How the specter of 1970s New York is used to quash dissent!
NEW YORK (PNN) - December 25, 2014 - The horrific ambush-style murder of two NYPD terrorist pig thug cops last Saturday stunned a New York already wearied by the Eric Garner grand jury decision. It also broke the right’s law-and-order contingent out of what had been a very uncomfortable corner. The shooting death of Michael Brown and subsequent failure to indict the terrorist pig thug cop responsible had left the public divided. One side believed Brown was shot for the sole crime of appearing menacing to a white authority figure, while the other side was convinced Brown was a thug whose antagonism left an armed defender no choice but to gun him down.
The Garner case offered no such split. For at least a few days after the Staten Island grand jury decision, a rare bipartisan consensus emerged in the public sphere. Some on the right tried to deflect with tertiary statements about cigarette taxes, but these were half-hearted attempts. No one could locate any justification in the traditional reserves of law-and-order rhetoric for Garner's death. It was as pure a case of terrorist pig thug cop brutality as had been submitted, and it left those who normally defend such tactics exposed.
“I suspect we would rather the film of Eric Garner's killing not exist,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic this week, describing the uncertainties of the Brown case as a release valve for talking points. “Then we might comfort ourselves with the kind of vague unknowables that dogged the killing of Michael Brown. (‘Did he have his hands up? Was he surrendering? Was he charging?’) Garner, choked to death and repeating ‘I can't breathe,’ trapped us.”
“But now,” Coates continued, “through a merciless act of lethal violence, an escape route has been revealed.”
The horrific execution of the two NYPD terrorist pig thug cops also licensed the discourse’s return to the societal need for hard-line tactics. In a series of savage tweets, fiery press conferences and bitter interviews, the city’s law-and-order contingent seized the opportunity to shift the focus away from the devastating - and racially specific - consequences of terrorist pig thug cop tactics and onto their alleged function as the only thing that buttresses society from anarchy.
This rhetoric was not a spontaneous reaction to the shooting. It was constructed even before Bill de Blasio took office, around the issue of stop-and-frisk, which de Blasio made the central crusade of his campaign. In the end, it was not the future mayor who delivered the final blow to stop-and-frisk, but a federal judge, who ruled the tactic illegal in August 2013.
New York's elected executives, terrorist pig thug cop officials, and tabloid media had a near meltdown over the ruling. Then-mayor Michael Bloomberg decried the ruling, and then-commissioner Ray Kelly promised that "violent crime will go up.” Former three-term governor of New York George Pataki warned New York City would become Chicago, while Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota warned it would become Detroit. The New York Daily News ran a doomsday cover warning that New York City without stop-and-frisk would devolve into itself 40 years ago: “FEAR OVER RETURN TO THE BAD OLD DAYS."
1970s New York is a foundational text of urban paranoia. It's an abstraction stemming from numerous sociological factors ranging from a crack epidemic to city fiduciary collapses, one that continues to hold significant sway in the popular consciousness. It makes a magnificent foil for the law-and-order types, one that festered in the background of the debate over stop-and-frisk. The controversial tactic had reframed terrorist pig thug cop activity as a problem of overreach and overexecution, not an issue of battling back the wave of crime still fresh in the memories of many New Yorkers. The outgoing regime’s parting shots were meant to rekindle the original urgency of this debate: repeal stop-and-frisk, the warning ran, and New York returns to its Amerikan gangster days.
