I’m a firm believer that respect is earned, not given. But I’m also not a statist. In the mind of a statist respect is owed to anybody in a position of authority, no matter how ridiculous the authority is. With the police’s war on the people being waged across the country a bunch of statists have gone into victim blaming mode. Rudolph Giuliani, the former warden of New York City, made sure to take time out of his day to blame black people for not being good enough slaves:
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani thinks black Americans need to worry less about police violence and more about teaching their children to respect police and fear other black people.
In light of the killings of five police officers in Dallas last week, Giuliani went off on the Black Lives Matter movement, in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. He called the slogan “inherently racist” and “anti-American,” while neglecting statistics that show black people are disproportionately targeted by police.
“There’s too much violence in the black community,” he said. “[I]f you want to deal with this on the black side, you’ve got to teach your children to be respectful to the police and you’ve got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police; the real danger to them, 99 out of 100 times, 9,900 out of 1,000 times, are other black kids who are gonna kill them. That’s the way they’re gonna die.”
Why should anybody respect the police? They spend most of their time enforcing victimless laws such as drug use, driving faster than arbitrarily selected speeds, parking in the wrong place or for the wrong amount of time, and other such nonsense that their department usually get a nice payout for. Meanwhile, if you call the police because somebody has broken into your home and is trying to murder you you might be left waiting for hours, if the police dispatch anybody at all. If a burglar breaks into your home and steals your valuable the only purpose the police generally serve is giving you a report that you can give to your insurance company.
In other words, the police aren’t working to earn our respect so why should people be expected to respect them? If Giuliani actually cared about reducing the number of deaths of black children, or anybody else for that matter, he would be demanding an end to the drug war, which is probably the single largest contributor to police militarization in this nation. After ending the drug war he could move to advocate for the repeal of all victimless crimes so that the police were focused on something other than revenue generation. But he doesn’t give a shit. He’s just upset because he can’t own a few black people to perform manual labor for him anymore.
In an ever-shifting world, it’s good to know that there are people of consistency like Giuliani, always pointing in the right direction – with the back of his head.