Pharrel Williams & Charles Barkley in effect called Mike Brown out as a punk. Which doesn’t mean he deserved a kill shot to the crown of his head. At 18, he was old enough to enlist in the military yet young enough to further mature & grow out of his situation. Since no video exists, reading the grand jury transcript suggests that chances are, speculatively, he copped an attitude (contempt of cop) & patrolman Darren Wilson thugged him (whatever happened to Officer Friendly).

Then looters chose to party in a convenience store.

Eric Garner is different. His case drove people into the streets, even some who’d usually sit it out & spectate. Peacefully, casually, wisely in powerful symbolism to defy a system on the brink of losing sight of its ideals.

Yeah, some knuckleheads chanted “NYPD is KKK”.

A few signs read BLM.

Unless black lives matter all won't matter.

Another common refrain: Arrested While Black (aka in 12-talk ‘driving behind tinted windows’).

Truth is, cops mess with everybody. That’s their troubled calling & special authority. Only the degree of harrassment differs.

One such encounter: stopped for running a light on a bicycle by an officer who fit the description of -- curious checkbox -- “PoC”:

POLICE (writing up a summons): So you find this funny.
BICYCLIST (smirking): Well, think about it, officer. You've got a squad car, a dispatch radio, plus a gun in your holster. And here you are writing a summons for a moving violation by a bicyclist. Crime must really be way down in NYC.
POLICE: Orders from City Hall to crack down. Besides, you voted for him, cracker. (NOTE: 'him' refers to Mayor Bloomberg.)
BICYCLIST: Did I really. Well, I was dumb enough to vote for Dinkins – twice.

2 court appearances & a modest sum later, the matter was closed but not done… because, racialists say, epithets form deep-seated wounds & scars that live on as PTSD. Unless, of course, those directed at everyone who enjoys White Privilege since they never hold grudges because they create so many of them.

After 30+ priors for various citations / violations, the police & Eric were very familiar with one another. He knew the drill in this cat ‘n mouse game of street arbitrage over cigarettes. Doesn’t mean they should take him down & crush his skull into the pavement. Just saying… there has to be a better way to treat citizens.

Of the 3 media-drenched cases that involve shootings of black men, 1 shows clear cut police excess (Eric Garner), another a wrong-headed move (reaching into a police car) & a third remains ambiguous (George Zimmerman / Trayvon Martin). So the record is 1-1-1, hardly the docket for systemic police brutality.

The larger picture, however, sees the USA lurching in a sinister tilt:
-- Swat teams still descend on pot houses & backyard pharma mills, busting teens & twenty somethings;
-- A militarized guard in Ferguson rolled out armaments left over from the Iraq & Afgh wars gifted by the Obama Administration to local law enforcement agencies;
-- Even the roundup after the Boston Marathon attack exposed a dark underbelly as anti-terror squads, weaponized to the max, fanned out in a dragnet to greet homeowners at gunpoint with “hands up & get the fuck out of the house”… “with all eyes upon us” in “the city on the hill” of John Winthrop & the Puritans, Paul Revere & Revolutionary Patriots of which JFK would later extol as the Athens of America.

Add in the Bush-Barack NSA data mining sweep (thank you DC & Silicon Valley) & this remains from sea-to-shining-sea the “land of the free & the home of the brave”... only if you pay taxes & submit.

Something deep is festering.

Gen. Eisenhower articulated for relatively quaint times The Military-Industrial Complex. It has since metatasized into the Financial-Surveillance Nexus.

A just & purposeful govt, in the tradition of Lincoln at Gettysburg, of / for / by the people, continues to not-so-secretly vanish. Instead of the legalized racket that currently operates, Feds, states & municipalities need to enroll in their own re-indoctrination campaign on the fundamentals of serving as a counterweight to corporate & criminal misconduct.

In times like these & a place like this, that development could take forever. Perhaps never.

In the meanwhile, if nothing else, should police be chastened by the uprising of Millennials in the streets to back off a bit, then every one of their steps up the West Side Highway will have achieved a modicum of good.