I see a country descending into open rebellion against its oppressive, unjust, inequitable Police State.
There is no greater symbolism of the endless systemic oppression than an agent of the state kneeling on a totally incapacitated dying man in the street.
I don't see this ending until vast swathes of the dystopian police state apparatus, ideology and funding empires are dismantled and dumped in the dustbin of history. They cannot be reformed peacefully so they will only go violently.
The people have finally woken up and The People always get the final say in matters of the nature of the state. Look it up, it's in the Constitution. There's 40 million unemployed Americans and probably tens of millions more disaffected enough to take to the streets. At most the US armed state agencies could rally perhaps a few million. In the end its just math.
Ultimately its about freedom.
When I was a kid, the police were respected members of the community, the boys in blue. They walked a beat and knew everyone by name and everyone knew them by name. We didn't fear and hate them. We respected and appreciated them.
Somewhere along the way everything changed. They switched from friendly blue to intimidating black. They started hiding their faces. They separated themselves from society. They developed an adversarial "us against them" stance and started treating the community (their bosses) as the enemy. They hid behind the anonymity of their uniforms and refused to give their names. They abdicated all personal responsibility.
What is long overdue is individual identification of all police officers. It should be mandatory for all police officers (except those on active undercover duty) be identifiable. Their names and badge numbers should be clearly displayed on the fronts and backs of all uniforms. They should also be displayed on the outside of their upper arms and thighs, so would be no doubt about the personal identity of all officers even if camera angles were obscured.
This would be an obvious first step toward re-integrating the police into decent society. Hiring practices must also be re-evaluated. As long as police officers are social pariahs, only social misfits choose to become police officers. Most normal people don't choose a career that leads to ostracism unless they are already outsiders, hence the bullied-in-the-schoolyard-and-seeking-revenge syndrome seen in so many of today's police departments. Better psychological testing must be used to weed out the violent, sadistic, authority-oriented applicants.
It's perhaps not as bad in Toronto as in most big American cities, and in fact it's getting much better since the confrontations between the public and the police during the 2010 G-20 meetings. More individual officers are making an attempt to reintegrate themselves and the evil Police Association is slowly losing it's power. It still has a long way to go though. There are still individual officers who hide behind their badges and think they're better than the law.
Some are simply arrogant doofuses like "Officer Bubbles":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGMTm3QRwEcBubbles did not even lose his job.
They seem to forget who's the employee and who's the employer.
America calls itself "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave". You can ask George Floyd's family about freedom, and there's nothing brave about 4 fully armed police officers murdering a handcuffed, unarmed man over a $20 non-violent crime.
The time has come to start treating police officers personally, as individual men and women, not as faceless uniform wearers, and it is time for police officers to start realizing they are members of the human race and start acting like it.
It would be best if they/we could affect this change peacefully. If not it seems like civil war is close, the people versus the state. It would be a very bloody war indeed.
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