The threat of state-sanctioned violence is so constant in the U.S. that it doesn’t even make the headlines.
This week, responding to the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden entreated the nation not to “descend into violence.” In his Sunday night speech, Biden repeated an eerie set of talking points echoed by politicians around the country: “There is no place in America for this kind of violence — for any violence,” he said. “Ever. Period. No exception. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.
Police violence is often presented and discussed as a mistaken byproduct of an otherwise well-functioning system. But it is in fact an endemic form of political violence — the use of “force to achieve political goals” that is openly endorsed by politicians in both parties and vigorously defended as a necessary part of daily operations in the United States.The violence of policing forms the foundation on which all of this country’s structures of order and “security” are built. Indeed the U.S.
For people and communities whose lives are constantly threatened by the possibility of state-sanctioned violence, the role of raw fear in maintaining the political order cannot be overstated – and yet, it is rarely publicly mentioned at all. . These individuals live in isolated private homes and gated communities, pay for private security, benefit from low wage growth and call on police to protect their interests at every turn. On the other side of that power, most people in this country live with the threat of daily violence and mass shootings as a constant din in the background, and the threat of impoverishment and precarity ever more imminent.
Crawford was on the phone with the mother of his baby, shopping for ingredients for s’mores, when he picked up an air rifle sold in the Walmart, that was on display, unboxed. As he wandered the aisles, apparently distracted by conversation, a white man named Ronald Ritchie called 911 and reported a Black man was pointing a gun at children in the Walmart. Within minutes, police arrived on the scene; within seconds, Beavercreek Officer Sean Williams shot Crawford multiple times.
I was a reporter in Ohio at the time, and I remember distinctly the day the news came back that there would be no indictments, no charges in the killing of John Crawford III. There would be no apologies, not even a public memorial in his name . In 2014, and again in another wave in 2020, many people who had not previously viewed police violence as political before, came to see it in a new light.
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