Correction, Please!
With Cities Riotous and Aflame, Radicals Bang the Drums for Police Defunding
Item: In a double issue dated August 17/24, 2020 (with a feature variously entitled in different parts of the magazine “Reimagining the Police” and “The Police Are Broken”), Time magazine reported that after a Minneapolis police officer “knelt on [George] Floyd’s neck, the Minneapolis city council concluded that its police department was beyond reform and must instead be replaced.” The magazine noted that “many activists and academics alike have come to believe that the relationship between Black Americans and U.S. police can’t be solved with incremental change.”
Item: A major piece written by self-styled “agitator” Vicky Osterweil was highlighted in the radical Nation magazine dated June 12. In that article (“Burning Down the 3rd Police Precinct Changed Everything”), the writer trumpeted: “Calls to abolish the police are spreading. Dozens of cities are considering cutting police budgets, and police are resigning across the country.”
She boasted about the “destruction of the Minneapolis Third Precinct house on the night of May 28, three days into the riots. Having just completed a book [In Defense of Looting] on the history of anti-police rioting and uprisings in America, I cannot recall another time when protesters took over and burnt down a police station. It was an unprecedented and beautiful moment in the annals of rebellion in this country.” In conclusion, Osterweil said that “the seizing of two police precincts is a blow against whiteness, against the police, against capitalism and the anti-black world it upholds. May the blows continue to fall, until we stand side by side in a post-abolition world.”
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