I have a complicated relationship with police.
I am certain that I was racially profiled by police one time in my Burgundy on the inside Burgundy on the outside ‘97 Buick Riviera, and always had the fear thereof. My mother hated me having a giant afro or cornrows allegedly because it could exasperate these situations. In this case, the police driving on the other side of the street saw me and did a sudden and hectic U-Turn to get in the opposite headed traffic I was in. By happenstance my registration was a day or two expired, and what started off as a crazy conversation beginning not with license and registration please but with how long have you been out of jail, they ran my info and were calmed by my demeanor. I also learned to never attempt to step out the vehicle without being instructed to. Other police have driven next to me and let me go with a warning for having no daytime lights on.
You cannot let your politics, radical or reactionary, get in the way of The Way. Our Lord and Savior, the light of light which came into the world, taught us to love one another. And that category is expansive enough of a definition to include the totality of humanity. Growing up on ‘90s boombap and beyond, you can imagine my mind was formed to have an orientation toward the police that at maximum screamed FUCK THE POLICE, and later at minimum, FILM THE POLICE. In high school, I did a research paper for American History on the Black Panthers, who exclusively referred to the police as pigs and swine. I read The Black Panthers Speak and Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism.
In university, I dived deep into theory. I read about transformative justice, prison abolition, and police abolition. From anarchists who are communists and anarchists who are capitalists. I had my fancy exceedingly tickled by how traditionalist societies dealt with crime and punishment. Prof. Efrem Isaac relayed to me and a group gathered at my parish how the Oromo compelled victim and offender of a murder case to eat cattle gallbladder (or something like that) together to make peace, or else be banished from the community forever. I learned about the Hmong (and other Zomians) from novelist Anne Fadiman’s incomparable The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, anthropologist James C. Scott’s scholarship, Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Turino, and the personal testimony of a bigoted suitemate from Minneapolis. He had a prejudice against Somali, whom I knew, and Hmong, whom I came to know. I even later lived in North Dakota, frequenting Minneapolis, and lived in Merced, both of which are locations the Hmong were relocated to by the CIA after their aid in secret and dirty wars in Southeast Asia. The Hmong culture is a historically tax-gatherer dodging one that relied on slash-and-burn agriculture. There’s no room for police and prisons in that world. Instead, you get shamans as arbitrators. When physical space runs out, and nature fills the vacuum of power she abhors, these traditionalist societies get subsumed by bigger neighbors who use police and prisons.
As a youth minister since 2012, I have always tried to deeply reflect about how we could love the police. I have written and spoken about praying for them, and even showing love by offering to wash their cars. The latter with the idea that their minds would be changed if they saw a bunch of black folks loving bombing them like this.
Since 2019, I have had a student-teacher relationship with Rener Gracie and Ryron Gracie, whose father Rorion Gracie invented the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and choreographed and acted in Lethal Weapon. They have a general jujitsu program, but are also set apart by a number of specific programs they run for women, children, and the police. The police program is called Gracie Survival Tactics (GST). They take the show on the road often, but I have helped them as an unofficial mentor of beginners during their annual week long session at HQ in Torrance, CA; where it all began. Rener has also established a relationship with El Segundo Police Department, where a contract the government pays for allows police to train jujitsu for free. This is in contradistinction to some departments that only offer training 1-3 times a year, if that.
Amongst his many projects, Rener does Gracie Breakdowns of viral street fights and school bullying. He’s talked about the case of the marine in the NYC subway that sadly ended the life of a Michael Jackson impersonator that also happened to be a repeat offender was in the midst of offending again. This was done with a rear-naked strangle (or choke), which is the highest submission seen in the UFC. This strangle works efficiently in 6-10 seconds. And is nigh harmless in this window, when performed correctly. When held for a minute or longer, there is an exponentially increasing risk of death. I haven’t looked into it as much but the Eric Garner case of getting strangled by police for selling loosies in NYC comes to mind.
Rener has also been called in to court to be an expert witness in a freak accident training injury, where a professor of jujitsu was held responsible for injuring a student, and damages were perceived to be exceedingly high by some members of the jujitsu community. Rener hashed out his disagreement publicly with his largest critic Tom DeBlass (also a jujitsu black belt and professor), displaying verbal jujitsu.
No matter how much I wish it was, everything is not black-and-white. There is some gray in this world. At the time of the death of George Floyd, I attended the first major protest in West Hollywood. I thought this here is one of the most straightforward cases of all time, and I was glad to see the energy. But even then, I didn’t share the totality of the politics of most gathered. And as we know, the energy quickly became a destructive force of chaos. Like Napoleon, I have revolutionary roots, but disdain disorder and love order. I heard a few people like Candace Owens at the time say Floyd was just a criminal who overdosed, and I took it under consideration but never deep dived. It just didn’t seem right.
The Fall of Minneapolis documentary was produced by Liz Collin, and written and directed by Dr. JC Chaix. Knowing biases is important, but the facts are the facts. Collin and Chaix are both police-affiliated. The former a reporter and anchor married to a former police union chief. And the latter a former police officer. Nevertheless, everything you have been fed unto this point by the media, academe, and activists has been anti-cop.
Here are my takeaways from the film:
Race was not only not the main factor, it was not even a factor in the court of law. The heart of Officer Derek Chauvin can only truly be known by God, to whom I leave final judgment. Half of the police force that stopped and arrested George Floyd are BIPOC. Officer Thao is Hmong. And Officer Keung is Black. Or at least Black-ish. How Black becomes a one-drop adjacent medieval scholastic debate in which I will not participate. His mother is White. His father is Black. He calls himself Black over the phone in the film, from prison.
George Floyd was a habitual linestepper. His rap sheet rivals the resume of any notorious criminal. His most serious prior offense seems to be involvement with the assault and robbery of a woman. The relevant crime of Floyd’s arrest leading to his death was counterfeit money. Portugal has decriminalized drugs since 2001, and they seem fine. Someone correct me if things have changed. I shared this information in 2011 with the Honorable Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich, who I worked for at the time as a legislative intern mostly writing obituaries and responding to constituents but occasionally getting my pet legislation in front of his eyeballs. So, I take less offense to his drug charges, but counterfeit and assault and robbery are bad.
The drugs in his system (including synthetic heroin and meth) were double or treble the lethal dosage. Body cam footage shows that he popped some pills right when they arrested him, in order to dispose of them. He may have already been high.
The film begins with extensive body cam footage that I wish was released around the same time of his death and the riots. Some of the footage was intentionally delayed for undisclosed reasons we can only speculate wildly about. Some of the footage was not permitted to be shown in court. Any openminded person interested in this case has a duty of at least watching all of this footage before they come to any conclusion on their own.
There is a Maximum Restraint Technique (MRT) that Chauvin uses on Floyd that we have all seen stills of. However brutal it looks to the untrained eye, the evidence in the film shows that Chauvin had the move in his manual and the officers on the scene discussed this move and referenced it. Even if this move is incorrect, this should take personal responsibility away from Chauvin let alone the other officers doing a bid for guilt by association or neglect to intervene. Chief of the Minneapolis Police Department Medaria Arradondo comes off as a career bumbling bureaucrat who has perjured himself by saying MRT was not known to him and not taught to his officers in training. Jujitsu is the science of control, that if you want, can lead to submission. From a jujitsu mindset, there are better ways to control someone. No doubt. Back control, top mount, and side control are all better ways of control than the MRT. Cops should train more judo and jujitsu.
I want to hear what you have to say about all of this. But please do not comment hither, or email me, without having watched the film in its entirety. It takes intestinal fortitude, but the juice is worth the squeeze, in order to have some type of reasoned dialogue on this subject. Godspeed.
Post Scriptum:
h/t
who helped me think through this documentary first including: Matt Welch (WASP?) a LBC (Long Beach) native and Editor-at-Large at Reason Magazine, Kmele Foster (a Jamaican who says he is not black and thinks racial categories have no significant meaning whatsoever) a meaning-maker, and Michael Moynihan (an Irish-Italian Bostonian) an anticommunist journalist who recently left VICE.
and Black professors Glenn Loury (economics) and John Mcwhorter (language) who are n + 1 exceptions to the rule of how Black folks are allowed to think in the United States. They have covered this issue and related ones extensively in writing and in videos.
My conversation with Officer Andy Jaye of Greater Minneapolis. He and I collaborated on then Orthodox Christian Leadership Institute’s (now Orthodox Christian Coaching) Galatian series. Officer Andy did Galatians 3. I did Galatians 4. Former guests of POAAS did Galatians 2, Galatians 5, and Galatians 6.
Balko v. Hughes for further deep diving on this topic https://www.youtube.com/live/O_iOCKMAzIA?si=o0AjrdbNj5f6wvJq