PowerShare Collective

Resist STL Infiltrates Anti-Abortion Fundraiser, Crashes Stage in B***y Shorts The protest group is turning to guerrilla tactics in the wake of the Dobbs decision

Today marks the culmination of , and we're addressing one of the most dangerous myths of all.

Police supporters, such as U.S. Reps. Rodney Davis, Darin LaHood, and Mike Bost (all from Illinois), would have you believe that police are under attack and need special protections. This is propaganda that is not based in reality. Police departments are already incredibly well funded and supported, receiving more than a quarter of the annual budget in many US cities. They regularly turn weapons of war against unarmed civilians, employing both literal and legal shields to protect themselves from any repercussions for their violence.

Police unions and the Blue Lives Matter ideology do not exist to protect officers from danger or ensure them fair compensation. They exist to insulate the police from accountability and enable their unchecked brutalization of poor communities and people of color.

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Myth 9:
Police are under attack--police unions and Blue Lives Matter exist to keep cops safe.

Fact:
There is no "War on Cops." They're just trying to avoid accountability.

Many police unions, including the St. Louis Police Officers Association, were formed to ensure they would be able to continue to brutalize communities of color with impunity.

The phrase “Blue Lives Matter” did not exist until 2014, and was coined in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Again, this was a case of cops attempting to avoid accountability for acts of violence against marginalized communities.

Sources cited in this post: https://www.vera.org/publications/what-policing-costs-in-americas-biggest-cities, https://revealnews.org/podcast/why-police-reform-fails/, and https://www.the-sun.com/news/992088/blue-lives-matter-racist-flag-blm-protests/

Today is the final day of . May 15th was designated "Peace Officers Memorial Day" in 1962. There is no federally recognized day memorializing civilian victims of police violence, in spite of the fact that they outnumber 10 to 1 the number of law enforcement officers who die at work annually.

We encourage you to commemorate October 22 instead, which is recognized by and other local groups across the country as the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, honoring the hundreds of Americans who are murdered by police every year.

What you see in the following images comes from the FBI. These numbers are in fact greatly inflated, given that an officer who has a heart attack while at work is still considered "killed in the line of duty." Even using these inflated numbers, however, policing is still far less dangerous that actually important jobs such as farming and construction.

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Myth 8:
Policing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.

Fact:
It’s not even in the top ten.

According to statistics reported to the FBI, 89 law enforcement officers were killed in line-of-duty incidents in 2019. It’s easy to assume that these were all shootings, but that is not the case. Forty-one of these deaths were classified as “accidents.” Of those 41, the majority were killed in motor vehicle crashes. Half of those fatalities occurred because the officer was not wearing a seatbelt.

Top ten most dangerous jobs in the US:

10 Landscapers
9 Construction workers
8 Structural iron and steel workers
7 Farmers and ranchers
6 Driver/sales workers and truck drivers
5 Refuse and recyclable material collectors
4 Roofers
3 Aircraft pilots and flight engineers
2 Fishers and related fishing workers
1 Loggers

Sources: https://bit.ly/3ohSIs4 and https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm

Myth 7:
Representation of police in the media is honest, accurate, and unbiased.

Fact:
Media representation of the police tends to be biased in their favor.

Mainstream and local media have long been cozy with the police, right down to their use of the police-coined phrase “officer involved shooting.”

In Citations Needed episode “Kitten Rescues, Lip-Syncing and Christmas Traffic Stops: Your Guide to Clickbait Copaganda” on December 12, 2018, the hosts state that “The New York Post...didn’t have a single story about the NYPD saving kittens before the murder of Eric Garner in 2014...And since his death in July of 2014, they’ve had roughly ten stories in the New York Post about police officers saving kittens.”

Sources cited in this post: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/officer-involved-shooting.php and https://bit.ly/3ok0HFk

More information about the relationship between the media and the police can be found at https://newrepublic.com/article/158055/rethinking-presss-relationship-police and https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/police_reform_media_george_floyd.php

Myth 6: Police live in the communities they patrol.

Fact: Most do not.

According to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight: “On average, among the 75 U.S. cities with the largest police forces, 60 percent of police officers reside outside the city limits.”

More information at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-police-dont-live-in-the-cities-they-serve/

This week, PowerShare Collective is commemorating by addressing some common myths about the police.

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Myth 5:
We need police because our country is getting more dangerous. Police funding is proportionate to crime rates.

Fact:
Crime has dropped substantially while police funding has risen over the last four decades.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the overall violent crime rate in the US fell 74% between 1993 and 2019, while the property crime rate fell 71%.

Meanwhile, according to the Urban Institute, spending on policing continues to rise. From 1977 to 2017, state and local government spending on police increased from $42 billion to $115 billion (in 2017 inflation-adjusted dollars).

Sources cited in this post: https://urbn.is/3hjYRCN and https://bit.ly/33Gv8fa

It's . Get ready for myth number four.

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Myth 4:
Police enforce the law fairly and objectively.

Fact:
Policing in the United States is capricious, subjective, and racial biased.

According to a 2020 study, victims of fatal police shootings are twice as likely to be Black, in spite of African Americans making up less than 15% of the US population.

According the Drug Policy Institute, of the 1.5 million drug arrests in the U.S. in 2016, more than 80% were for possession only. Nearly 80% of people in federal prison and almost 60% of people in state prison for drug offenses are Black or Latino. Again, this is in spite of being a minority of the population. One in nine Black children has an incarcerated parent.

A study of more than two million 911 calls in two US cities, authored by Texas A&M economist Mark Hoekstra, found that white officers dispatched to Black neighborhoods fired their guns five times as often as Black officers dispatched for similar calls to the same neighborhoods.

All of this is using the best data we can find. Unfortunately, use of force data has not been tracked in a centralized way. Less than half of officers report non-fatal use-of-force data, estimates Justin Nix, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha. The true rates of police violence against Americans may be far higher than most data show.

In the interest of keeping the scope focused, we will not address here how the laws themselves are not necessarily fair or objective. We invite you to learn more about the racist history of the War on Drugs by looking into resources such as Drug Policy Alliance and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

Sources cited in this post: https://bit.ly/3fdG613 and https://drugpolicy.org/resource/drug-war-mass-incarceration-and-race-englishspanish and https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01846-z and https://abcnews.go.com/US/latest-research-tells-us-racial-bias-policing/story?id=70994421 and https://drugpolicy.org/

It's , so we're addressing 10 common myths about police.

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Myth 3: We need the police to solve crime.

Fact: The vast majority of crimes go unsolved.

Federal government data from 2018 show that just 46% of all violent crimes reported to police were "cleared" with an arrest. This is bad enough in and of itself, but worse when you consider that only an estimated 43% of people who were the victims of violent crimes reported the incidents to police.

According to Shima Baughman, Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Utah, only about 2% of US arrests end in a conviction. And according to the Innocence Project, about 4-6% of defendants in capital cases are wrongfully convicted. So even by the system’s own logic, where justice = arrest + conviction + punishment, it isn’t working out.

Here are the sources cited in this post:

https://www.insider.com/police-dont-solve-most-violent-property-crimes-data-2020-6

https://innocenceproject.org/research-resources/

It's , and we at PowerShare Collective are busting myths all week long.

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Myth 2:
Violent cops are just a few bad apples.

Fact:
The issues are systemic.

According to the 2020 Police Violence Report, 1,127 people were killed by police in 2020. Most killings began with police responding to suspected non-violent offenses or cases where no crime was reported. Of the total, 121 people were killed after police stopped them for a traffic violation, and 97 were killed after police responded to reports of someone behaving erratically or having a mental health crisis.

For comparison: police in the US kill about 33.5 people for every ten million. In neighboring Canada, that number is just 9.8 according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

And this is only taking into account police violence that results in death. According to a 2018 repost by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 1 million U.S. residents age 16 or older experienced the threat or use of force by police in 2015. But this experience was not the same across all groups: the report found that police were twice as likely to threaten or use force against Black and Hispanic residents than white residents.

Here are the links to the sources cited in this post:
https://policeviolencereport.org/https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15.pdf
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/10/12/policing/

It's ! Let's bust some myths.

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Myth 1:
Police have always existed. Their function in society is inevitable and essential.

Fact:
Policing as we know it did not exist until the 19th century.

Policing in the United States evolved primarily out of two areas: the London Metropolitan Police and Southern slave patrols.

Southern US cities began forming slave patrols as early as the 18th century. They were responsible for using intimidation to prevent enslaved people from attempting to escape, as well as capturing those that did.

Larry Holzwarth writes: “Following the Civil War many of the former slave patrols became vigilante groups...continuing to terrorize the former slaves to prevent them from exercising their new rights as citizens. The vigilantes gradually evolved into the sheriff departments and small town police departments of the Deep South, which enforced the Jim Crow and segregation laws well into the twentieth century.”

Excerpted from “10 Things to Know About the Evolution of the Police in the United States” August 1, 2018

Meanwhile, the London Metropolitan police focused their efforts primarily in the following areas:

Collecting tithes to the Protestant Church
Assisting landlords with rent collection and evictions
Suppression of political groups and enforcement of curfews

Northern cities took their inspiration directly from the London Metropolitan Police. The four functions of these new police forces were:
Suppression of strikes
Control of the workforce by regulating drinking, dancing, and gathering
Enforcing vagrancy laws
Crime prevention among the underclass

This information was adapted the People's History of the Police presentations by John Chasnoff. Watch recordings of the two part presentation here:

Part I: https://fb.watch/5piKAjvZRz/
Part II: https://fb.watch/5piMN0_Edf/

We also highly recommend the Truthout Movement Memos podcast episode “You Cannot Divorce Murder From Policing”
https://truthout.org/audio/you-cannot-divorce-murder-from-policing/

In honor of , we will addressing common myths about policing in the US all week long. We invite you to join the conversation! Feel free to comment, share, and message us with your questions and insights

A good portion of the anti protest bills and other similar legislation that is pushed through after national crisis, like 9/11 and the Jan. 6th insurrection have been written by a group known as Alec, a right wing think tank. These bills have been crafted as wish list legislation that sit and wait for something devastating to happen to leave open the opportunity that they will be better received, then they are quickly pushed through local legislators, frequently word for word. Learn more about Alec here.

ALEC Exposed In ALEC's own words, corporations have "a VOICE and a VOTE" on specific changes to the law that are then proposed in your state. DO YOU? Numerous resources to help us expose ALEC are provided below. We have also created links to detailed discussions of key issues, which are available on the left.

Here are the state level anti protest laws that have been proposed and/or enacted in the last 4 years for the state of Missouri. You can also check out other states to see what they have been doing. Also note that many states are trying to shove through this kind of legislation since the Jan. 6 insurrection, even though we historically see these kinds of laws used against protests for black, brown and indigenous rights much more than for white nationalist protests.

US Protest Law Tracker - ICNL The US Protest Law Tracker, part of ICNL’s US Program, follows initiatives at the state and federal level since November 2016 that restrict the right to protest. Click this link to see the full Tracker.

Listen to our next guest presenter, David Cunningham, speak on St. Louis On the Air, titled "What History Tells Us About The Mobilization Of Hate Groups In The U.S." And then join our event on Thursday, where he will talk about "Kops & Klan: A Conversation of White Nationalism and Policing of Activism. '

What History Tells Us About The Mobilization Of Hate Groups In The U.S. Washington University Sociology professor David Cunningham shares what we can learn about right-wing, white nationalist groups today — and best practices for defeating them — by studying their mobilization during other moments in our nation's history.

As we discuss all of the spaces that white supremacy has infiltrated, such as police and military, it is important to understand the how and why these spaces are so vulnerable to these ideas.

"Nearly one in five people facing charges related to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol had some connection to the military, including at least two active-duty troops, prompting Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to order a 60-day stand-down across the services to address extremism. Ahead of the first deadline on April 6, the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing Wednesday on extremism in the U.S. military. We speak with one of the experts who testified. “People who are connected with the military are prime targets for extremists,” says Lecia Brooks, chief of staff at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Despite the decades of inaction, she says, “the conversation is moving forward” in Washington, as lawmakers are finally speaking openly about white supremacy and white nationalism."

1 in 5 Capitol Insurrectionists Tied to U.S. Military; Soldiers “Targets” for Extremist Recruitment Nearly one in five people facing charges related to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol had some connection to the military, including at least two active-duty troops, prompting Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to order a 60-day stand-down across the services to address extremism. Ahead of the f...

Police unions protect officers, and officers protect corporate interests. Who protects the people, then?

Join us tomorrow for Part 2 of the People’s History of the Police with John Chasnoff.

https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-of-the-american-labor-movement-142538

Why police unions are not part of the American labor movement George Floyd's death has thrust police unions into the spotlight amid a growing recognition that they are not part of the U.S. labor movement but a narrow interest group pursuing their self-interests.

They used to be called “race riots”.
It’s time to call them what they are: massacre.
Never forget