If you then factor in cops who are not necessarily crooked, but think it’s appropriate to pepper-spray people for fun, or leave people in detention over a missing ID, or who simply kill innocent people by mistake, officers who routinely arrest people on “contempt of cop” charges, you are talking about something a bit more dangerous than the One Percent rule implies.That is the terrain. I accept it as a result of democracy. I also accept that communities which enjoy an overexposure to this privileged One Percent, will tend to be less likely to regard the police as a legitimate branch of law enforcement, and more likely to regard them as another neighborhood crew, empowered with the right to legally kill, and suffer few obvious consequences. One can see how such a people might make the wholly sensible decision to refrain from speaking too much with this One Percent.
Over the long term, I hope we revisit how we’ve decided to police our communities. In short term, I have son to raise. There are numerous forces I seek to safeguard him against. The police are among them.