Law-and-order policy created the police violence it is blamed for

Evidence

Black men produced more films in 1991 than during the entire 1980s. But a White man, George Holliday, shot the most influential racial film of the year on March 3 from the balcony of his Los Angeles apartment. He filmed ninety grueling seconds of four Los Angeles Police Department officers savagely striking Rodney King, a Black taxi driver. Holliday sent the footage to TV stations, and TV stations started broadcasting it across the country, from urban communities that had been suffering under the baton of aggressive policing for years to suburban and rural communities that had been cheering the aggressive policing of inner-city communities for years. Charges of assault with a deadly weapon and the use of excessive force were quickly filed against the four LAPD officers. In the emotional swing, N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” reemerged with a social vengeance in thumping cars and on screaming televisions. President Bush condemned the beating, but he did not back down from the tough-on-crime mantra that he had ridden to the White House. It was a political mandate that the LAPD had executed on trampled and imprisoned Black bodies as efficiently as any department in the nation. Politicians created law-and-order America, but the police officers were the pawns carrying out the policies. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1114

Categorization

• XREF: Directly illustrates Kendi’s policy-first inversion: the tough-on-crime mandate is the policy, and police brutality is its enactment — evidence against the ignorance→hate→discrimination model. — connects to: Seventeenth-century opposition politics made public law into a weapon against the police state — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 175; Protest movement leaders simultaneously shielded attacked police and blamed the state for violence. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 377
• ADDENDUM: The King beating as the enforcement limb of law-and-order policy could extend the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s theme of states stabilizing order through ritualized violence.