Eiskaffee genossen, meine Tomätchen gezählt, das letzte Brot aufgetaut, weil ich nicht vor die Tür wollte, gejammert, dass ich nur blödes aufgetautes Toastbrot habe, Erdbeeren und Kirschen, mehr Eiskaffee. Hamilton geguckt (schon gut, schon gut, “I’ll do whatever it takes / I’ll make a million mistakes“, Lieblingszeile du jour, mal wieder gedacht, der Burr ist viel spannender als Hamilton). Hamilton gelesen und bei jeder Erwähnung eines Namens, einer Jahreszahl oder eines Ereignisses den Soundtrack im Ohr gehabt, sehr nerviges Leseerlebnis, selber schuld. Mein blaues Top teilweise aufgetrennt und mit der Hand nachgenäht, aber gefühlt eher verschlimmbessert. Muss ich nochmal auftrennen. Abends mit F. ein kleines Radler bei Funzellicht und Kerzen auf dem Balkon. Gemeinsam eingeschlafen. Guter Tag.

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The Invention of the Police

Diesen Artikel teilte ich gestern schon auf Twitter; er beschreibt die historische Entwicklung der US-amerikanischen Polizei, die, Überraschung, sich heute noch auf Taktiken von Sklavenjägern und dem Militär beruft. Über die Idee, dass die Bevölkerung, die du schützen sollst, dein Feind ist, habe ich noch nie nachgedacht, weil sie mir so fremd erscheint. Den Artikel könnte man komplett zitieren, ich lege ihn euch ans Herz, weil ich ihn historisch sehr aufschlussreich fand.

„The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they’re there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm’s way. To say that this doesn’t always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that, among American men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, the number who were treated in emergency rooms as a result of injuries inflicted by police and security guards was almost as great as the number who, as pedestrians, were injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within.

There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, a rate that is lower than the European average. The difference is guns. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, “in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.” American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one. Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone. A study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male. The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that’s spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren’t trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost.“