Can we see your papers, please?

This story from Alternet reminded me of a recent experience:

My wife and I spent a couple nights down on the Bay at a Calvert County AirBNB a couple weeks back. We'd exhausted ourselves selling and donating and gifting about 95% of our worldly possessions in preparation for moving internationally, and needed to go someplace to get our heads together in peace and quiet.

One day we visited Point Lookout in St. Mary's County and spent a couple hours walking around the shore watching wildlife. On the way into the park we'd noticed police pulling people over but hadn't really thought much about it. Inside the park several Latin families were swimming, having cookouts, and fishing from the pier. When we left the park we were pulled over for "speeding," though I was only doing 30 MPH. The cop who pulled us over had a couple conflicting stories. First, he said "We are pulling everyone over today." Then, he said "The speed limit is 15 here and you and the caravan behind you were doing 30--no big deal, we are just reminding people of speeding." There was no posted limit coming out of the park. Then I noticed that all the cars behind us which had been pulled over also had already been waved on. He chose to run my license, however.

The real reason had nothing to do with speeding, but because my wife is a person of color. The cars which were waved on immediately had only Caucasians inside. The police held my license for about 15 minutes and then gave me a warning for speeding and let us go.

This was an ICE operation, though the cops were in cars marked Maryland National Park Police. They were flak-jacketed militarized cops. They were polite and professional, but they detained us because of race, and under false pretenses. And the stated reason they were pulling people over was a facade. Presumably a "patriot" and "good citizen" felt uncomfortable with the number of Latin families in the park and called the cops?

At any rate, it doesn't take three police vehicles with six officers and a K-9 unit to do a speeding sting on a small park on the Chesapeake Bay.

The Wash, Rinse, and Repeat Cycle of Violence

David Cole, at NYR Daily:

But in this instance, it is the “war” on crime itself that is most to blame. More than any other nation in the world, we turn to the state-sanctioned compulsion of the criminal justice system to “solve” social problems, including mental illness, drug addiction, poverty, homelessness, and lack of opportunity. Our “first responders” are too often the police, bearing handcuffs and guns rather than public assistance or life support. We arrest and incarcerate our fellow citizens at the highest per capita rate in the world. And those targeted are disproportionately black and Hispanic men living in poverty-stricken inner-city neighborhoods. We can’t seem to find the resources to invest in those neighborhoods to support adequate schools, job training programs, after-care for children let out of school before their parents come home, or economic development. But we are more than willing to pay enormous sums for more police to patrol the neighborhoods and prisons to house inmates taken from these communities. Our prisons in turn are ruled by violence and the threat thereof, from both guards and fellow inmates.

Cole goes on to conclude: "As Americans we have been far too complacent in the face of state-sanctioned violence. As long as the guns are pointed at others, we turn our heads and look away. But until we begin to demand alternatives to state violence, the killing will not cease."

It's a point that others have made before. Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine connected the manufacture of nuclear missiles in Columbine and Clinton's bombings of Kosovo and Sudan to the mindset of people who shoot up schools or malls. Noam Chomsky has been saying for years that the best way for the US to end terrorism is to stop participating in it against others.

So read Cole's piece and meditate on it, then go read:

I thought I knew a lot about the history of our drug prohibition. But here are more valuable pieces to the puzzle beyond the Reefer Madness, chemical-company funded and racist Chamber of Commerce shenanigans which resulted in marijuana criminalization in the US. And the book is entertaining as hell on top of being contrarian and smart.