Illinois Safe-T Act (The Purge Law)

[PseudoStupidity]

The police are really gambling on this. If you make donating to bail funds punishable in the same way burning a cop car is punishable you're going to see a lot more burned cop cars. Also, if you make it clear that doing legal things (like donating to bail funds or handing out pamphlets and zines) will get you punished in life-ruining ways people are going to be more willing to take up arms to defend themselves from the jackbooted thugs coming to arrest them.

I hope all the folks who have been resisting cop city stay safe, this sounds incredibly dangerous and the calculus for "should we resist the police with force" gets pretty fucking weird when the cops are going after you for doing legal things. I recall a few years back there was a person who killed a Proud Boy in self defense (the Proud Boy was in the middle of bear macing people at a protest and this person shot him dead) and got gunned down by like, 5 different police departments when they tried to "arrest" him (the man didn't shoot at them or even draw a gun, he was killed while trying to flee) later on.

This sort of thing is what leads to groups like the Black Panther Party (who were great, this is not an anti-BPP post).

Edit: I read through the indictment and found one of the funniest things I've read in a while. I've quoted it below.

"In addition to so-called living room, the area had a rudimentary bathroom where a toilet seat was attached to four vertical plastic poles to emulate a very basic toilet. It sat above a crude hole in the ground so that toilet user's waste would fall into the hole. In themes consistent with anarchy and anti-police sentiment, a painted sign titled the bathroom and toilet as "9/11 Memorial." "

[Kaelik]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/09 ... ssent.html

[Thaluikhain]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/09 ... ssent.html

"“Collectivism,” mutual aid, and solidarity are anarchist concepts, it claims. Because activists refer to and practice these concepts, they must be anarchists, and because they are anarchists, they want to overthrow the government, perhaps with violence."

Ok, the rest of the article wasn't good news either, but that? Jeez.

[Sashi]

The police are really gambling on this. If you make donating to bail funds punishable in the same way burning a cop car is punishable you're going to see a lot more burned cop cars.

Really not much of a gamble. A significant fraction of the country believe the purpose of the law is to enforce social hierarchy and anything is justifiable as long as it's directed at marginalized groups. An even more significant fraction of the population has this copaganda inspired notion that if the cops arrest you it must mean you did something wrong.

You might think that's in conflict with the right wing claims that the January 6th prosecutions are political witch hunts, but Republicans aren't obligated to be consistent. "It's a witch hunt when it's our people and justice when it's our enemies" is basically a founding principle of right wing politics. Left wingers are also perfectly happy to apply actual legal and ethical tests to explain why "prosecuting people who donated to bail funds" is an overreach while "prosecuting someone for saying they will overturn the election and then trying to overturn the election" isn't. It's only the centrist institutionalists who have to tie themselves in knots to explain why we have to support prosecuting BLM supporters if we also want to prosecute Proud Boys. The problem is that a huge number of Americans believe that being a centrist institutionalist makes them a brave pragmatist (see above re: copaganda)

[Omegonthesane]

You might think that's in conflict with the right wing claims that the January 6th prosecutions are political witch hunts, but Republicans aren't obligated to be consistent. "It's a witch hunt when it's our people and justice when it's our enemies" is basically a founding principle of right wing politics. Left wingers are also perfectly happy to apply actual legal and ethical tests to explain why "prosecuting people who donated to bail funds" is an overreach while "prosecuting someone for saying they will overturn the election and then trying to overturn the election" isn't. It's only the centrist institutionalists who have to tie themselves in knots to explain why we have to support prosecuting BLM supporters if we also want to prosecute Proud Boys. The problem is that a huge number of Americans believe that being a centrist institutionalist makes them a brave pragmatist (see above re: copaganda)

ok I'm quoting your post out of order because everything you said above is correct re: left wingers having legitimate ethical standards that lead to different judgments in different situations while Republicans have not even the pretense of standards and just call it according to what benefits them.

The statement was, in short, correct in a vacuum.

That being acknowledged.

The police are really gambling on this. If you make donating to bail funds punishable in the same way burning a cop car is punishable you're going to see a lot more burned cop cars.

Really not much of a gamble. A significant fraction of the country believe the purpose of the law is to enforce social hierarchy and anything is justifiable as long as it's directed at marginalized groups. An even more significant fraction of the population has this copaganda inspired notion that if the cops arrest you it must mean you did something wrong.

The correct statement quoted at the start was presented as a rebuttal to PS's assertion. It did not in fact rebut that assertion.

The point is that if you're going to be punished for innocuous shit as well as for illegal shit, then you might as well skip to the illegal shit and shift your concerns from "optics" to "not getting caught". And "not getting caught" is actually somewhat easier if you torch a car while wearing something that conceals your identity until you're out of sight of the cameras, compared to if you sign your real name to a petition or donate cash money from your bank account to a bail fund.

[PseudoStupidity]

The correct statement quoted at the start was presented as a rebuttal to PS's assertion. It did not in fact rebut that assertion.

The point is that if you're going to be punished for innocuous shit as well as for illegal shit, then you might as well skip to the illegal shit and shift your concerns from "optics" to "not getting caught". And "not getting caught" is actually somewhat easier if you torch a car while wearing something that conceals your identity until you're out of sight of the cameras, compared to if you sign your real name to a petition or donate cash money from your bank account to a bail fund.

This is correct.

When you criminalize the "right" way to support a movement like Defend the Atlanta Forest or Stop Cop City you will likely see a reduction in the number of people participating in the movement in the "right" way, but you'll also likely see an uptick in people wrecking your shit. Why? Because slashing tires and burning shit is actually a pretty low-effort activity (and not even that high in risk if you aren't a dumbass who carries their phone with them to do crimes) if you're in the area, whereas donating to a bail fund, doing a letter-writing campaign, and other "right" ways to do things tend to be pretty expensive or time-consuming while also being trackable. You can wear baggy black clothes and slash the tires of a vehicle quickly and easily, but earning $100 takes most people several hours and you are not hiding that your $100 came from you unless you do even more work.

If you are the state you don't want to make peaceful resistance illegal because the alternative is worse for you. Who cares if people hand out zines? You're the cops, you can and do shoot people who resist you peacefully if they get in your way. Arresting people for handing out zines is going to turn a nonzero number of peaceful resistors into violent resistors, and violent resistance is both more expensive and more dangerous to deal with.

[Sashi]

When you criminalize the "right" way to support a movement like Defend the Atlanta Forest or Stop Cop City you will likely see a reduction in the number of people participating in the movement in the "right" way, but you'll also likely see an uptick in people wrecking your shit.

I 100% agree with both of you on this. Where I disagree is this part:

If you are the state you don't want to make peaceful resistance illegal because the alternative is worse for you.

Maybe there are some states that don't want to spend massive amounts of resources on the cops, but I can assure you that the one being led by Joe "the solution to police brutality is to give cops more money" Biden is not one of them. Cops love when their cars get set on fire because they see it as a justification for bigger budgets, more militarization, and even more brutal oppression. If you crack down on peaceful protestors some of them will turn violent, and some of them will give up and go home. That's not seen as a "gamble" by the cops except as a "heads I win, tails you lose".

Sure, in the long term a police state that spends more money surveilling its citizenry than it does on educating them will eventually cause the state to collapse like a sad balloon. But that will (probably) happen long after the current people in power are dead, so why do they care?

This means that even when you're wearing baggy clothes and slashing tires optics still matter. Those actions must be understood by the public at large to be the result of the state closing off every effective avenue for peaceful protest.

[PseudoStupidity]

Maybe there are some states that don't want to spend massive amounts of resources on the cops, but I can assure you that the one being led by Joe "the solution to police brutality is to give cops more money" Biden is not one of them. Cops love when their cars get set on fire because they see it as a justification for bigger budgets, more militarization, and even more brutal oppression. If you crack down on peaceful protestors some of them will turn violent, and some of them will give up and go home. That's not seen as a "gamble" by the cops except as a "heads I win, tails you lose".

Sure, in the long term a police state that spends more money surveilling its citizenry than it does on educating them will eventually cause the state to collapse like a sad balloon. But that will (probably) happen long after the current people in power are dead, so why do they care?

Cops are actually scared of getting hurt and dying, they aren't a bunch of berserkers who want to get juiced up and crack the skulls of people who are fighting back. They only want to get juiced up and crack the skulls of unarmed, passively-resisting people. If you'd like evidence for this I'd point you to Uvalde, but also every single time the cops have ever had to face potentially lethal force. Cops wait for overwhelming force and then use it, they do not act if they think they might get seriously injured or killed. They are trained to act this way, and they do act this way.

This means that even when you're wearing baggy clothes and slashing tires optics still matter. Those actions must be understood by the public at large to be the result of the state closing off every effective avenue for peaceful protest.

My post was about how this is actually the state taking a risk both for their personnel and equipment, because making nonviolent resistance illegal makes violent resistance more likely. I am not encouraging people to slash the tires of construction equipment or talking about optics, I'm just stating that it's more likely now that the cops are threatening to give people 20 years for handing out zines or posting up fliers.

My opinion on what the Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest activists should do was not provided and is also irrelevant because I am not in the area and absolutely do not understand the conditions on the ground and have no skin in the game (aside from what we all have, as cop city will surely lead to more efficient oppression of people across the world and the success/failure of resistance will also have ripple effects across the country and potentially the world). Your opinion as to whether or not these people should be slashing tires or firebombing cop cars is similarly irrelevant. People who care about the optics of resistance when the people fighting against the cops are already getting murdered can all fuck off. No amount of slashed tires or burned cop cars could possibly change the optics, one side already murdered someone.

[Sashi]

Cops are actually scared of getting hurt and dying, they aren't a bunch of berserkers who want to get juiced up and crack the skulls of people who are fighting back. They only want to get juiced up and crack the skulls of unarmed, passively-resisting people. If you'd like evidence for this I'd point you to Uvalde, but also every single time the cops have ever had to face potentially lethal force. Cops wait for overwhelming force and then use it, they do not act if they think they might get seriously injured or killed. They are trained to act this way, and they do act this way.

Yes, I agree with you completely. Also, Cop City (the thing being protested) is a response to passive protests that were too large for the cops to handle. It is literally a police brutality training ground to help cops squash increasingly large protests with increasingly overwhelming force.

My post was about how this is actually the state taking a risk both for their personnel and equipment, because making nonviolent resistance illegal makes violent resistance more likely. I am not encouraging people to slash the tires of construction equipment or talking about optics, I'm just stating that it's more likely now that the cops are threatening to give people 20 years for handing out zines or posting up fliers.

Again, I agree with you! I agree with you so hard that I didn't even think that was the point of your post because "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." is a very well known quote. Trying to refute me by making this point is like trying to refute the space program by saying rockets cost money. Not that they cost too much money, just that they cost money at all.

What I am disagreeing with is whether the amount of people who will recognize that peaceful protest is being made impossible and switch to violence is greater than the cops can handle. I thought that was the "gamble" you were referring to the cops making. My point was that 1) a distressingly large number of people probably do not recognize that they are losing the right to peaceful protest and 2) there is no upper limit to the amount of violent protest the current state would like to be able to crush with overwhelming force. That means they won't respond to violent protest against cop city with "oh no! Violent protest, perhaps we should change course" but more like "Oh no! Violent protest, now we absolutely need to build Cop City and arrest or kill anyone anyone who says otherwise." If the protestors burn cop cars the cops will not "like" that a cop car is burning, but they will love that they can point at that burning cop car and say "See! This is why we need to build Cop City! Also, we need fireproof cop cars." Considering these circumstances, it does not seem to me that the cops think they are taking much of a "gamble".

People who care about the optics of resistance when the people fighting against the cops are already getting murdered can all fuck off. No amount of slashed tires or burned cop cars could possibly change the optics, one side already murdered someone.

Bullshit. People have to agree that cops are murdering people. You agree they are, I agree they are, but a significant number of people still believe that if the cops kill you it means you must have done something wrong. That's optics.

[PseudoStupidity]

That clears things up, and now it's clear to me that the misunderstanding here is that you think public opinion is a part of the path to success. I think you'll find that movements we like such as the civil rights movement and women's suffrage were opposed by the majority of people right up through them accomplishing their goals (or rather, accomplishing some of their goals), so I disagree with you that it's important for the public to be on our side. It's nice when the public isn't a bunch of propagandized morons and supports the correct side, but it's definitely not a thing you need to wait for.

You never succeed by getting the majority on your side, though it can certainly help to do that, you succeed by accomplishing the goal you have set out to accomplish (in this case, stopping cop city would be success for Stop Cop City, while building cop city is success for the state). If succeeding was as easy as getting the public on your side we'd have universal healthcare in the US that is provided by the government, stricter gun control laws, and Roe v Wade would still be protecting abortion access. The public genuinely doesn't matter in the US, we aren't a democracy and you don't accomplish things by getting majority support. You accomplish things by building an organization/coalition and exercising whatever power you have to pursue your goal. Sometimes that's soliciting donations to get the money to fix a road, sometimes it's gathering a group of people to physically occupy land to prevent construction projects, and sometimes it's getting a ballot measure and then campaigning to win an election. Public opinion doesn't get you shit, power does not care how many signatures your survey has or how many people post online in favor/opposition to your side.

The Stop Cop City folks have built organizations that are capable of exercising power, and they have allies who are also capable of exercising power. Their opponents are several organizations that are also capable of exercising power, and those organizations also have allies who can exercise power. The state has exercised some of its power with bullshit RICO charges and state-sponsored murder and terrorism aimed at Stop Cop City and its members. However, their use of power may cause Stop Cop City and its allies to retaliate. The gamble the state is taking is that if this fails to destroy Stop Cop City and its allies there will be further action taken against the state, and that retaliatory action will likely be more violent than earlier actions as the state has made it clear that being nonviolent won't protect you from state violence.

[Sashi]

The Stop Cop City folks have built organizations that are capable of exercising power, and they have allies who are also capable of exercising power. Their opponents are several organizations that are also capable of exercising power, and those organizations also have allies who can exercise power. The state has exercised some of its power with bullshit RICO charges and state-sponsored murder and terrorism aimed at Stop Cop City and its members. However, their use of power may cause Stop Cop City and its allies to retaliate. The gamble the state is taking is that if this fails to destroy Stop Cop City and its allies there will be further action taken against the state, and that retaliatory action will likely be more violent than earlier actions as the state has made it clear that being nonviolent won't protect you from state violence.

And then what? It's not unreasonable for me to take your assertion about the state's "gamble" about violent retaliation as a gamble that that violent retaliation will be effective in stopping Cop City. And yet despite your two paragraphs of ranting about consequentialism, you aren't actually making any assertions about what effect that violent retaliation will have on the building or not building of cop city. You simply keep stating that violent retaliation might happen, which in itself is not a success or failure for either group.

It seems like you're literally saying the cops are taking a "gamble" because there might be violent retaliation and it will make the cops sad, but I really hope that's not what you're saying.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

and it will make the cops sad

I'm going to make the assertion that cops are very emotionally vulnerable.

[PseudoStupidity]

And then what? It's not unreasonable for me to take your assertion about the state's "gamble" about violent retaliation as a gamble that that violent retaliation will be effective in stopping Cop City. And yet despite your two paragraphs of ranting about consequentialism, you aren't actually making any assertions about what effect that violent retaliation will have on the building or not building of cop city. You simply keep stating that violent retaliation might happen, which in itself is not a success or failure for either group.

It seems like you're literally saying the cops are taking a "gamble" because there might be violent retaliation and it will make the cops sad, but I really hope that's not what you're saying.

My point is that violent retaliation can fucking kill people and stop projects, so if you're the state you are gambling if you make violence more attractive or nonviolence less attractive. By using bullshit RICO charges to go after people for handing out zines they are making nonviolence less attractive, and thus people may decide to get violent in response.

[MGuy]

People 'may' decide to get violent but that's what they want. Someone to give them an excuse to use the stuff they've been given. Violence happened in very limited quantities a few years ago due to the fact that our storm troopers love killing people but all that did was get us a president who insists on giving them more money to do more bullshit and thus Cop City. I'd say the gamble would be more on the side of anyone who would want to turn to terrorism. A lot of factors are arrayed against whoever would turn in that direction and I'm not just talking about the risk of getting caught. The reality we live in, in this country, makes the success of violent actions taken to stop any project like this distasteful to the public at large. Say someone burned it all down? Well that's fine for the side that wants it built because now there is clear reason it needs to be built and also now they can petition for more government money. The pearl clutching voters and people on TV will likely denounce the actions taken and are very unlikely to conjure a narrative that would inform the media consumers that vote that this is actually caused by the lack of legitimate avenues to redress their grievances.

The bigger risk the state takes (if any at all), I think, with these bullshit charges is probably with the voting moderates. From all the reporting it is written very very poorly and is coming on the heels of bad orange man's RICO thing. The pearl clutching from the people they do pay attention to (people on the TV and the people who reportedly vote) might dissuade them from pursuing the case because they want the orange man jailed. This trumped up bullshit tarnishes the pursuit of the more legitimate case. Even believing this is a stretch because people kind of move on from these stories very quickly and by the time these trials go forward the voting public may likely just up and forget about it all together. Alternatively they risk galvanizing protestors by letting a bit too much of the mask slip, showing that their anti protest lean is getting even worse.

Nothing about this action reads as something that would stop Cop City or similar projects from going forward. Nothing in the RICO charge their levying suggests the people who wrote it really thought anything through. My hope is really that the incompetency of the people who orchestrated this assault on the freedom to protests means that the attempt fails and makes their next attempt a little harder to pull off.

[phlapjackage]

There's this, a study being posted all over reddit today.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9023000578

"An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths....Potential mechanisms behind the reduction include police agencies obtaining body-worn cameras to curtail force and a so-called ‘Ferguson effect.’ Fewer property crime arrests, but more reported murders, were associated with local protests, yet the property crime clearance rate fell."

[Kaelik]

What some of you may know is that Alabama killed a man slowly over 32 minutes of torture with nitrogen replacing oxygen but apparently not very well. What fewer will know is that they accelerated their development of the process because they tried to kill the guy already with lethal injection and failed and he sued them which prevented them from trying again with lethal injection.

What even fewer likely know is that the reason they did this is because the discovery deadline for his suit was coming up, so they killed him and now his suit is moot so they never have to provide the evidence they otherwise would be lawfully obligated to provide about his suit.

Also they've decided they are going to use it on another victim of their lethal injection attempt who has sued.

Because in the US if someone sues you, and you are the cops, you can just kill them and make the suit go away.

[Omegonthesane]

Can his estate continue to pursue the suit in his name so that the proceeds might be distributed according to his last will and testament (or any default formuia in the absence thereof), or does he have no estate to do so, or would it not be able to do so even if he had one?

[Kaelik]

After 10 years of DOJ oversight and consent decrees, the Albuquerque police department is shooting more people then any other US city.

It's almost like reformist bullshit doesn't work because the cops are actually the bad guys and you can't help them do their job better when their job is to be the bad guys!

https://searchlightnm.org/can-the-albuq ... e-reformed