Dear FBI: Black People Are Not The Reason I Don't Like Cops

We have found it, the stupidest thing in the universe! It's an FBI report that says that "black identity extremists" are making people hate cops.

I have married two Marines, one of whom served in Fallujah, so I am well aware of what it means to face a hostile population. Only in the instance of domestic law enforcement, I am the hostile population.

I don't dislike police in St. Louis because black people told me to. I dislike them because they have a habit of fucking tear gassing me every time I see them.

Police in America have more body armor than the Marines gave my husband. That's not even a joke - during the height of the Iraq war there wasn't enough armor to go around and we had to buy flak vests for our Marines and ship them overseas. But these motherfuckers back home? Yeah, they've got LRADs and APCs and Bearcats and more than enough Kevlar to protect them.

Oh, and at least in St Louis, they might be carrying illegal AKs. They might shoot you with them, and then they will be found not guilty of murder - and that's in the rare instances they're charged. Then if you complain about it, they hit you with chemical weapons while screaming SUBMIT!!! at you like that's not the most disgustingly on-the-nose thing they could think of.

Middle of the damn day in St. Louis. NBD, this isn't intimidating and stupid, right?

This is a gang of thugs who will march through the town chanting "whose streets? Our streets" because that's what protesters chanted in Ferguson. These are tiny little men with no more honor than fucking Steve Bannon, trying desperately to preserve their machismo so nobody notices how fucking weak you have to be to need riot shields to face down a few journalists. These are racist scumbags who will tell white protesters that they're race traitors, idiots in armor who can't figure out that their job is de-escalation, out-of-control megalomaniacs who can't handle the idea of a world in which they are not petty tyrants. (And some, I assume, are good people.)

Try to tell me black people made me a radical, get right the fuck out of here. Black people are trying to not die. Black people are not reaching out to white people trying to get us to kill cops. It's the cops themselves that made me a radical , watching them abuse their power and shit on the Constitution in defense of a few panes of plate glass as though glass was irreplaceable and human life was renewable. It's the most batshit insane thing I've ever seen in my life, and I used to work in a porn store that had a theater in it.

"radical" St. Louis black people.

Here's a comparison for you: from black protesters in St Louis, you frequently hear Assata's Prayer:

"It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains."

From cops, you hear the following:

"This is an unlawful assembly. You must disperse immediately. If you do not disperse you will be subject to arrest or chemical agents."

You fucking tell me who the goddamned radicals are when the "assembly" is fifty black people chanting Assata's Prayer on a public street corner.

If you want me to feel like the police aren't my enemy STOP SENDING THEM TO GAS ME FOR DOING MY FUCKING JOB AS A JOURNALIST.

If you don't want people to get het up about how many black people you've killed, STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE.

[ FP / NYT / Riverfront / WaPo ]