Last week, the National Park Police had to release footage of a park ranger tazing Darrell House, a Navajo/Oneida man who, walking through Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico after praying on his holy lands, briefly stepped off the path to observe social distancing.
A week later, Jake Angeli, a right-wing conspiracy theorist from Arizona who goes by the name Q Shaman because of the horned headdress and facepaint he wears to get attention (sometimes at climate rallies), was among the many fascists who carried out Trump’s plan to storm the Capitol with the intention of using terrorism to overthrow the election and force Congress to declare Trump the winner. After being allowed by police to take pictures on the Senate dias and run roughshod through those supposedly hallowed halls, eventually he and others were gingerly escorted out.
Law enforcement’s drastically disparate responses to people of color peacefully existing and violent fascists erecting nooses, carrying confederate flags and wearing Holocaust merch or cosplaying as a “shaman” to spread white supremacy is as enraging as it is unsurprising.
As Masha Gessen pointed out, the optimistic answer for why the “armed mob storming the Capitol” was given such leniency not afforded to BLM or Kavanaugh protestors (or people in wheelchairs) is because the white seditionists were “familiar enough [to the police] to be dismissed as clowns.” And yes, the Q-Shaman is a clown, but as we know, modern American Nazis embrace humor as a recruitment tactic and defense mechanism- what, you can’t take a joke? Per the Daily Stormer’s leaked style guide, “the reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor,” and is then drawn into their propaganda. The ridiculousness of Q-Anon operates similarly.
But, Gessen writes, because “we fear the other,” and not “those whom we see as being like us,” the lax response by Capitol Police to the attempted insurrection is an indication that while “the invaders may be full of contempt for a system that they think doesn’t represent them,” their treatment proves “that it does. The system, which shrugged off their violence like it had been a toddler’s tantrum, represents them. It’s the rest of us it’s failing to protect.”
The systemic failure of policing to protect the public, and not private interests, can be found everywhere. For example, Mike Soraghan’s recent story about the fossil fuel industry paying for law enforcement officers to serve as their own private security forces to keep protesters under control — without any of the constraints of actually having to follow the law.
Soraghan profiles one protestor, Cindy Spoon, who was pulled out of a kayak by Energy Transfer’s anonymous hired goons and arrested, despite the fact that boating was specifically exempted from a Louisiana law criminalizing pipeline protests, and despite the fact that actually it was Energy Transfer that a court ruled was trespassing on land that it had not yet secured the rights to build on.
If private companies contracting with police officers and sheriffs departments sounds like law enforcement selling out, well, rest assured, Coos County Sheriff Craig Zanni can put your mind at ease. His department worked out a (since-cancelled) contract with a company building a gas pipeline and export facility, in which he told Soraghan that “I said, 'I will provide you with law enforcement if you pay the tab.' I thought it would be a reasonable trade-off. If that's selling out, I don't know what to say."
But, he defended it by pointing out that he also contracts with local tribes to handle their 911 calls. "Does that mean we'd be on the Indians' side," Zanni said, "the Native Americans?"
What side? Against whom? Criminals, presumably? And so then why would it take them paying you to be on the Native Americans’ side? Obviously Zanni’s attempting to paper over the differences between serving the public and private interests, but he couldn’t even do that without some casual racism?
Taser-happy rangers and slur-dropping sellout sheriffs are certainly problematic, but even if their behavior were perfect, the laws they’re meant to enforce often aren’t.
Take the boating-loophole Louisiana law that ensnared Cindy Spoon. It was one of a rash of similar statutes being pushed by the industry-funded, right wing bill mill known as ALEC. The pro-polluter lobbying coalition has seeded these types of laws to criminalize protests across the country, and over the holiday Ohio sneakily moved its version forward, meaning it now awaits the Governor’s signature (or veto). The Ohio state Senator who sponsored SB-33 is Frank Hoagland, a Republican with not one but two security consultancies, Huffpost reported, that specialize in providing security to fossil fuel companies.
If that’s not selling out, we don’t know what to say.