President Donald Trump on Monday applauded U.S. police officers as “great, great people” who “have been letting us live in peace,” praise that is starkly odds with the direct experience of protesters and journalists on the ground who in recent days have witnessed — and, in many cases, captured on video — cops beating and tear-gassing peaceful demonstrators in the streets demanding justice for the killing of George Floyd.
“They’ve done a fantastic job,” Trump, who has repeatedly encouraged police to use excessive force, said during a roundtable with law enforcement officials at the White House. “There won’t be defunding. There won’t be dismantling of our police. And there’s not going to be any disbanding of our police. Our police have been letting us live in peace.”
Trump’s description of police officers as peacekeepers comes as activists are in the process of compiling an online spreadsheet of videos and images documenting law enforcement brutality against demonstrators across the nation, violence that has galvanized efforts to fundamentally change policing in the U.S. — including by disbanding entire police departments.
Attorney T. Greg Doucette and mathematician Jason Miller teamed up to create the Google spreadsheet — which, as of this writing, has nearly 600 entries — after efforts to compile the footage of police violence on Twitter proved difficult, given the sheer volume of videos that have circulated across social media during the nationwide uprising over Floyd’s killing.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation has also documented nearly 300 incidents of police violence against members of the press covering the demonstrations.
“This kind of documentation serves as a counter-narrative to repeated denials of responsibility from the police, who are routinely claiming protesters were the ones to grow violent first, or that a man who they pushed to the ground, cracking his head open, simply tripped,” wrote VICE’s Katie Way. “It also combats media coverage that downplays police violence or even goes to the lengths of using passive voice to obfuscate what the police have done.”
Another video supercut of some of the lawlessness from the last few days:
4️⃣3️⃣0️⃣ Seattle, WA + Portland, OR: another mashup of multiple videos showing the chaos and violence by police
— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) June 9, 2020
On Monday, the Washington Post published a video timeline of the violent police crackdown on peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Square on June 1, an assault that cleared the way for Trump’s photo-op at St. John’s Episcopal Church.
Asked about police conduct during a briefing on Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the administration has “no regrets” and is “not sorry” for the attack on demonstrators.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.