Welthauptstadt Germania; an update on D.C.

So the eagle has landed, and boy fuckin' howdy are the Bad Guys on the run:

"Between the first two nights of the federal takeover, 66 arrests were made, with another 45 being made Wednesday — numbers that Parker argued paled in comparison to the potential millions of dollars the deployment will cost taxpayers.

“In fact, 1,450 officers participated in Tuesday night’s operation to arrest 43 people; this comes to 34 officers per alleged offender,” Parker wrote.

“On Wednesday night, 1,650 officers participated, which breaks down to about 37 officers per alleged criminal. And on Thursday, 20 officers arrested a plainly overwrought man who allegedly threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent at 14th and U streets NW. Your tax dollars at work.”

Which takes us back to the first post about this, which asked several questions but not, perhaps, the most important one, which is

"What, exactly, are all these GIs going to actually do?"

These aren't civil cops. They're Joe and Molly, weekend warriors, cooks, bakers, mechanics, grunts, MPs, PAC clerks. You don't enforce law with fucking PAC clerks, you fill in forms.

That has been lingering in the back of my mind since I posted earlier.

Don't handwave. Be specific. What is one of these DCARNG "presence patrols" going to do?

Can you imagine a couple of the guys from your local Guard unit chasing robbers like T.J. Fucking Hooker? Rousting bums from the park? How? At bayonet point? With just their amazing Guard jedi mind trick powers?

Will they walk around hand-in-hand with the newly-federalized D.C. cops the way the Royal Army did the RUC in Belfast?

And if so, why? The IRA was an armed insurgency. Backing the Ulster cops with soldiers made perfect sense (not that I'm arguing that the British occupation of Ireland made or makes sense in any fashion, just that if you're going to try and do policing during a guerilla war you kinda have to do it that way...) but the D.C. cops aren't fighting guerrillas.

So...what? What are all these GIs shambling around the Tidal Basin doing? They're on our fucking taxpayer dime, so I'd sure like to know if my money is being wasted on the military equivalent of a multi-million dollar gold-encrusted fucking ballroom.

Just sayin'.

Update 8/17: So, couple of things. 

First, here's where all these Sicherheitsdienst commandos are strolling:

 

As the Fallows account post that contains this image notes; this ain't where the crooks are.

These are the "good" neighborhoods and where the public attractions like the monuments and other touristy shit are. These jokers are not Crushing Crime. They're wandering around doing fucking presence patrols, and about as uselessly as in Kandahar or Fallujah.

The other fucked-up part? Porky has got wingnut governors tripping over themselves to send GIs; Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

Okay, now. I mentioned that how you could do this here in Oregon is bus guys from downstate, or out in the Greater Idaho parts of the joint to bust Portland heads, but that the District is too small for that. 

This is how you get around that.

But...South Carolina? Seriously? You're gonna send those fucking crackers to D.C.? Now that's gonna fucking end well. That's just mindbendingly ridiculous. 

I get it; just like the rest of this, it's not about anything real. In this case it's wingnut governors competing to see who can get their tongue the furthest up Tubby'a anus.

Doesn't make it any less goddamn irritating, mind. 

Presence patrol

 Apparently we're doing this... 

 
...because it worked so fucking well in Baghdad and Kabul:

"President Donald Trump announced he is placing the Washington, DC, police department “under direct federal control” and deploying National Guard troops to the nation’s capital..."

It's easy enough to sanewash or handwave why the drooling moron is doing this, but to me the real issues are in the mechanics of the actual doing. Because...

1)  Soldiers are shitty cops.

That's also #2 through infinity.

Soldiers are trained to kill people and break shit. That's the nature of the business. So whenever you try to use them as "cops" (call them "OOTW", "assistance to the host nation", "peacekeeping", "occupation", whatever...) you run a genuine risk that that training will break out in unforeseen and usually disruptive or even dangerous ways.

Think the paras in Belfast, or the 325th in Fallujah. If you put Joe and Molly in a tight spot, they're going to default to their training, which is not "cop".

Mind you, as I think I've hammered hard on here, even "cops" aren't often very good at "peacekeeping". Confronted with people they dislike and distrust their go-to reaction is to pull out the club and the pepper spray and start shit.

So using soldiers to police D.C.? Just in and of itself that's not a smart thing, because

2) The things Trump is telling these GIs to do would be difficult to impossible even for truly gifted and well-led municipal leaders, police and social service organizations and staff.

"The Homeless will have to move out, IMMEDIATELY."

Where? 

How?

As I noted when the City of Portland had this brilliant idea a couple of years back, what the actual fuck do you expect these poor bastards to do? 

"The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?"

Yeahno. 

So here's an interesting note on this whole "round 'em up and shove 'em in The Camps" thing.

I had a lovely evening with a dear friend not too long ago. She's a retired elementary school teacher, grandma, traveler, thoughtful and honest and kind. 

(FWIW, the tradition around here is that we don't show people's faces without their permission, but feet are fair game...)

But she's also a longtime Portlander who's had bad experience with homeless/feral street people in the past and, like the rest of us, is sick and tired of the trash and the noise and the apparent menace. 

She's all in on these camps.

"They can get help there. They can get treatment. They can get their lives straightened out".

My response was "Okay, let's say that happens." (thinking "we don't want to pay for that now, why would we pay for that once the hoboes are locked up out of sight..?") "Then what?"

Once you've caught-and-released these people? They're still broke. Still unable to afford a roof, a shower, a toilet. Still unemployed, or underemployed to where they don't make enough to pay for those. 

"We will give you places to stay..."

WTF? Seriously? How? Where? No, show your work. Where are these Homeless Havens? Who pays for them? Who maintains, and runs, and cleans them?

And how do soldiers help do all that?

Is Tubby suggesting that the D.C. Guard set up Homeless Refugee Camps in Bradenburg? Silver Spring? How? Who's gonna pay for that, and for how long?

And while we're on the subject of the D.C. Guard...

3) We're probably not talking the most elite of military material here or the best military experience for doing this, either.

Fatso might think that wearing the tree suit makes you a combination Rambo and Clausewitz (drink!), but in my experience a lot of Guard joes were fairly average at best, and a fair number of them had little or no active time. 

Farkling about Southwest Asia has changed that...but not for the better. So the ones that do have RA experience? A lot of these jokers will have "presence patrol" experience in Iraq or Afghanistan and associate that with policing at best unwelcoming and at worst dangerously hostile places.

Putting someone whose "peacekeeping" experience is Kandahar or Basra or Baghdad in NW Washington D.C.? Probably not a good idea.

I'm guessing that the primary unit that will be tasked for this is the 372nd Military Police Battalion. The D.C. Guard website says that the "Red Hand" outfit...

"...plays a crucial role in conducting traffic control, corrections, security and mobility support, especially during National Special Security Events, like Presidential Inaugurations and when deployed, such as the 276th Military Police Company’s deployment to Guantanamo Naval Base, Cuba in 2016."

So pretty much cage-kickers, with a short c.v. in crowd control. Not sure how that works on the Mean Streets of Foggy Bottom.

So this looks a lot like the "depopulation" thing we just talked about; a "one-simple-trick" "conservative" "solution" to a difficult and complex (and, I note passing, an imaginary-in-the-"no, crime and vandalism and mayhem are not really running wild in D.C."-sense, but that's pointless to drag in because this isn't about an actual thing but the usual "conservative" reality-is-what-I-believe-it-is bugnuttery) problem.

One of the worst aspects of Trumpism is the grinding stupidity of it.

It's exhausting. The daily piling of stupid on nonsensical on corrupt on ignorant all founded on ridiculous 4chan gibberish. Trying to push back against it is like shoveling water; it's ALL just bullshit all the way down, so there's no actual logic or reason or sense involved, there's no bedrock there outside bafflegab, so there's no pinning down these people or their ideas to beat the life out of them. They just ooze from one idiotic notion to another to justify whatever they want to do, because that's all it's really about. 

It's what they want to do and now they can.

And that it pisses their enemies off?

That's just gravy. 

Am I Blue..?

One of the Portland newsweeklies is doing a worthwhile civic service; turning the paper over to members of Portland's Black community to talk about The Oregon Problem Which Dare Not Speak It's Name; systemic i.e. "institutional" racism.

Of all the places in this country I've lived Portland (and Oregon) is the whitest place I can think of. The racism is baked in, going back to the original Oregon Constitution of 1857. Here's the Oregon Encyclopedia on the subject:

"Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution."

Hell, I wrote a whole post about it a decade or so ago. 

Oh, and I love the part about the Oregon Bill of "Rights" being clear that while you had rights to trial by jury, free speech, and from not having GIs in your guest bedroom, you didn't have a right to be Black and Oregonian.

Nice.

One of the most visible, and intractable, pieces of this racist history that isn't just history is the Portland coppers.

They were lethally racist fucks then, and by and large they are now.

We've gone through a covered-wagonload of schemes to change that and it hasn't worked. Portland's Thin Blue Line is both racist and lethal to people of all colors; as the first linked article points out, they killed 78 people over the past four years up from 51 between 2014 and 2018.

But mostly Black.

So I'm with Mr. Smiff, the goatherder of the Mercury piece; the problem is the cops, and the problem is bred into the whole outfit's bones. It's not "reformable", it's not "redeemable". The only real solution is to burn the fucker hull and sticks, break up the ashes, and start again from scratch.

Call it "defund the police"? Fine. The point is that this blue village has to be destroyed in order to save it.

Then...what do you do?

And there's the big question. Because here's my theory: Portland police aren't bad just because they're lethal racist fucks. they're lethal racist fucks because of policing.

At least the way we here in Portland (and much of this country) do policing. And that, to a massive extent, is because of who we Americans are.

 

Specifically, the "occupation" model of policing - a relatively small number of coppers racing around in cars responding to emergency calls - means that the cops themselves typically only work with:
1) drunks and dopers,
2) belligerent assholes, and
3) poor people.

And many of these people are armed; indeed, the number of guns lying around means that if you have to try and deal with whatever fucking thing they're doing you kind of have to start from the assumption that they're strapped.

That's kind of it. 

People don't call 9-1-1 when they're having a nice day. They don't need cops when they're being friendly, or happy, or peaceful, or content. The cops only get involved when somebody's mad, or whacked out, or scary, mean, violent, or some other form of assholery, and as often as not with a deadly weapon.

Lots of these people are poor, and lots of them are Black because it's way more likely that you're poor when you're Black; that's how we roll here in the Land of the Free. And poor people don't have the options that better-off people do, especially if they're on the street, but just in general it's harder not to end up breaking the law which forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread if you're poor.

And there, told to enforce that law, on "those people", are the cops.

Think of how you'd feel about your work, and your co-workers, if it meant constant irritation and aggravation dealing with assholes?

After not too long you'd probably conclude that most people are assholes, many are dangerous assholes, and that almost all poor, Black, and poor Black people are dangerous assholes that you'd need to shoot first to stay alive. 

In other words, you'd be a lethal racist asshole.

Even if you didn't start that way, the way the United States works now goes a long way to ensuring you'd end up that way.

So how do you change that?

My only thought is that you'd effectively have to change 1) U.S. society, and 2) how we police it.

You'd have to get rid of the fucking guns, for one thing.

If any interaction with an asshole, or even just someone having a bad day - angry, depressed, even suicidal, argumentative, irrational, out of control - might involve a firearm? Then anyone whose job involved stopping that bad day would have to have lethal force, if not in hand at least at hand, and be mentally prepared to use it.

That's the kind of hypervigilance that produces "combat stress" and PTSD  in soldiers. Until the cops don't have to start from there? Every cop incident is going to have the potential to go lethal pretty quick smart. With the expected consequence of the cop starting every incident halfway to drawing down on someone.

Then you'd almost have to have a cop living, or at least walking around, in every street in every neighborhood.

Because the other part of this is the "working with nonstop assholes" thing, remember?

To change that the cops would have to interact with other kinds of people; happy, peaceful, friendly, non-asshole people. They'd have to see the good side of the people around them, instead of seeing them as random "civilians", randos they jump out of the car on, who are either useless NPCs, or assholes that need a beatdown.

Remember "Officer Friendly"? Yeah, well, it's kind of hard to be friends when you only drive in once or twice a year to thump some asshole and haul them off to Detox. 

And then there's the whole "right of the people to peaceably assemble" thing...

...yeah, that. 

This is a long way around to get to the part where I say "I don't see any simple, easy, straightforward way to fix the cops".

Do we need some sort of police? Yes.

Do we need the police we have now? As I think I've made clear; no. The current cop model is broken. It doesn't prevent crime. It doesn't solve crimes, not very often, and often not correctly, given the number of people whose convictions turn out to be mistaken or, worse, deliberate frame-ups.

But ISTM that "fixing" that involves "fixing" a huge chunk of modern American life; society, economy,  politics...and we can't even agree to get a fucking ketamine-addled Afrikaaner's fucking long nose out of our collective governmental pocket, or send a corrupt and predatory grifter and former real estate slumlord to the pokey instead of the Oval Office.

WASF.