David Forbes • Feed
avatar
David Forbes @davidforbes.bsky.social

Awhile back, wrote a reality check on cops and gun laws based on my experience investigating them. Here's some of what I've witnessed. The full piece: www.patreon.com/posts/realit...

As a journalist I've investigated police departments for over 20 years. The reality is that they will not enforce gun laws against white supremacists, the far-right or the kind of abusive guy that makes up 95 percent of mass shooters on any scale that matters. They do not do so now and they won't in the future. A few of the things I've seen: • A ton of guns, drugs and money go missing from a police evidence room. There was a full-court press to downplay this. The former evidence room manager was the only one ever charged. He claimed he'd only taken small amounts of drugs and acted alone. He received an incredibly lenient plea deal and spent less than a year in prison. • A bunch of rifles disappear from the sheriff's custody. Said sheriff — later convicted on extensive federal corruption charges — absurdly claimed he'd buried those rifles in the walls of the new jail. The architect called b.s. on that, but the issue was never seriously investigated and the guns were never found. • Cops downplay the former county Republican party chair's son opening fire on a Pride party. Miraculously, no one was injured. He got minor charges. • At the same time the same police department was engaged in a prolonged racist p.r. campaign to falsely blame Black neighborhoods for gun violence. This included claiming every report of a shot fired in a Black part of a town was a “shooting,” even if no one was shot. Meanwhile the aforementioned attempt to massacre a crowd of queer and trans people didn't even get a press release. • Police brag about confiscating a legally-held gun from an unhoused person fleeing domestic violence. They did this just because they could, and mocked the very real threat of violence the survivor faced. • Multiple law enforcement agencies let the far-right — including literal klan members — go armed whenever they wish. They do this even when it violates the law (which in N.C. takes some work). On the rare occasions one of the far-right gets charges it's only after significant public backlash. These are usually minor. Later they are often quietly dropped entirely. In at least one of these cases the main deterrent to a fascist opening fire was the presence of a handful of armed anti-racists. By contrast to their treatment of the klan the police hit them with charges, some blatantly false, the very same day. This is far from a complete list.
dec 5, 2024, 1:01 pm • 81 35

Replies

No replies