NOTICE: the video below is of a violent nature and involves local officials.
That’s a police officer that kicks the apparent shoplifter in the head. This video came along my feed last week and, sadly, it wasn’t as shocking an experience for me like it once would’ve been.
Now look, I don’t know about the context, I don’t know anything about the specific incident other than what is seen in the video. So, I acquiesce, there may be more than meets the eye. But, for the record, here’s what I see: a group of three, who may be undercover officers or not, have pinned a man down and are pounding him. A uniformed officer comes along and kicks the suspect in the head while the suspect is being held down by the other men. All four assailants appear to be of primarily Anglo-Saxon heritage. The assailed (and confirmed shoplifter) is a 17-year old male of Spanish or LatinX descent.
NOTE: this isn’t a Cops are Nazis essay. I’m not a Defund the Police guy. I don’t want to abolish or shrink police forces. I know and work closely with MANY officers in my capacity as a school administrator and know many of them to be good, true people.
But yeah, I think we need to reprioritize investments to reform, rebuild, and retrain officers. We should put the monies used for armored tanks and grenade launchers into healthcare, mental health services, education, and other community services. Seriously, Los Angeles Unified School District’s Police Department announced that it would be returning the grenade launchers they purchased thanks to some civil rights protestors.
I posted this particular video capture of apparent police brutality because it was shot recently, in the city I grew up in: Glendale, California—just south of the Verdugo Hills, west of Pasadena, east of Burbank, and north of Los Angles. It’s a 30 square-mile town that’s a little more than a century old. It is the native land of the Tongva people. Today, it’s known as Little Armenia; it’s a suburb of Los Angeles that leans 59% progressive (down from 65% just over a decade ago…)
Because there’s been such pervasive journaling of police brutality more recently, viewing the video reminded me that the place I formed most of my most cherished experiences, sadly, has a very overt white supremacist history. It was a “pure American city”, don’t ya know.
Let me sum up: the whites-only past of the city never went away. In the 1930s, there were the rallies of the local German American Bund chapter (a "German virtues" lobby smack dab in La Crescenta). In fact, check out this clip from Rancho La Canada, a film that shows the Nazi rallies in the hills of La Crescenta (far away from the press)…
Glendale was a "Sundown Town"--communities that kept Americans of primarily African racial heritage out. In fact, if you dig a little into the song "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" by Elton John, you'll see it's connection to the expression "N*****, don't let the sun go down on you in our town". These were posted on signs at the outskirts of many of the Sundown Towns. Forest Lawn wouldn't bury non-whites. Hindenburg Park, now Crescenta Valley Park (the place where the Oktoberfests happen up over the hill) was named after the German President Hindenburg who APPOINTED Hitler as chancellor of Germany! In fact, it wasn’t until October of LAST YEAR that the City of Glendale formally resolved to apologize for its history as a Sundown Town.
Then, there’s the Ku Klux Klan. In 1921, the KKK arrived in Glendale and began recruiting new members in California. By 1926, they operated under charter. If you wanted to join, you had to respond to the following questions:
Were your parents born in the USA?
Do you believe in White Supremacy?
Do you believe in the principles of pure Americanism?
My family moved to Glendale in 1980, just a short while after emigrating to the US. I developed 75% of my elementary and secondary schooling in Glendale. As an immigrant teenager from Iran, I was woefully aware of how the dynamics of the north part of town worked and found my way through it by way of, what I think was, a clever strategy. While integrating my Stranger in a Strange Land complex, I secretly took more note of and gave more attention to the sociological dynamics of this new world I had found myself in. For example…
My age-alike friends may not remember (or know) this, but throughout the 1980s, Glendale experienced a swell of rallies, marches, and demonstrations by white power groups influenced by neo-Nazis, racist skinheads [Reich Skins], the Ku Klux Klan, and the Christian Identity religious sect. It wasn’t something I understood at the time because, well, it’s a pretty dark kind of evil to get your head around, but I recall instances, stories, and nuances in people’s conversations that piqued my senses, in a bad way.
When I was a sophomore in high school, there was this group named The League of Pace Amendment Advocates that were basically proposing a Constitutional amendment that would deport non-white citizens of America. There was a huge brawl that summer at the Glendale Central Library between the KKK folks and a group named the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) In fact, later that fall, the neo-Nazi groups held a rally at the Holiday Inn (the parking lot of which, I used to make out with my girlfriend at) and another big old brawl broke out between them and activists that were protesting the keynote speech that was to be given by a convicted domestic terrorist and neo-Nazi at the rally.
During my senior year of high school, there was a frickin’ conference of the Christian Identity Ministries held at the old Glendale Masonic Temple. If you’re not aware of this sect, the people of the Christian Identity movement center their white supremacy on a political theology that holds that white people are the true lost tribe of Israel and that people of color and Jewish people descended from animals or Satan.
Glendale was an all-white community, that excluded Americans of primarily African heritage and other minorities through discriminatory laws, harassment, or use of violence: and it was this history that lead to ongoing policies of redlining and community covenants throughout the 60s.
So how’s this connected to the video? What does this have to do with the police? Well, for that, we’d have to go back to my junior high school days...
In 1985, an investigation was ordered into the Glendale Police Department because a lawsuit [Jauregui v. City of Glendale] exposed SYSTEMIC RACISM that extended to other city officials too. Officer Ricardo Luis Jauregui sued the city for employment discrimination. He joined their police department in ‘73 when there was a spike of Americans of primarily Latin descent emigrating to Glendale. He was basically passed over for promotion for five years and so, he alleged that Americans of primarily Hispanic heritage, Americans of primarily African heritage, and women in general were denied equal opportunity for employment throughout the Glendale Police Department.
He won. The city appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court. They lost.
Here—you can read the 120 page report that was published that proved Glendale Police Department’s racial and ethnic minority discriminatory practices yourself! Racialized policing in Glendale isn’t just a perspective.
Then, there’s the FBI. Check out this intelligence assessment they put out in 2006. It basically reports that white nationalists and skinheads have infiltrated police departments across the nation; from the neo-Nazi gang formed by members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to the Ghost Skins—racist cops who don’t overtly display their beliefs in order to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.
And it goes on and on. In fact, the earliest forms of organized law enforcement in the US is the slave patrols that tracked down escaped slaves and served as overseers assigned to guard settler communities from native Americans. I’m tellin’ ya—ethnicity-based policing ain’t something new. It’s at the core of our American heritage!
So, am I saying all police are white supremacists? HELL NO. But given the rooting of the city’s history with white supremacists and the KKK, given the macro-generational diffusion of Nazi intellectuals into the US after the disgrace of Germany’s loss, given our nation’s history with chattel slavery and its direct link to the origins of our policing institutions, given the trans-generational racial anger that arose from our loss in the Vietnam War, given the history I’ve outlined above, and that 19 second video, I think I can fairly say that there isn’t a sociologist in the world that would disagree with the assertion that…
…too many Americans who wear uniforms are driven by racially socialized tribalism and said racially socialized tribalism stems from our beginnings as perpetrators of genocide of the country’s indigenous peoples via the Doctrine of Discovery, on up to chattel slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Civil War, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, to the tragic aftermath of the Reformation period, the Civil Rights movement of the mid-century, to the anti-white racism gaslighting of the 70s and 80s, on up to… the January 6th Insurrection (or the recent SCOTUS ruling upholding the voter suppression efforts of Arizona just yesterday).
Am I wrong?
For more on this horrible matter of supremacy in American policing, check out Steve Volk’s article, The Enemy Within.