BY RAUL HERNANDEZ
Notebookventura@Yahoo.com
Who are you going to believe – the UN report made public this week condemning police brutality and tactics in Ferguson or the city’s Police Chief Tom Jackson who defends the practice of bringing armored vehicles, dogs, tear gas, rubber bullets and heavily armed cops dressed like Marines who are about to enter Fallujah to a protest?
The photo of the police sniper on top of the armored vehicle in Ferguson was the cherry on this police department cake – that image put an exclamation point that was seen around the world in a country that professes to be the home of the brave and the land of the free, the haven for constitutional rights.
These images that came out of Ferguson can, in some ways, can be compared to the beating of Rodney King – in other words, the official version has been: please don’t believe what your lying eyes are seeing there are explanations, lame and often ridiculous. But there are reasons.
After all, we are the professionals and experts and have years and even decades of experience putting lipstick on our pigs and handing them to a gullible and often frightened public who has been gobbling our PR pigs like Subway sandwiches.
But when the images started piling up, people are now beginning to question the militarization of police departments along with the brutality cops use, most often, in poor and minority neighborhoods.
Trying to plug up a cracking dike by sticking the official BS finger into the hole to patch up the leak on its cracking foundations is no longer working.
Many Americans seem to be siding with the UN – the U.S. can no longer point its accusatory finger to the injustices and genocide around the world until it begins to clean up its own backyard.
For the most part, the media lost its role and certainly much of the public trust in covering poor and minority neighborhoods. When the TV trucks are parked in these communities it is usually to capture images for the evening “news” that only serve to instill fear and pump up ratings by selling half-truths to its viewers.
The media’s packages its “Wow Factors” with images of young blacks as the faces of crimes or it will tell the tales of the heroic actions of SWAT teams who are never questioned about the increasing use of terrifying and unabated tactics to execute search warrants for minor offenses such as shoplifting and minor drug possession.
The most powerful weapon against the insanity of cop militarization, police brutality and the overuse of SWAT in gathering the facts has unfortunately now been abdicated by the media and elected officials and given to citizens with cell phone cameras.
The resilient citizen with a cell phone camera using it to capture the sights and sounds of injustice can, in some ways, best be summed up by a powerful image from communist China.
The photo of the young and brave Chinese man who stood in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square.
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