What if a major city facing a crippling upheaval against police abuses were to hire a transgender woman to take over law enforcement? It’s not a crazy idea, notwithstanding the Almodovarian implications, given the budding panic setting in at city halls around the country. What better gesture to the relentless crowds hitting the streets daily to demand radical change than to elevate the maximum symbol of wokeness and gender-bending, identitarian emancipation?
I knew a lot of transgender ladies during the time I ran an AIDS education and support group physically located at the main corner of transgender sex work in Santiago, Chile, and I can attest to the fact that they knew a great deal about how to handle violent men. I would gladly have accepted the services of many of them if I ever needed a bodyguard, and I don’t think that finding a credible candidate from among their ranks to buckle on some enforcement gear and manage the notoriously macho ranks of uniformed officers is a far-fetched notion.
But would it work to neutralize the deep perception of police departments as free-lance armies of occupation? It depends on what you think policing is about in our society as presently constituted. The mainstream view is that their job is peacekeeping, chasing down criminals, and protecting property. Residents of New York’s minority neighborhoods often don’t see it that way because their experience of the cops is permanent petty harassment combined with a surprising lack of competence in actually rooting out the crime that plagues their neighborhoods. A cynical wag might even conclude that eliminating crime isn’t really in a PD’s interest given that a steady stream of offenses keeps the arrest and prosecution numbers high, thus justifying more gear, more personnel, and more public deference.
Then there’s the opposite notion, that police exist to protect the assets and profits of the owner class, and on that score a moment of truth is about to arrive. Our three-month moratorium on evictions here in the city is about to end in a few days, at which time we will see a flood of cases in housing court by landlords seeking to oust non-payers, many of whom are now destitute and have no chance of coughing up $3000, $4000, or $5000 they owe in arrears. Police will be assigned the task of getting these people out of their now illegally occupied homes, and the BLM marchers may well be inspired to show up to express their opinions about what is taking place. At that point, anything could happen.
The marches are now surprisingly popular and draw broad support because they are mostly polite and well-behaved. The TV newscasters here express a fetishistic obsession with their peaceable nature, but when push literally comes to shove, these pious observers may find the tenor and consequences of the debate over what the police should do, when, and toward whom, to be more than a philosophical consideration.
A more immediate question, given that New York City is finalizing its annual spending plan, is how loud will the explosion be when Mayor De Blasio’s cop-worshipping budget proposal gets blasted into outer space. De Blasio originally tried to zero out all summer youth employment funding while not cutting a dime from the NYPD, despite the pandemic-induced plummet in revenues. In a bold attempt to get out in front of the rebellion and call it a parade, he pivoted to a $400 million cut. The latest figure bandied about is a reduction of $1 billion, or 1/6 of the police budget—which would put it back to roughly the spending level of 2013 when De Blasio took office after getting elected as a reformist progressive.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court this week ruled that LGBT persons are included as a protected population under the terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so police departments no longer have any grounds to refuse a TG applicant who then could move quickly up the ranks to a supervisory role, perhaps just in time to send out her riot squads to evict one of the black families who cheered our BLM demo last weekend.
If the fight over policing turns into a real, well, fight over policing, we needn’t waste time wondering how the courts are going to feel about that. That’s where the Supremes long ago set the tone by eagerly crippling unions, opening the floodgates to secretive political slush funds, and generally kowtowing to corporate and elite interests. Once the conflict returns to the realm of haves versus have-nots, our courts will be quick to send rent strikers, the jobless, or the destitute packing, no matter who is sharing the beds indoors with whom.
[To receive alerts of these posts, message me at tfrasca@yahoo.com ]
No comments:
Post a Comment