ghost of miles

Silvio and his crew are gonna be very displeased!

Just read it via your Facebook link—thanks for posting it. I’ve been thinking about revisiting the RCA box ever since Larry’s thread about whether or not SR worked at all w/Miles circa 1961-62. Amazing to think of all that Sonny’s seen and played in his near-90 years on the planet. He’s a master human being.

Per Jsngry's prior comment, sounds like things are going to hell in a handbasket in Arizona.

I don't even know where to begin with this. (Doctors who "kill" people generally don't do it by slowly crushing the life out of them with a knee to the neck, for starters.) I'll begin, I guess, by saying that I had three cops for uncles and a mother who was a deputy prosecutor. So I don't come from a background of f-the-pigs or what have you. But frankly, the less guys like this as cops, the better. *Please* leave, and step aside for a new generation of law enforcement officers who don't act like entitled fascists. Dude's attitude on display in this article is a symptom of why so many people have taken to the streets to protest.

Josh Marshall actually just now published a post at TPM that addresses this very topic. You have to be a paid subscriber to read all of it, but here is a pertinent passage: >> Police abuse of minority communities in the United States is a story stretching back decades and centuries. The militarization of American policing is a much more recent phenomenon though the two phenomena have overlapped and compounded each other. Much of this debate over militarization has focused on the Pentagon’s 1033 Program which charges the Secretary of Defense with donating surplus military hardware to the nation’s thousands of police departments. (The photo above is of an MRAP, a vehicle designed to withstand IEDs and guerrilla ambushes. Numerous US police departments have them.) But there is another dimension of the story that has only partly made its way into the national conversation about policing and violence. The United States has been in a constant state of war since the end of 2001 and in many ways since the Gulf Crisis of 1990. Through numerous channels this has led to a broad militarization of life in the United States. Policing and military hardware is only the most obvious manifestation. The 1033 program begins with the Defense Authorization Act of 1990 and first focused on counter-narcotics. The program was further expanded in 1997 for “use in counternarcotics and counterterrorism operations, and to enhance officer safety.” 9/11 and the Iraq War led to still further expansions and a new generation of hardware designed for urban combat and counter-insurgency operations. In the nature of things access to military hardware primes people to act in militarized ways and to see their work in militarized terms. But hardware is only one part of the equation. Two decades of being at war – which again really stretches back to 1990 – has created a steady stream of military veterans who go into law enforcement. This means people who are trained in military actions and in many cases people who carry the psychological baggage of PTSD. One study of the Dallas Police Department found that officers with military backgrounds were significantly more likely to have fired their firearms in the line of duty than those who hadn’t. The point here isn’t to create a stereotype of trigger-happy vets bringing the trauma of their service onto American streets. There are other examples of police vets who say their training has helped them deescalate situations. But these experiences are shaping even if they are not traumatic per se. The more or less constant deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of it in urban environments, has certainly had a deep imprint on the policing cultures which have followed many of those veterans into American police departments. To pick just one example, Josh Kovensky has been reporting on this incident in the clearing of Lafayette Park a week ago in which at least one National Guard helicopter flew low over crowds inundating them with the rotor downwash, an established crowd control measure used in military situations to overawe demonstrators. The Pentagon is investigating who gave the order to use this tactic and the identity of the pilots is unknown. But given the near constant deployment of National Guard troops to Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two decades and the highly specialized training for helicopter pilots it seems quite possible that whoever the pilot was had experience with the tactic from overseas. Indeed, it is almost a certainty that whoever trained that pilot had such experience. It is a constant theme of much of the 20th century literature on colonialism that the tactics and strategies great powers use on their peripheries are often brought back and used at home. The militarization of American policing is unquestionably highly driven by this dynamic. The flow of weapons is only the most concrete and literal manifestation. But even hardware and personnel are only one part of the equation.<< Militarized policing and bringing the war home

Not so much a penchant for violence, but intensive training to fight in combat is perhaps not the best background for policing, which is, or should be, anyway, a very different kind of duty. (Unfortunately, U.S. police culture has become overly militarized in recent decades, which is part of the problem we're now facing.) And if one is a "Marine for life," as has been said in this thread, then I'm not sure how one so easily changes that kind of vocational orientation. Again, not saying that ex-soldiers should be banned or discouraged from serving as police officers; but the blurring of military and law enforcement is possibly indirectly exacerbated if a particular department or force has a large number of ex-military, or a militaristic mindset to begin with. As somebody in a social-media discussion I'm following said, the notion should be not to "defund the police", but to "demilitarize the police."

Damn, this is a good book. Really seems to capture the vibe of 1969, at least from the vantage point of being on the road with the Stones--a road that's leading to Altamont:

Speaking of Marines: U.S Marine veteran stages three-hour BLM protest in Utah heat Also, I don’t think anybody was out to denigrate Marines or suggest that ex-military should not serve in law enforcement. More that ex-military may come with their own particular forms of baggage that contribute to the problematic police culture in this country. Wasn’t he holding it upside down, too? Somehow that *does* seem appropriate... though bursting into flames would have been divine poetic justice for sure.

Last week's Night Lights show, which draws on the recent Mosaic set of Woody Herman's recordings for Decca, MGM, and Mars, and which includes commentary from set annotator Jeff Sultanof, is now up for online listening: Woody Herman's Trip To Mars

I don't think the size of a PD, larger or smaller, is the issue. The issue is how those officers are trained, what kind of leadership they're given, what kind of law-enforcement culture is established, etc. And I completely concur with the points made above about the problematic militarization of the police--not just having lots of ex-military in law enforcement, but the kind of equipment and tactics that police departments have deployed and employed in recent times. Then there's the FBI's documentation of white supremacists infiltrating U.S. police forces, just to make this stew even more toxic. Then you have a U.S. president who actively encourages police to treat suspects, arrestees, protesters, *whoever*, roughly. And whose AG put the kibosh on law enforcement consent decrees, both present and future, that were crafted to address the very kind of problems we're all talking about here. I, too, have a long list of those I don't trust, though not sure how much overlap there is with your list. What do you think is the best & potentially most effective solution?

This is a great story—just shared it on my Facebook page. Thanks for linking to it.

No surprise here—police unions have stifled reform in many cities. And look no further than the NYCPD’s violent and insubordinate behavior for an example of a belligerent police force in a city largely under Democratic governing. That dude is not going to change. You’re a leader, you know how important the tone of leadership is. The systemic problems certainly existed long before he took office and go all the way back to the origins of this country, but you seriously think he hasn’t made the situation worse? Hell, just look at Kroll in Minneapolis, the guy who called the state’s AG a “terrorist,” has white-nationalist ties, and was photographed with DT at a rally—and who’s said “Obama put the handcuffs on cops, DT took them off and let us put them on criminals again.” WTF? And btw there’s an answer to your previous remark—after Michael Brown and Ferguson, the Obama DOJ worked with a number of problematic police departments to establish federal consent decrees that were intended to help PDs establish better and fairer policing policies, strategies, and rules/guidelines. Guess what happened when DT and crew came in? They threw that all out. Not saying that that would have solved all problems, or that there’s any magical or easy solution to fixing all of this. But it seems to me that some of your criticism is misdirected.

They didn’t resign from the police force, unfortunately. They just resigned from the emergency response team. But yeah, point # ad infinitum against the “few bad apples”’argument. There are a lot of inherent and systemic issues with policing culture in this country. Excellent NY Times opinion piece, btw: The police are rioting. We need to talk about it.

Very disturbing “resolution” to that story. Nixonian is bang-on correct. Is G. Gordon Liddy still around? Surprised he hasn’t gotten a call-up for the current crew in charge.

Yet more WTF: Law enforcement seizes masks meant to protect anti-racist protesters from Covid-19 1. On what possible legal grounds could such a shipment be seized? 2. How did law enforcement even know about the contents of this shipment? There is a lot of weird and troubling stuff going on right now that is reminiscent of an authoritarian police state, as opposed to the country that we’re supposed to be. Maybe there’s some “explanation” for this story; I’d sure like to hear it.

Just reading about the impact of those two 1960s Robert Johnson releases on Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, via Patrick Humphries' uneven but generally entertaining Rolling Stones 69. Which is why this particular title is spinning right now:

Turns out they’re federal prison riot teams. Double WTF.

Yep, just read about it in the NY Times.

Very cool! I've always wanted to ride with an engineer on a freight train... and as a kid thought being a crewman in a caboose would be a really cool job. (My father, who is a great lover of trains, dampened that career desire by correctly assessing that caboose crews and cabooses in general were on the way out.) My girlfriend and I have been talking for the past couple of years about taking the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle as part of a vacation in the Northwest. Hoping to do that either next summer or the summer after.

WTF? Via Josh Marshall: The last 48 hours have seen multiple press reports of people who appear to be federal law enforcement patrolling in the vicinity of the White House, refusing to identify who they are or what agency they represent. According to a report this afternoon from Garrett Haake of NBC News federal law enforcement officers of some kind pushed the crowd perimeter back from the White House but refused to identify themselves, what agency they represented and had removed all insignia or name plates that might identify them.

Yep--Josh Marshall posted a skeptical piece about this study not too long ago, citing some of the same issues that the Guardian article elaborates on.