So apparently quarantine is over, and boy is it over in grand fashion.
We went from: “Covid-19 is a pandemic, how dare you go out in public, I hope the police arrest these people putting everyone else at risk”, to: “Oh well, fuck it”, in the matter of like 24 hours. Now the police are suddenly the bad guys again, and the people gathering outside are the heroes. What a plot twist to end all plot twists.
Obviously there’s a reason for all of this, namely continued police brutality and the subsequent lack of accountability that always seems to follow. That series of events that happens over and over again like in that movie Groundhog Day ™ starring Chris Elliott and also Bill Murray. Cop uses excessive force, civilian dies, cop gets put on paid leave, people get outraged, cop is finally held accountable, cop only gets a slap on the wrist, it turns out the cop had a long history of bad conduct, repeat the process again next month.
Now we’re gathering outside in cities across America as if Covid-19 was nothing more than a fad or meme that had lived past its expiration date.
Which bring us to now. When I originally started writing this post a few days ago, it was merely chronicling some of the events that had transpired. I wrote about the peaceful protests, the opportunists hijacking the movement to “smash capitalism” and steal shit, and how the different media outlets were choosing to portray these events.
When I was almost done with the post, I realized something. For all the tweets and pictures of gatherings and destruction, I had like 3 times as many pictures of outright police brutality that had occurred in the just the span of a week. So I scrubbed what I had already written, and am posting this instead.
I’ll write about some of the other goings on later, but for now I’m just going to catalog some of the more egregious instances of police overreach. This entire situation started over police brutality, so it’s ironic that so much brutality has transpired during protests against said brutality.
And now for some bonus police shenanigans:
Good times.