H.R. 7120, the Justice in Policing Act, would ban chokeholds, allow police to use deadly force only as a last resort, crack down on racial and religious profiling, limit police officers' "qualified immunity" in lawsuits, require body cameras for all police officers, limit police departments' access to military weapons, and criminalize lynching at the federal level -- among many other good works. I'd eliminate "qualified immunity" and police departments' access to military weapons myself, but H.R. 7120 is a good start. And when right-wingers call all that "socialism" or something, just remind them that plenty of good Americans want to abolish the police entirely, so maybe they need to get on board with this reform. And when they proclaim their love for "law and order," ask them if it's lawful that police murder black folks in their sleep, as they did with Breonna Taylor back in March. So Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to start reining in police misconduct by passing the Justice in Policing Act.
Let's not stop there, though: the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the 1033 program that gives police military weapons and the COPS grants that give us too many police officers. Once upon a time more cops might have seemed like the answer, but not now -- we've avoided solving problems and instead turned police officers into the Swiss Army knives of our civilization. If we were to focus on rehabilitating drug addicts instead of putting them in jail and forgetting about them, for example, there's a big swath of work we've just taken off our police's hands. Someone's still got to serve warrants and arrest corporate criminals, but must every conceivable 911 call involve police? If you're still afraid of "defunding" police, note well Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)'s answer when asked what "defunding" the police looks like: "It looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where the choose to fund youth, health, housing, etc., more than they fund police." I think we're looking at the winning argument here, folks.
Meanwhile, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is another public figure saying all the right things about "racial equity" ("equity"? Gosh, does the moneybrain ever turn off with these people?) but still failing to put his money where his mouth is, by continuing to fund the New York City Police Foundation that helps NYC police buy military weapons! And yes, that would be the same NYPD currently teargassing and driving trucks into protestors! So, so many of our so-called "best and brightest" think they can just "share from the heart" and be done with it, but those of us who have been doing our damnedest to maintain a civilization know that the work is never done, and certainly not done with a few choice words likely written by some hired PR hack. And what does BlackRock do in the first place? They do the kinds of "risk management" we used to call speculation, and when The Economist, a magazine never seriously mistaken for a liberal rag, calls BlackRock the world's largest shadow bank, remember that "shadow bank" isn't necessarily a compliment. You know, like "bankster." Hence Color of Change helps you tell Mr. Fink to stop funding the New York City Police Foundation.
Finally, while we're still peripherally on the subject of toxic white supremacy but I repeat myself, you may have heard all of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pablum about "free speech" lately and about how it's not really his job to prevent it. But you may not know that, per a whistleblower complaint, that Facebook still auto-generates pages that allow white supremacists to recruit new members! And not to bond over their mutual love of knitting or Doctor Who! We can be reasonably sure that white supremacists try to connect with others of their nefarious ilk so they can find people to help them commit crimes against non-white folk. You can be a white supremacist in America without going to jail, of course, but if you go around actually trying to create your white ethnostate by, say, killing black folk or Hispanic folk or Muslim folk, well, you've broken a bunch of laws right there. Hence the National Whistleblowers center helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to take the appropriate action against Facebook for its failure to stamp out white supremacist organization.
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