The next in my list of things that the non-indictments have shown us:
3.) Opposition to selectively abusive policing isn't just from progressives. It's also from conservatives.
We do ourselves, and justice, a disservice if we assume that the case against brutally racist policing is compelling only to people of color and progressives. Yes, those abused first and most are the first and most fierce to resist. But the power of actual self-interest runs deeper than white privilege and rightward fear-mongering. Particularly after the Eric Garner video put execution-style streetcorner policing on display worldwide, it is interesting how some voices on the right have chimed in with their reasons for opposition.
Andrew Sullivan, for instance, takes the temperature of some conservatives and libertarians on the perilous injustice of untrammeled and targeted policing, including this entry from Reason Magazine's J.D. Tuccille:
You want a society taxed and regulated toward your vision of perfection? It’s going to need enforcers. … Those enforcers aren’t an equal problem for everybody. They spare the people who pay them to look the other way. They give a pass to friends and relations. But they often take a dislike to individuals or whole groups that rub them the wrong way or cause them extra grief. Poor minorities, in particular, are always on the short end of the stick when it comes to dealing with cops. When they break petty laws, they don’t often turn enough profit to grease police palms enough to be left alone, they don’t have the political power to push back, and at least some of the enforcers have a hard-on for them anyway.
On a shallower but still interesting level, in a CNN interview former President George W. Bush observed that he finds the Eric Garner non-indictment "hard to understand" and that, after a dinner conversation with pal Condoleezza Rice, he is disturbed that large numbers of black Americans seem to not trust the police. Even House Speaker John Boehner has said regarding the Garner and Michael Brown cases that "the American people deserve more answers about what really happened here and was our system of justice handled properly." Neither remark reflects more than a penny's worth of empathy or informed conviction. But the fact that both of these men felt the need to say something publicly sympathetic toward the movement against racist militarized policing says a lot about how flagrant that policing has become. With the Garner video now globally viral, it is not, at the moment, good politics for the Money Party to summarily dismiss police brutality as a wild claim of lying black thugs. There are white conservatives out there who are more afraid of the state than they are of black people.
It's not that the agenda of the American right is anywhere near the same as that of the left. It's that, again, the realities of what the state does and who it works for run deeper than claimed ideologies about race and entitlement.
That zone of overlap is where new movements can happen.
