It would seem an obvious step in the seasoning process for this would be first invoking fear in the police themselves, making them feel under assault, in danger, and prime them for overreactions, violence, and a feeling of contempt and disgust for most of the public, for most of the people they supposedly exist to protect.
I am not a sufficient conspiracy theorist to think the Dallas shooter was part of a conspiracy, that he was brainwashed or selected like in the Parallax View, then killed to cover it up (although I can’t rule it out, of course, any more than I can rule out the allegations by a former Canadian Defense Minister that our government is currently working with several species of aliens; the world is a vast and strange place). What seems vastly more likely is that the people who fund and control what has become a Communist front group–Black Lives Matter–KNEW that sooner or later somebody or multiple somebodies would take to heart the relentless violent rhetoric against police. They talk about killing cops continually, and our PRESIDENT, our fucking PRESIDENT supports them in this. Given millions of angry people, and hundreds of millions of guns, why wouldn’t something like Dallas happen sooner or later?
And this is a dual bonus: one, they make cops paranoid, and more prone to overreactions, but two, they get to point to guns, as Obama did immediately, the asshole, and push gun control yet again. Both are needed for a police state.
I would like to expand on all this a bit, and take it in a slightly different direction.
Like all bureaucratic organisms, police departments exist to perform a job, in theory. Police of course do a very public job and in most places do it reasonably well. In this they differ from many bureaucracies.
But like bureaucracies they are prone to losing sight of the end goal. The end goal is public safety. Safe streets. Freedom from violence and theft. It is a very subtle evolution, though, from those laudable goals, to a demand for respect and fear. “Fear me”, they say, “and I may leave you alone.”. It is a short step from law and order to the use and abuse of power for its own sake.
When we look at the Stanford Prisoner Experiment–which I now realize is very relevant to the issue of police/public relations generally–what we see is that it is virtually impossible not to become adjusted to, and to some extent addicted to, the exercise of power.
And psychologically normal people cannot but react to this in a variety of ways, which include all the possibilities in any situation of predator/prey interactions.
They can stand up for themselves without panicking, using mature psychological defenses, frame the situation in a way which is not existentially threatening, and emerge with few or no scars.
More commonly, people likely go into some mild or severe form of fight or flight or freeze. In the case of being arrested, it is a literal confinement, a textbook case of being mobilized to run or fight without the ability to do either. This leaves scars in many people. I think most black people particularly in this country walk around with mild to severe trauma as a result of their dealings with the police. For my part, I don’t doubt for a moment that blacks get treated differently. Proportionately, they empirically commit a lot more crimes, visibly do a lot more stupid things, but there is a circle, I think, in that by getting arrested more, they get traumatized more, and this creates more crimes and more arrests. Once they are familiar with the prison system, they are conditioned to a known evil, and they do not fear it as much, which creates fewer fears of being punished for committing crimes. In some places, doing time is, I think, a bit of a status symbol. That is the opposite of the effect we want.
I’m not sure where to go with this. Here is another idea: utilizing volunteer police officers the same way we use volunteer fire fighters. We put cameras on them that cannot easily be dislodged, provide them basic training, and rotate them often. We make blacks the police of their own neighborhoods. What I think would happen is that arrests would happen a lot less. A lot more things would be talked through. A lot more patience and tolerance would be shown by people who do not see the same shit year after year, and who have not undergone the conditioning which inevitably follows the power they are granted.
This idea is a bit far out, I know, but shit aren’t most of my ideas? I’m OK with that. I actually think it has a lot of merit, not least the political merit of decentralizing power, and the use of power, and the relative empowerment of the people.