Police in McKinney, Texas are facing national outrage after one of their officers was caught on video assaulting and threatening to shoot unarmed black teenagers at a pool party. But the video does not simply show another case of excessive force, as media reports would suggest. It also reveals the significant support these tactics enjoy among white Americans – and why the responsibility for police brutality extends far beyond the trigger-happy cops themselves.
The media’s focus on lone officer Eric Casebolt, who has since resigned, serves to obscure a larger pattern of white complicity in state violence. At the McKinney pool, white residents taunted black partygoers, telling them to go back to their “Section 8” homes before attacking a black girl and calling in the police to forcibly segregate their neighborhood. Indeed, the video shows white residents assisting the police, at one point even holding back bystanders while an arrest is made. Afterward, residents posted a sign thanking the officers for keeping them safe.
This popular enthusiasm for brutal policing is not isolated to a single Texas suburb. Nor can it be written off as a uniquely Southern phenomenon, a lingering stain of slavery and Jim Crow. From Ferguson to Baltimore to Cleveland, the violent enforcement of racial segregation has always been a national affair. As Malcolm X observed half a century ago, “As long as you’re south of the Canadian border, you’re south.”
This helps to explain a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in which 58 percent of white respondents dismissed the Baltimore uprising as “people seeking an excuse to engage in looting or violence.” By contrast, 60 percent of black respondents cited police misconduct as the cause of the rebellion. Nationally, it is the McKinney mentality – in its authoritarian police worship, its fear and disdain for perceived black criminality – that dominates mainstream political discourse.
The white community’s embrace of state violence in McKinney hints at a stark truth: the police could not continue operating in this manner without at least the tacit support of white America. The epidemic of police violence we are witnessing today would not be possible without its civilian enablers: the juries who acquit violent cops, the people who blindly insist we live in a “post-racial society,” the 911 callers for whom the police offer an expeditious way of resolving disputes with their black neighbors. Police brutality is bigger than the police. It is an indictment of the society that sustains it.
As calls for criminal justice reform grow in volume, the largest obstacle to structural change may not be the power of police unions or private prison contractors, but a public that largely approves of what is done in its name. In the face of widespread indifference or hostility to the Black Lives Matter movement, policy fixes – like ending police militarization or stop-and-frisk – can only go so far in curbing police violence. Until white communities come to terms with the depth of their support for police violence and work to disinvest from these power structures, the violence will continue unabated.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy