Support the Police Beat Yourself Up – FUNNY POLITICAL BUTTON

Support the Police Beat Yourself Up – FUNNY POLITICAL BUTTON

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This design goes out to all those Occupy Wall Street protesters everywhere!  I like this cool design because of the obvious incongruity of juxtaposing supporting the police and beating oneself up.  While the police are part of the 99%, they are also tools for the 1% to enforce, typically selectively enforce, laws that will protect the power of the 1%.  Dealing with nonviolent protesters is not something for which the police are typically well-trained. Police routinely rely on militaristic methods for crowd control and social control.  Police brutality and abuse is a natural outgrowth of this approach.  Presumptively having the law on their side, as the enforcers of laws, police can shield themselves from accountability and overreact to peaceful demonstrators.  Fortunately, one of the purposes of nonviolent demonstrators is to expose the inherent violence in the system, and the front lines of this is often law enforcement and the military.  Of course, when police overreact and use violence to quell peaceful demonstrations, denial of doing anything wrong, a refusal to be accountable for one’s actions is typically the first response.  This only highlights the gap between the immense responsibility that police have to behave well and the reality that the socially sanctioned possessors of violence can get away with violence much easier.  Suggesting that a protester beat themselves up preemptively is a way to highlight the farcical notion of the purity of law enforcement and violence to control other people.  Rather than law enforcement officers receiving harsher punishments for “unnecessary” violence, it is rare to see police prosecuted successfully for such misbehavior.  Maybe we should expect that such misbehaving police should regulate themselves, and that they should beat themselves up!