back the PD against people exercising their constitutional rights. Like the NYPD, Oakland PD is just another part of the army that works for Wall St.

non-violent but actually stop things from happening and business from going on as usual.

With the decline of social services, and public infrastructure in general, the people at the bottom of the social scale will have increasing contacts with the police. As their economic/social situation gets more desperate, they will encounter the police because they live in crime-ridden neighborhoods, because they are being evicted, because they are mentally ill and someone called a "crisis unit", because they are attempting to escape through suicide, because they are on drugs, because they are creating a ruckus trying to protest this situation, because they got in a fight, because being poor makes them "look criminal", etc.

Contact with the police is traumatizing in itself. Police have a demeanor of authority and intimidation that is meant to protect the police-person by discouraging the suspect from taking aggressive actions. But if you're innocent, this demeanor is scary and dehumanizing. If you are exposed to the police repeatedly, it is psychologically damaging. You fear being arrested, you fear documentation that could affect your future prospects, you fear going to jail and facing horrors there, you fear accidentally making a wrong move so the cop shoots you. Police can kill you.

I don't think larger society has realized that the decline in mediating services - social workers, advocates, lawyers, programs - has meant that the police are the last line of "interveners" in the lives of the poor.

The fact that the police have such an impact on the psyche of black people also underscores economic racial discrimination: the police have intervened more in their lives because they have lived in communities where the decline in public infrastructure meant they had no other problem-solvers. There "social control" of last resort was the police. Wealthier white communities didn't experience this because they had more economic security and social status, and they didn't get into situations that "required" police intervention.

In communities where black people have been pushed out by rising rents and other hostile conditions, the status hierarchy will remain: the police will then start intervening in the lives of the bottom half of the white people - because then they will be the ones being evicted, falling into mental illness, doing drugs, creating a ruckus, etc. This is why you see support in rapidly-gentrifying Berkeley - not because we're a bunch of rich sell-out-hippies condescendingly deciding to "do a protest" after a 3-martini brunch. It's because this community includes a lot of disabled and retired people on fixed incomes who are the "next victims" now that the black population has been depleted from 30% to 10%.

I've already experienced one scary cop intervention myself. Because I found out appealing the rejection of a medical procedure was going to be referred to Social Services, and I had already been through 4 Social Services hearings in the proceeding month because of a bungle related to me trying to do some work (see my sig), and I was going through a nightmare of bureaucracy over that, I tried to protest and insisted - unfortunately in writing - that my medical clinic find alternative way to appeal. What did they do? Call the cops to check on my frame of mind. This did nothing to address my health needs, essentially broke my relations with that medical clinic, and made me wary of whether I'm now being documented/watched by the Berkeley police as well. I know that's just a small taste of what black people are talking about - but it was a taste.

In the end this is about stealth social darwinism, and the police are just part of the overall system used to demean, demoralize, and destroy the poor.