Dear Reader,
Because I fear being misunderstood,
because I care what you think of me,
I want to add an addendum to yesterday’s podcast
but I don’t want to do it via podcast because
while in one way a podcast is less work, i.e. all I have to do is talk and let the talk wander where it will,
that method can lead pretty far afield, and
this requires some precision:
So I was watching TV moments before the mob stormed the Capitol and what struck me was the body language of the security men. They did not seem alarmed. They were backing up, accommodating. They did not seem to see the mob as a threat.
This struck me as odd. I had become accustomed to seeing security forces in tense crouches. As if they sense a threat.
The Black Lives Matter movement has popularized the concept of “implicit bias,” which I would prefer to call “unconscious bias.” At any rate, if white police officers have a buried, unconscious fear or suspicion of Black people, then it stands to reason that in equal measure they have a buried, unconscious approval or welcoming attitude toward white people. That’s perhaps what I was seeing on the TV: These police did not seem to be threatened, or to take seriously the job of keeping those people out of the Capitol. If a potential threat looks like your cousin, maybe you’ll underestimate the threat.
In the training necessary to reform policing tactics, police must learn to recognize when they are acting out of fear. They will also have to learn to assess a situation that does not activate familiar fears but is actually very dangerous.
Yes, unfortunately there is evidence of more than just the mob members looking like the cops’ cousins. Many police forces around the country have White Supremacist members, meaning, they are active members of White Supremacist groups. In addition, right wing militias often have ex-military members. There is a lot of crossover. In the specific case of the Capitol police, whose job was to protect the personel inside the building, some of them greeted and took selfies with the incoming crowd, who had broken windows to get in. There are also reports of some persons (supposedly off duty police) who flashed their badges in order to gain entry with the rest of the surging trespassers. It awaits further arrests and investigation to find out the whole truth of what happened Wednesday. It was all too happy and easy. Almost no resistance from the admittedly outnumbered and ill-prepared Capitol police.