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Committing Acts of Brutality with Impunity
A deeply
disturbing
pardon
by e bony
s laughter -
J ohnson
During
a
speech to a
group of police
officers in July,
President Trump returned to one
of his favorite themes of the cam-
paign season: violence. “Please
don’t be too nice” to the “thugs
being thrown into the back of a
paddy wagon,” Trump advised the
officers. Be “rough.”
The president’s endorsement
of police brutality was met with
applause from the officers and
shock from activists and pundits
alike.
Subscribe!
503-288-0033
Sensing the brewing backlash,
the White House insisted that the
president was simply making a
joke. Even Attorney General Jeff
Sessions, the country’s top
law enforcement official — a
man with his own complicat-
ed history of encouraging the
worst impulses of the police
— attempted to distance him-
self from the controversy.
Yet the president just
proved that when it comes
to endorsing police brutality, es-
pecially against communities of
color, he’s dead serious.
For more than 20 years, Sheriff
Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County,
Arizona terrorized Latino com-
munities, harassed immigrants,
and made life a living hell for
prisoners in his care in order to
build a reputation as “America’s
toughest sheriff”.
These systematic violations of
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human and constitutional rights
eventually landed Arpaio in legal
trouble of his own. Then Presi-
dent Trump pardoned him.
Arpaio had been awaiting sen-
tencing for a July conviction of
criminal contempt.
Back in 2011, a federal judge
ordered Arpaio to stop target-
ing and detaining Latinos just
to inquire about their immigra-
tion status. Nevertheless, Arpaio
persisted for another 18 months,
insisting that his racial profil-
ing was lawful. He emasculated
inmates, forcing them to wear
pink underwear, and attempted
to starve them with food that was
called inedible.
He tortured them, too: Begin-
ning in the 1990s, Arpaio opened
Tent City Jail, which forced in-
mates to live outside in the ex-
treme Arizona heat. An untold
number of inmates died.
To the law, Arpaio is a convict-
ed criminal who built his career
on denying the constitutional and
human rights of the most vulner-
able among us. To Trump, he’s “a
patriot” who kept “Arizona safe.”
“Throughout his time as sher-
iff,” a White House statement
bleated, “Arpaio continued his
life’s work of protecting the pub-
lic from the scourges of crime
and illegal immigration.” In other
words, the innocent immigrants
who were harassed, and the pris-
oners who were tortured, were
the real criminals.
Trump promised to be the “law
and order candidate” during his
campaign. He codified this prom-
ise once he became president in
the “Standing Up For Our Law
Enforcement Community” sec-
tion of the White House website.
“The Trump administration will
be a law and order administra-
tion,” it echoed.
For the president, it seems,
“standing up” for law enforce-
ment includes allowing officers
to subvert the rule of law to com-
mit acts of brutality with impuni-
ty. Empowering law enforcement
to “keep our streets free of crime
and violence” means supporting
racial profiling. And “law and or-
der” only applies to some, namely
those that support the president.
With Trump’s pardon of Ar-
paio, a message has been sent:
When it comes to police brutali-
ty of the kind Arpaio perpetuated
for decades, the Trump adminis-
tration won’t simply be complicit
in it. It will promote it.
And that’s nothing to joke
about.
Ebony Slaughter-Johnson is a
freelance writer whose work cov-
ers history, race and the crimi-
nalization of poverty. Distributed
by OtherWords.org.