Saturday In Focus: Police Tactics in Covidian Times; Also, Press Freedom in India, and, of course, the Tiger King - Dinner Table Digest № 5, April 4, 2020
Dinner Table Don’ts is a curation of News, Commentary and Analysis from Peter Thurley, a conversation about all the topics you were told to keep away from the dinner table.
Today’s Dinner Table Digest - Saturday Edition is packed full of goodies!
First Up and In Focus are two pieces about the euphemisms and tactics used by the police to control certain segments of the population, most often people of colour and the poor. We begin with a piece that looks at the importance of precise language and commonly-understood definitions, while the second brings it into timely local focus, and features up-and-coming Waterloo Region writer (friend, and all-around cool dude) Fitsum Areguy. Finally I follow up with three short quotes from pieces on the rapidly devolving freedom of press in India, an author’s reading suggestions on grief, and, of course, everybody’s favourite Tiger King.
The Saturday First Up and In Focus
Police Tactics in a Covidian World
Policing and the English Language - Patrick Blanchfield - The New Republic
What if all the euphemisms we hear in the news describing tragic situations involving the police were just a thick smokescreen? I must preface this by saying that I don’t think ACAB, but I do think that one of the most important concerns for any discussion about policing is to agree on the definition of terms. If the police rig the game against people of colour already, why would we think their definitions mean what the words say?
Coptalk, in any case, is defined by one paradox above all: a total monopoly on deciding what counts as rationality, alongside the police’s conversation-ending deference to their own invocations of that most irrational of affects, fear. The scholar and theorist Rei Terada, writing of the distressing regularity with which police shoot the mentally ill (or as they’ve been known in coptalk, “emotionally disturbed persons,” or EDPs), notes, “From the perspective of the police, resisting arrest is necessarily irrational: they perceive irrational people as resisters, even if that isn’t their intention, and resisters as definitionally crazed.” Drawing a gun, shining a flashlight, and yelling at anyone will understandably terrify that person; for a child, or for someone who is intoxicated or suffering mental health issues, this effect is even more likely. Yet if you hesitate too long or move the wrong way, if you make a gesture that could possibly be conceived as threatening, within seconds, the police can end you. To be in fear for their lives is the police’s criterion for deploying deadly force, while your own terror can be precisely what cops cite as proof that they had no choice but to kill you. “That’s what the higher-ups tell officers to say when something goes awry,” observed Matthew Horace, a distinguished police veteran of both state and federal law enforcement. “You learn it in the police academy and it becomes the mantra of every officer when any shootings occur. And who can prove that you weren’t in fear for your life, even if the fear was caused by something improper that you yourself did.” ….
….talking about cops, even critically, raises the ever-present hazard of simply producing yet more coptalk—new impersonal jargon about threat and necessity and the absence of alternatives on which the survival of the institution depends.
Given what we know about how the very presence of police can strike terror in the hearts of people of colour across North America, there is some concern to be had about increased police powers during the declared State of Emergency for COVID19. Here in Waterloo Region, it is no different:
Fitsum Areguy writes in COVID-19 and the threat of “community policing,” in Briarpatch Magazine,
[a]s society restructures in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, laws designed to punish those who are “endangering public health” will land heavily on marginalized communities. In a Facebook group called CareMongering-KW: Kitchener-Waterloo Community Response to COVID 19, someone asked how to report kids from a townhouse complex playing together. The poster suggested that “sending a police car over with info and a little authority might help.” Many townhouse complexes in Kitchener-Waterloo are populated with low-income, racialized families. While group moderators eventually deleted the post, clarifying that calling the police is not “caremongering,” this scenario is one that will keep repeating itself across Canada (I already saw a similar post in a Montreal caremongering Facebook group).
...Can we really trust governments to rescind increased police powers and dismantle increased surveillance infrastructure after the pandemic ends? The police have never kept Black, Indigenous, and poor people safe, and that remains true in these Covidian times. We must be wary of increasing police powers during the crisis, lest the police embed themselves even deeper in our communities under the guise of “community policing” after the dust settles.
Local homelessness during COVID-19
When I heard John Neufeld, ED at House of Friendship say that the Charles Street Men’s Hostel had transitioned into a hotel in response to #COVID19, I squeeed with joy.
Everything Else
Under Modi, India’s Press Is Not So Free Anymore - New York Times
India is rapidly devolving from the foundation of the emancipated British colony, secular democracy, to a Hindu Nationalist Autocracy.
"The shutdown of Media One and another Kerala television station, Asianet News, in March was a new twist. Both stations broadcast in Malayalam, a local language spoken by less than 3 percent of Indians. And both channels had aired witness accounts that echoed what many other outlets aired during the violence in Delhi: that the police had done little to stop Hindu mobs as they rampaged against Muslims.But the broadcast ministry claimed that what these two stations reported “could enhance the communal disharmony across the country.”"
Five Books on Grief - Sophie Radcliffe - Five Books
I think a lot of us are re-discovering the complexity of grief.
"Grief takes many forms, but I was drawn to and wanted to highlight the unexpectedness and the multifaceted-ness of grief. ‘Grief’ can bring to mind melancholy or gentle sadness, but I’m interested in the risk-taking, badly-behaving, traumatized, hedonistic, heady forms of grief as well as the desolate ones."
Joe Exotic and the Inevitability of Self-Sabatoge - Vice News UK
I know, you’ve probably heard enough about this guy by now. But here’s one last look at the sad reality of Joe Exotic, who let his own passion for animals transform into something really ugly.
Joe Exotic drips with self sabotage. He exudes it. Joe Exotic would not be in prison now if it weren’t for the aggregated actions and decisions of Joe Exotic. Joe Exotic started out just a man, on the floor of a neighbour’s front room, awed and seduced by the sheer power of being able to hold a tiger cub like a revving engine, and then – after decades and cages and bones and blood and piercings and tattoos and fire and limbs and guns and corpses, human and animal, buried in the same red-brown dust – it all transfigured, grew ugly and unmanageable, all egged on distantly and passively by Carole Baskin, smiling mildly in a flower crown.
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