The Myth Of The "Mostly Peaceful Protests" And Unprovable Counterfactuals

Donald Trump, still pressing the narrative of a stolen election, met with protesters hoping to shut down the formal electoral vote count. These protests later turned into an absurd, theatrical farce, with dozens arrested and four dead. Very quickly, Joe Biden went straight into absurdities of his own, pretending that the kid-gloves treatment afforded the George Floyd protesters of last summer did not happen, and that they were instead somehow manhandled by the police:

Biden: "No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn't have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that's true, and it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable." pic.twitter.com/TfWa25VzEt

— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 7, 2021

Kamala Harris and Michelle Obama made similar statements:

.@KamalaHarris: "We witnessed two systems of justice when we saw one that let extremists storm the United States Capitol, and another that released tear gas on peaceful protesters last summer...We know this is unacceptable. We know we should be better than this." pic.twitter.com/Uc1FC8aZKg

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 7, 2021

Like all of you, I’ve been feeling so many emotions since yesterday. I tried to put my thoughts down here: pic.twitter.com/9xzRvrpk7y

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) January 7, 2021

This is the purest of self-delusion. In fact, the summer protests are likely to go down as the most expensive in US history, with mayors in, at least, Seattle, Portland (especially), and Minneapolis all taking little effort and/or being slow to suppress the violence. Seattle only finally cracked down on October 3, but Minneapolis continues to have problems, and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler actually said something mean about violent protesters. Yes, Trump famously (and stupidly) got unmarked federal police (some from the Bureau of Prisons) on the scene in D.C., and also to Seattle, but both dispersed relatively quickly. It's hard to look at this and conclude this is nothing but a narrative in search of its own facts — and that Democrats have no interest whatsoever in an honest accounting of any misdeeds from their side of the aisle.

At Last, Something Approximating A Plan In Portland

I recently despaired at the problem of Black Lives Matters offering no policy directions to improve policing and diminish police abuse of blacks. It therefore came as welcome news when I found out about Reimagine Oregon's surprisingly meaty list of policy demands, particularly their section on police divestments. A great deal of this has already been accomplished in some form or another (banning the use of chokeholds, mandated duty to report/intervene in cases of violence, making officer disciplinary records visible to the public) with many other particulars still on the table. Some correspond to reforms I have already proposed, but many strike me as commonsense beyond those:

• Prevent contract arbitration from limiting disciplinary action.
• Demilitarize the police, including ending (a) tear gas use, (b) sound cannons, and (c) flashbang grenades. (a) will be extremely difficult to implement (crowd control is still a legitimate function of government), but the other two ((b) especially) are so overused as to be serious problems.
• Decriminalize public transportation fare evasion.
• Prohibit public transportation fare evasion as justification for search warrants.
• Remove sworn and armed officers from public university campuses. This is probably unlikely to happen, and in any case, how much of a problem does this realistically present? University campuses are hardly a hotbed of crime to begin with.
• Ban the receipt of militarized equipment (1033 transfers). This is well overdue.
• Reconsider personnel public records requests. Police disciplinary records need to be public. Despite a nearly 60-year-old Supreme Court case, Brady v. Maryland, that has frequently been read to imply that police disciplinary records germane to court proceedings must be made available to the defense, it is frequently flouted in practice.
• Consider the laws that allow expunction [expungement] without costs for people with no convictions in a certain number of years.
• End 48 hour rule that delays police officer questioning after a charge of excessive force is raised.
• Eliminate qualified immunity, duh.

There are other items aimed at the county and municipal levels, but this strikes me as a fine first crack at achievable line-items. The biggest single item missing, and the hardest one to implement, is ending police unions. The question in my mind is whether the Portland protesters have anything whatsoever to do with this group.

No Concrete, No Foundation, Or, "Awareness" Is Not Enough

About a month ago, I ran into Shaun King's widely-disseminated tweet about voting response to police brutality:

STOP generically telling us to VOTE in response to all of the police brutality we have right now.

Yes we should vote. But we have to be VERY specific.

Democrats, from top to bottom, are running the cities with the worst police brutality in America right now.

We voted for them.

— Shaun King (@shaunking) June 5, 2020

This was, I think, the first sign of a possible awakening (and no, I don't think the Republicans are a particularly good answer here). The fact that these things keep happening in Democratically-run cities and states is an indicator that the rot is substantially more difficult to excise, and that the affiliations in multiple dimensions will make this harder still.

Forcing politicians to implement reform in the face of entrenched interests will require sustained political agitation, and an agenda of reforms to agitate for. This brings me to the subject of this piece, Black Lives Matter, the formal organization. It surely has been front and center in many aspects of the current crisis. Formed in the wake of the George Zimmermann acquittal in 2013, the protests of the Michael Brown shooting in St. Louis the following year garnered the nascent organization national recognition. But in that time, they have not set up a national 501(c)4. There is accordingly no IRS 990 history to analyze. The PAC registered under that name raised a grand total of $500, and has since been dissolved. As donations to BLM itself all go through ActBlue (itself a 501(c)(3) charity with over $1M in assets according to its 2017 990), there is no visibility to that money beyond what ActBlue provides. (At the time of writing, I have a request into that organization for BLM's finances, but have received only a robot response.)

You will seek in vain for actual policy at BLM's website. Their "What We Believe" page is a litany of sophomoric college intersectional babble, full of nonsense like

• "We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege"
• "We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered."
• "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure..."
• "We foster a queer‐affirming network."

This is not terribly surprising coming from people whose founders in fact include actual Marxists. But nowhere there will you find a proposal for dealing with police violence against black people. BLM, the organization, has lost sight of the main goal everyone assumes they are after: the end of disproportionate police violence against black people.

Contrast this void with CHAZ/CHOP's demand list. Yes, they're silly. Despite the repeated assurances this isn't what the phrase "defund the police" means, they "demand abolition. ... This means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle Police." But at least, they provide a set of specifics. You could also look at the NAACP, whose strategic plan is full of airy nothings ("A chance to live the American Dream for all", "A free, high-quality, public education for all", etc.), but at least they point in the direction of goals. You can't fix what you can't identify.

This is in some way ironic, because only five years ago, BLM had actually launched Campaign Zero, which offered tangible and plausible ideas to stop police violence (h/t Coyoteblog). But that seems to have since gone nowhere. Campaign Zero's parent organization, We The Protesters, has a 2017 990 (the last year I could find) detailing $484,588 of support in that year, with no distributions over the period 2015-2017. But where are they? Has anyone heard from them, at all, since the George Floyd protests started? They have been a cipher. "Activist" groups like Black Lives Matter, at least the formal entity, have invested much in protesting and public displays, but show almost no interest in why police violence against black people is so widespread, nor in concrete solutions to fix that problem.

Update: I forgot to add this Washington Free Beacon piece about Shaun King sending money from Real Justice PAC to his own company.  While this is not, by itself, proof of malfeasance, it sure looks fishy.

 

Update 2022-04-04: Stripped the formatting off the King tweet upthread that made the now-deleted tweet invisible. Sorry, Google.