture of compassion.” In Christian terms, it is Yahweh or the Old Testament God the Father, who demands Obedience, lest he smite you v. Jesus, the God of Love, Mercy, and Compassion, who said, “Let ye who is free from sin thrown the first rock” or “love your enemy.” But the cops serve the masters and must keep order among the hoi polloi. We know what happened to protesters like Jesus and Socrates before Him. Now it’s time for the homeless to die.
The failure of leadership at the Albuquerque Police Department (APD), which resulted in the death of a homeless man, according to a viral video, once again focuses attention on APD’s short term solutions to the problems of the homeless, helpless, mentally unstable, and suspicious social non-conformists: shoot’em and save taxpayer expenses for social services. One can argue about the delicate balance between real or perceived threats to “officer safety” as “excuse” but the results seem alarmingly perverse.
From the Albuquerque Journal, March 26, 2014: “Hours after hundreds protested the Albuquerque Police Department’s use of force Tuesday evening, officers opened fire on a man near Central and Coors. The man died at the hospital, police said Wednesday morning. He becomes the 23rd man since 2010 shot and killed by Albuquerque Police, which is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for its use of force.” The thin blue line is bleeding red but not their own.
The repression of savage impulses, aided and abetted by professional training, is sublimated and re-emerges as a Freudian message from APD to civilians: “We are who we shoot. Don’t mess with us.” In a country where the U.S. Mexican border patrol guns down rock throwers as if they were Palestinians, we shouldn’t be surprised. It seems it’s “us against them.”
The income or wealth gap between the haves and have-nots is growing steadily as more folks slide down the scale into debt. And the debtors, beholden to their masters, are willing to do the dirty work to survive. Today, the President and his Drone operators shoot first, prior to due process. So the APD can only shrug and point to model leadership in the White House, condoned by majority vote of the imperialists in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Albuquerque Journal presented a detailed timeline online for the last few years in the wake of the prior homicide of the homeless man by the APD death squad and depicted how many millions of dollars these police tactics cost taxpayers. There was no mention of moral culpability. Still, the APD might learn, as a practical matter, that compassion costs less than cruelty since juries and litigators still bring successful wrongful death lawsuits.
Death by cop, according to the actions of the APD, sounds like the “new normal” and is “justified,” according to the new Chief Eden, who said it in a press conference so it must be true.
Mayor Berry, however, disagreed. He and his municipality are on the hook for millions of dollars in bad press if not punitive damages. And the police looked like Pendejos when they shot a supine homeless man lying on his stomach, firing beanbags into his back. Several yards away, he lay, clutching some tiny knives, barely discernible in his gnarled hands, as defensive weapons against the ravenous police dog and the dogged cops, who killed him.
Sure Wednesday morning the APD shot another civilian. No matter how menacing your neighbor or relative, if you call the cops you may be delivering him or her up to a death sentence. Think about it because the authorities are not…thinking.