Couple of things I think are positive.
"It is asinine for a rich man hiding in a bunker to ask these troops, most of whom probably signed up to pay for access to college and healthcare, to take actions that will inevitably lead to more violence and haunt them for the rest of their lives."
www.commondreams.org
If the national guard refused to deploy, that would be a pretty big symbol of change. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it would be positive. The article says there is a veteran's petition endorsing a move like this.
“ill be introducing an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to discontinue the program that transfers military weaponry to local police departments," the Hawaii Democrat
tweetedlate Sunday.
Julián Castro, the former Housing Secretary, applauded Schatz's proposal, warning that "as long as our police arm up like a combat force, they'll act like it."
President Donald Trump in 2017
rolled backObama-era limits on the 1033 Program, which authorizes the Defense Department to send military equipment and weapons to local police departments. As
NBC reported at the time, "Congress created the program in 1990 during the height of the war on drugs for federal and state law enforcement agencies, and it was expanded seven years later to include all law enforcement departments."
"Since the program's inception,"
NBC noted, "more than $5.4 billion in equipment has flowed to police."
"Militarizing local police forces doesn't make our communities safer."
www.commondreams.org
I think the support we are already starting to see beyond the protest, is an encouraging sign of real potential change. There is a lot that is starting to happen besides the protests.
I think it would also be interesting to be able to compare the response to the protest based on whether that police station is union or nonunion, but I doubt most of the news sources are going to do anything cool like this. Maybe an independent new source will. I don’t know though, but it would be interesting to see whether they approach the protesting differently since some of the police seem to be joining the protests and others seem to be tear gassing them for no reason.
Police unions have become increasingly rightwing as a backlash to the Obama administration and Black Lives Matter — and that’s bad news for the cities they police.
www.buzzfeednews.com
“Yet a University of Chicago
study found that between 1996 and 2015, newly unionized law enforcement agencies saw a 27% uptick in misconduct complaints — a phenomenon the researchers tied largely to protections afforded by union contracts.”