Is The US a Police State?

second thought is a 100% viewer funded operation if you'd like to help support the channel and get some great perks while you're at it consider becoming a patron at patreon.com secondth protest against the war in Gaza arrests in New York City students clashing with [Music] police Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling has a direct message to those that plan to protest peaceful protest does not necessarily mean that someone is exercising their first amendment rights first amendment protection is only there if you're not committing a crime and you can be acting out peacefully but still breaking the law so if you block a roadway or you block a venue or you're on private property and you refuse to leave those are crying this is not a 10 City this is New York City it's our city and if you thinking about doing something like this take a look around see how fast we cleared it out this could be you [Music] ready what you've just heard are two audio clips from the last month or so the first one's from Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling in it he's talking to reporters ahead of the DNC and spelling out in no uncertain terms his plan for protesters who break the law the second one is from Tariq Shepard Deputy Commissioner of public information for the NYPD and in that clip Shepard is standing on on the west lawn of Colombia's campus where the school's second GSA solidarity encampment was set up on the night that hundreds of cops were invited for the second time by the University's president to violently crack down on Pro Palestine protesters after they occupied a school building if you've been on Twitter the last few months you've maybe seen or heard one of these clips before but outside of a few angry replies neither of these statements really made it into the mainstream news no controversy no press releases to walk back the rhetoric nothing cops talking like this is normal nobody is shocked when cops threaten protesters why would that be weird is the US a police state I feel like we should talk about this violent suppression of dissent because it's always been bad and it's getting a lot worse so the core feature of police States is the violent suppression of political dissent if you've been to a protest recently you already know it can be a bit unnerving to attend and that's a bad thing in a country where free speech is meant to be protected every major protest since the 2020 BLM movement has come with the same recommendations wear non-identifiable clothing wear a mask at all times turn off your phone and have someone's number written on your arm in case you get arrested at every protest you can be certain you're being surveilled by security cameras and police drones you'll usually have dozens of cops surrounding the area watching you resting their hand on a stack of zip tie cuffs or putting on RI gear and just patiently waiting for the call to come in to start locking people up this is a general State of Affairs we've gotten used to and it's getting worse we're seeing more and more obvious examples of the US doing everything in its power to increase police surveillance capacities and silence the opposition cops have gotten wise to the safety measures protesters have adopted and in recent weeks we've seen the mayor of New York explicitly trying to ban the use of masks in public because of their use by Pro Palestine protesters masks are just a good Public Health measure especially for imuno compromised people but according to Eric Adams quote you should not be able to wear a mask at protests because quote that's what cowards do back in April the Supreme Court similarly made it clear that for Louisiana Mississippi and right here in Texas where I live Mass protests are functionally illegal by refusing to hear a case that makes protest organizers financially liable for any illegal act that happens at a protest like if some bad actor shows up and start throwing rocks the Supreme Court has decided to up the risks for protest organizers in a major way as we've seen with protests against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians it's all too common for outside agitators to start trouble this new ruling makes it that much easier for genocide enjoyers or corporate goons to get peaceful protest shut down in addition to framing the organizers for the crime of course over the past 3 months or so we've also seen around 3,000 students get arrested across the country for calling for the end of of the US's and their school's complicity in the Palestinian genocide hundreds more non- students have been arrested at the Israeli consulate the Brooklyn Museum the French Quarter in New Orleans a senate building in DC and at dozens of other protests around the country for the same thing at a lot of these crackdowns we've seen literal armies of cops decked out in full riot gear meet peaceful protesters with less than lethal ammunition throw them down flights of stairs beat them up and assault them with pepper spray and mace to name just a few of their crimes at hins Hall the building Columbia students occupied what little footage we have of the police raid shows cops using flashbangs against students going roomto room with their guns drawn and as far as we know firing at least one shot now thankfully the bullet didn't hit anyone but that doesn't mean these crackdowns were without consequences students professors and other protesters have been hospitalized with fractured eye sockets concussions broken ribs and hands and all the while cops have publicly denied these injuries and their use of excessive violence more generally in the aftermath of these crackdowns dozens of student protesters from Colombia ccny Penn Stanford and other schools have also been charged with felonies and misdemeanors that in some cases might land them in jail for up to 9 years and when I list these things out like this it seems almost exceptional like we're in some special time where every everybody overreacted for a second and that's very much the language we're hearing from the mainstream press and people in charge in her public statements Colombia's president called her decision to invite the NYPD to attack her students a quote extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances but nothing about this is actually unique all these protests have done is drag the dark ugly root of the US's carceral ideology into the mainstream news so this video isn't about the stereotypical police state thing there's no single agreed upon definition of a police state and it's more of an edgy label you use for shock value more than anything else that said here's a pretty good definition if you're interested now I'm not going to focus on checking off the details of this definition I don't want to spend too much time on how we've rebranded secret police as plane close officers here in the US when they randomly pull BLM protesters into unmarked Vans nor am I going to do 15 minutes on the depths of the National Security State coel Pro or the Patriot Act that'll get its own video at some point and I'll leave a few sources in the description for those who can't wait that long you can definitely make a case for an American police state using that definition I just showed you that's just not what we're doing today this video is exclusively about the police of it all the American carceral state its logic and how that logic becomes all consuming in moments of mass political upheaval like we're seeing today because while the vast network of surveillance that we all know about represents an extreme of State Control it's probably less powerful in practice than the everyday commitment of the American state to Law and Order especially now under a strained neoliberal capitalism so let me start with this policing here is Extreme the US is unquestionably one of the most police states in the world you've probably already heard that the US has more people in jail and prison than any other country but that doesn't actually capture the full scale of things about one in 100 people in the US is behind bars right now 2.3 million people more prisoners than 194 other countries combined and there's only like 200 countries out there the US on its own holds a fifth of all the prisoners on Earth our police are also far more violent per year they kill about a thousand people the second place among wealthy countries is Canada and Canadian cops kill about 30 not only are us police killing more there's also zero accountability for this violence according to Human Rights Watch about 98% of police killings in the US never result in officers being charged with a crime and still year after year Democrats and Republicans alike talk about how great and valuable our cops are Biden signs the American Rescue plan and cops all over the country get $350 billion to hire more police officers get more overtime pay and bonuses and get decked out in the latest military gear that means tiny towns like Prosper Texas not too far from here truly one of the most boring uneventful places I know has beat cops riding in $700,000 10t tall armored trucks now $350 billion is hard to grasp here it is in a more manageable format what you're looking at are what's called million blocks places in the country usually in big cities where single blocks get over a million dollar spent on incarceration alone per year and just think about where you live right now think about what would happen if every year the city decided to spend a million dollars on making your block better whether that's Renovations upgrades new businesses events or just gave you and your neighbors a couple thousand extra bucks each to spend on your home that's not what's happening in America's poorest and blackest neighborhoods the budget doesn't go towards making things better it's huge and it goes towards throwing people away this is the carceral logic of the American capitalist system and here's how it works under the neoliberal version of capitalism we've had in the US since Reagan government policy has looked something like this every Administration makes people more vulnerable by cutting Social and public services refusing to raise the the minimum wage pushing back the age of retirement defunding things like the nlrb to weaken unions and deepening government deficits not for anything useful but to increase incarceration policing military spending and private deregulation it's how you get graphs like these and cops that look like this the neoliberal Mantra is that you make things better for businesses by pulling the rug out from organized labor making endless calls for everyone to become an entrepreneur more cops and forcing people to take on more debt either through student loans or credit cards people need to pay this debt back and to do that you work longer hours at worse jobs for lower real wages in a society that year after year increases the pool of people who can't afford an unexpected $500 hospital bill thanks to Outsourcing Automation and leaner business practices geared towards maximizing stock prices there are fewer real non- gig jobs and more people need to work two or three of them to get by at the same time more and more privatized services like housing also means things like rent keep increasing and just like that you've created widespread poverty and insecurity with fewer solutions to escape it and more dire consequences for those who can't but that's not enough managing this widespread insecurity that's so beneficial for capitalist accumulation is difficult without conceding any ground to activists and organized workers so it starts being in the state's interest to redefine our concept of crime and apply it more broadly to the state's Target so it can manage this situation people don't usually love that their needs aren't being met no matter what they do and they might start getting the funny idea that upsetting this status quo taking back control and redistributing wealth and power more fairly is a good thing they could start organizing imposing demands on their bosses taking charge of their neighborhoods themselves or just trying their best to get on an equal footing with those born into privilege that sort of behavior the more it starts threatening the stability and negative peace of this violent system needs to become labeled as irrational and criminal so it can be justifiably repressed to protect the exclusive entitlements of a few so now media organizations both news and entertainment government bodies courts and politicians start moving the goalpost on what they consider crime and upholding this system exploiting workers keeping people exposed to the Daily violence of not having enough that's not part of their definition the FBI's crime statistics aren't about the number of people suddenly thrown in cages by the state after yet another new crime Bill nor does the report include what white collar criminals get up to when they slowly Rob millions of people of their retirement savings no the label crime is exclusively applied to things like petty theft armed robbery property destruction homicide and all these other crimes of opportunity that are inevitable When people's needs are being denied dened to them to Aid in this effort context gets completely steamrolled by liberal concepts of equal justice and the introduction of more rational criminal procedures like mandatory minimums We Trust retail companies when they broadcast that petty theft is on the rise crime rates are presented as objective reflections of reality to the public decontextualized from The increased level of policing and the predictable result is that criminal sentencing procedures systematically reaffirm the capitalist hierarchy some groups get charged with more severe crimes and more jail time but because this system has been rationalized because the concept of crime has been crafted around this specific purpose and because the context of the state's control over people's livelihoods is treated as a completely separate question none of this gets challenged politicians always get to ask for more cops more prisons and more guns because after all the crime numbers don't lie Crime Control becomes the Reg VI ation of a relatively small number of Acts that have been designated as threatening the social order and the administration of Criminal Justice becomes the institutionalized or patterned responses for processing those threats this way of Criminal Justice functioning becomes accepted and normalized ideologies legal and otherwise convince people that the patterns are inevitable and just to make this project of criminalization especially successful our leaders rely on crime as a a tool for othering along racial gendered sexual and class lines to the point that this othering comes to justify just about anything it structures the capitalist hierarchy lends legitimacy to those whose privileges allow them a higher standing than those who are othered and enables the violence of more extreme policing against some they shift the explanation for bigoted State repression away from the structural factors that make some groups disempowerment profitable and towards rooting out the bad apples from this perfectly neutral enforcement of Law and Order some people's identities and their efforts to live equal lives to the privileged become synonymous with crime and once that criminality is established and ingrained anything and everything is allowed cops can never go too far in punishing these obvious criminals terrorists Communists and those people who are branded as definitionally violent the result is a system in which the solution to every social ill becomes the police we throw cops at homelessness Mental Health crisis poverty and fair evasion while demanding that Public Schools public transportation and entire communities get by with much less than enough and you can very clearly see the inevitable consequences when protests start getting in the way of this capitalist society's goals at around midnight on April 30th a group of Colombia students occupied Hamilton Hall in an act of protest against the University's involvement and investment in the Israeli apartheid state and the genocide of Palestinians 4 days earlier former NYPD captain and current mayor of New York Eric Adams was on a zoom call with a group of heavily invested billionaires on that call according to Whatsapp chat logs filled with dozens of Forbes 100 capitalists this group discussed the various ways that they could leverage their tremendous wealth influence and connections to help Adams in his crack down of student protests they talked about making campaign donations to the Adams re-election fund hiring private investigators putting pressure on the Columbia Administration whatever it would take to get police officers to handle protesters at the same time a narrative began to take hold of mainstream media that this occupation and the escalation of protest it represented in response to an Administration unwilling to accept students demands was a step too far what they were doing was labeled by pundits across the political Spectrum as a violent crime and now that the protesters were criminals nothing could protect them so let me be clear peaceful protest in America violent protest is not protected peaceful protest is it's against the law when violence occurs destroying property is not a peaceful protest it's against the law vandalism trespassing breaking Windows shutting down campuses forcing the camp cancellation of classes and graduations none of this is a peaceful protest you can't convince me that a university with a $13 billion endowment cares about a single broken window that's not what this is about and it's certainly not violence there wasn't a single bloody nose or broken rib until the cops showed up no it's an excuse a line in the sand that justified hundreds of police officers flashbangs and arrests the condemnation of a president standing firmly behind a genocidal occupation and the Pearl clutching of the corporate media Law and Order had been restored protesters criminality had Justified it it Justified the press and legal observers not being allowed to document the police's actions which still today we only have a partial account of it Justified the cops forcefully removing students hijabs it Justified all the expulsions and the concussions suddenly it wasn't about Palestine anymore it it was about cracking down on inconvenience and in the days that followed it Justified dozens of bogus misdemeanor and felony charges for trespassing property damage burglary and assault not unlike the RICO charges brought against stop cop City protesters in Atlanta here again the consequences of the racial capitalist State came out in full force the wealthier and more mediatized Columbia protesters saw their mostly misdemeanor charges dropped relatively quickly down the road at ccny protesters saw the same violent Crackdown as their peers 20 minutes away but ccny is a public school its students and faculty largely come from lower inome Black and Hispanic families and so at the time of writing the cu22 are still dealing with felony charges that could put them away for years and as student protesters continue to remind us all of this pales in comparison to the violence imposed on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank but it's related so is the US a police state it's a matter of opinion but I think the message the ruling class and their militarized police are sending is pretty clear they're not hiding it and if you thinking about doing something like this take a look around see how fast we cleared it out just [Music] could I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that this channel is entirely Grassroots funded since sponsors don't want to touch videos like these we have to rely on the generous support of viewers like you if you'd like to help keep this channel afloat and get some great perks while you're at 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