The Despicable Violence of "Authority"

Garbage People and Their Hollow Debates

TYRE NICHOLS SUPERIMPOSED OVER HIS MURDERERS—IT TURNS OUT KILLER COPS CAN BE FIRED AND ARRESTED.

I am sick to death of killer cops using lethal force, when it seems like any able-bodied, non-cop citizen, could de-fuse, or disarm a situation (not that I agree with lethal force, in general).

I, unfortunately live in a 1984 situation in California, where the governor regularly tweets AT the governors of Florida and Texas about their gun laws and gun violence and he even tweeted about Tyre Nichols, but here in Oceania by the Pacific, our Big Bully Brother hasn’t tweeted about the recent murder of Anthony Lowe, Jr., by cops in his jurisdiction.

Here from Cal Matters (a California political blog):

One day earlier (from Tyre Nichols’ murder) — and initially receiving little public notice — Anthony Lowe Jr., a 36-year-old Black man whose legs had both been amputated at the knee, was killed by police in southeast Los Angeles County. 

Only this week — with the circulation of a grainy 23-second video, taken by a passerby, of the moments leading up to the shooting — is Lowe’s death getting more attention from the press, with activists demanding justice.

What we know so far, from the reporting of LAist and others: 

• Police officers in Huntington Park responded to reports of one man in a wheelchair stabbing another and found Lowe in an agitated state, holding a butcher knife.

• The officers were not required to wear body-worn cameras, but a passerby captured footage of the standoff, in which Lowe leaves his wheelchair and stumbles away on his knees. 

• Officers reportedly shot Lowe dead moments after the footage ends. 

At a Monday press conference, members of Lowe’s family said that he was experiencing a mental health crisis and insisted the police did not need to resort to lethal force.

• Ellakenyada Gorum, Lowe’s cousin: “You guys knew your lives wasn’t in danger. He’s running on his limbs. How cold-hearted could they be?”

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is investigating. If there is an outside investigation, it probably won’t come from the state Department of Justice Department’s police shooting teams, CalMatters’ justice reporter Nigel Duara explains: 

The department is required under a 2021 state law to investigate when unarmed citizens are killed by police officers. The department isn’t always quick to act, and it has declined to investigate some incidents referred to it at all.  

But in this case, the law likely doesn’t apply. No matter his limited mobility, Lowe appears to have been armed with the 12-inch butcher knife.

The Huntington Park Police Department told KABC-TV in a statement that its officers twice used a stun gun on Lowe, who “tried” throwing the knife at officers before they fired. 

In California, a law enforcement officer is only allowed to use lethal force when it’s deemed “necessary in defense of human life.”

I am not a gun owner, but I have long felt that the “socially approved” owners of lethal weapons like police forces and the US military do far more damage with their weapons than do the vast majority of gun owners here in civil society. I know many, many gun owners who have not shot one person, let alone brutally murdered handicapped people, or millions of innocents in foreign lands.

Unless this issue of top-down violence is addressed in a legitimate way that shows that the Garbage People who think they run things, really do care about reducing the carnage, by reducing THEIR weapons and THEIR barbarism, then it’s a very hollow debate.

The above is a bumper sticker from a now (due to covid) defunct organization that I co-founded in 2018 in reaction to the liberal-bourgeois Women’s March that only hated Trump and didn’t think that war and peace were “women’s issues.”

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