Cop Suspended for Facebook Comment Says He Would Have Shot Philando Castile Five Times
After last nights shootings of police in Dallas many Americans are asking themselves how people could have come to hate police so much that they would begin randomly murdering them in cold blood. While I am not an advocate for hate nor violence, I do understand that they are never born in a vacuum. Disdain for police did not magically appear out of thin air. They were born of thousands of deaths and millions of lives destroyed by police. Yet it is not just what police have done that causes the blowback, but about their attitude towards we the people.
For the most part, I do not believe that police hate us. Yet the truth might be even worse, which is that they view us as an entirely different species which they believe themselves superior to, if even living beings at all. How they seem to regard everyone on the other side of their thin blue line is more like problematic equipment that makes their job more difficult. And like most of us, they take out their daily frustrations on those machines. Only they are not machines, they are you and I.
To drive my point home, and sadly in such a delicate time for relations between police and the public, Nashville Metro Police Officer Anthony Venable took to social media to completely dehumanize us even more. More specifically, his Facebook comment dehumanized Philando Castile, the man killed by Minnesota police on Wednesday night.
“Yeah, I woulda done five.”
This was a reference to the four shots fired at the Minneapolis area man for his failure to do the police hokey pokey in just the right order. According to police and their unquestioning supporters nationwide, it is the responsibility of citizens to act in a highly trained manner during police interactions lest they deserve a bullet or four…or five. I will not bother with a logical deconstruction with this train of thought, because nobody on it would recognize that logic even if I reduced it to flash cards. Actually it is pretty simple – those people are assholes.
As for Officer Venable, he has been decommissioned. Which means he is on vacation, probably paid, while the incident is under investigation.
He claims that the comment was only meant to be sarcastic, which means that either he doesn’t understand what sarcasm means, or he actually meant to say ‘the whole clip’ instead of ‘five’.
I would like to offer my English language skills to NPD to aide in their investigation. The comment means that you have a bloodthirsty maniac under your employment who is also too stupid and irreverent of human life to even try to hide it. Venable is a clear danger to the public. End of investigation. You may now fire him so he can move on to another department and terrorize another city’s residents.
Will that happen? Probably not. ‘Investigation’ is almost always a code word for “Get outta sight while this blows over, then we can go on as though this never happened”.
Citizens owe nothing to police. They are our paid servants. The onus to fix what they have broken is on them. Until that happens, the thin blue line is going to become a battleground, and nobody can win that war. Policing as we know it just isn’t working out. It is time to end the failed paradigm by abolishing the police and putting safety and peace back in the hands of people and their communities.
The well is poisoned and no amount of fresh water poured in it will ever make it drinkable again.
