"Democracy Now" Tells the Truth About Alton Sterling and How the Baton Rouge Police are Harassing Witnesses and Truth-tellers to Cover Up Their Crimes

As rapper and actor Ice-T famously said some years ago, the police are the biggest gang out here in these streets. Police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana are acting to script.

This is not at all surprising. One of my repeated criticisms of how police thuggery and brutality against black and brown people is discussed by the corporate news media is 1) the assumption that America's police act in good will and 2) how there is little follow-up regarding the retaliation that witnesses and other truth-tellers often suffer from the police.

We have fancy academic and technical language such as the "carceral society" and "custodial citizenship" to describe how America's police are part of a vast system of social control against people of color, the poor, the working classes, the homeless, the mentally ill, and other marginalized groups. But perhaps we should just start calling America's cops "the gestapo". Such language is an apt description for how they treat many millions of the country's citizens.

The police take an oath to "serve and protect" the public. What are we to do when the police have abdicated such basic responsibilities and fail to either "serve" or "protect" people of color and others they have marked as second class citizens?