Yeah, it’s a newish hashtag answering some of the Blue/White lives matter trolls like Rudy ‘99% of blaks r killed by other blacks’ Giuliani, Joe ‘this is war, watch out’’ Walsh, ‘super-predator’ sort of stuff, as in: ‘they didn’t matter in this case, or in this time’. The racists and racialists have hit it hard already (“#blacklivesdidntmatter when 2,000+ shot each other in #Chicago this year (so far)” and worse.
Often asked since ‘Dallas’: Is it a race war? No, of course it’s bidness as usual for the police state against the Rabble Classes, who just so often happen to be black, red, or brown; and the hits keep on comin’.
My guess is that most of you have read far more than I about ‘the lone wolf sniper’ who was once upon a time: four snipers ‘triangulating’’ (baaad geometry) in a conspiracy, and maybe you’ve seen or heard actual police evidence that supports the claim of the cornered sniper that he wanted to kill whites, especially cops’, and the report that his ‘home’ was full of bomb-making ingredients or equipment and such, but having suspended my belief as far as anything the police say…well, I’ll wait for the movie. The dispatch video I played at the Guardian sounded just like a Three Stooges sketch to me, even accompanied by film of overweight ‘serve and protects’ running the wrong way after shadows. “No! Over here, fukkit!” stuff. Brilliant. Oh, yes; and weren’t we told The Sniper had committed suicide? Followed by: ‘Just kiddin’; we blew him up with a mech w/ a bomb on board! Due process? Just best practice, see?’ (And dead men tell no tales, unless by way of an autopsy, irrelevant here.) But yes, my cynicism just might be warranted.
Post ‘Dallas’, perhaps we’d all wondered if the police state protestors and BLM would be too timid to hit the streets again; by all accounts: not, thank goodness. And the military hardware has been out again in force, including sound and water cannons, in many cities. Arrests were epic, and not all were…without police violence.
I know I shouldn’t keep piling on poor Debutante-in-Aspen DeRay McKesson again, but remember the Orchestrated Pulse piece (and some at TRNN) noting that none of the on-the-streets protestors had ever seen DeRay? Well, the Guardian featured news of the early protests in Baton Rouge, and…there was DeRay, in a semi?-staged-looking portrait, a non-cropped version of this one in ‘How the tech industry is exploiting Black Lives Matter’. Anyway, all of the implications made me laugh, including the fact that McKesson used to say that ‘Twitter IS the revolution’.
I’ve rounded up a few things for your consideration.
‘FBI Greenlights Crackdown on Black Lives Matter Protesters’The FBI is using the actions of a lone gunman as a pretext to attack the Black Lives Matter movement., by Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, (civil rights litigator at the Partnership For Civil Justice Fund (justiceonline.org), also published also at Alternet).
V-Hilliard quotes some of the Chess Master’s equivocations post ‘Dallas’, and post recent po-po protests, then:
“But the real truth is that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, under the Obama administration, are continuing to fuel and encourage a repressive crackdown on peaceful demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights and moving for social change in America.
Last weekend, Baton Rouge’s African-American community was repeatedly assaulted by the police as people attempted to peacefully protest the killing of Sterling. The Baton Rouge police were given the green light by President Obama’s FBI to approach this peaceful protest as they would an enemy force. This has been the dangerous pattern of the FBI and other federal law enforcement efforts in the past few years: to suppress social movements in coordination with local police departments.
The police treated Baton Rouge’s black community like an enemy rather than Americans exercising the cherished rights. President Obama spoke about the right to assemble and redress grievances, but the message that the protestors were the enemy was broadcast by the FBI.
The FBI’s New Orleans Field Office circulated an alert to local law enforcement on July 7 titled “Violence Against Law Enforcement Officers and Riots Planned for 8-10 July 2016.” This document consisted of a few unsourced and inflammatory images that appear to be screen grabs from random social media postings. No such riots took place anywhere over the weekend, and despite widely circulating that the peaceful demonstrators were bent on violence, not a single law enforcement entity cited any credible evidence of such a threat or plot. But the bulletin gave local law enforcement—implicitly or explicitly—the green light for repression.
She links to a PCJF investigation into federal monitoring of the Occupy Wall Street and a similar PCJF investigation monitoring of School of the Americas Watch.
“No one should believe for a second that that this vital tradition of protest is going to stop. On the contrary, it is growing. The question is whether the FBI and other federal government law enforcement agencies are going to use their vast authority and power to set up pretexts justifying one confrontation after another with grassroots movements seeking change. That path will succeed only in intensifying polarization and ever-graver conflicts. Such tactics will not succeed in extinguishing social movements, whose existence is caused by unmet needs, racial and economic disparities, and the absence of justice for so many.”
Bill van Auken at wsws.org said the same: This was what obama should have said in ‘Dallas’:
“Asking me to speak here is like asking a murderer to deliver a sermon for his victim. The bloody events of the past week, from the police killings that have sparked nationwide protests to the gunning down of the cops here in Dallas, are either the direct product of, or blowback from, the policies pursued by my administration and that of my fellow war criminal sitting here on the stage beside me.”
This Guardian quote is the one that pissed me purple: ‘Barack Obama calls for peace at Dallas memorial service for five police officers’; President pays tribute to officers killed last week and says in tackling issues facing nation: ‘We ask police to do too much … and ask too little of ourselves’
Seriously, where would one even start the book-length polemic in answer to this upside-down platitudinous bullshit, you flaming comprador actor?
But it was great seein’ Dubya & His Homies at the service havin’ a little party (as Laura looked at him sternly), wasn’t it?
I’d imagine it was this sort of rubbish that had caused Ted Rall to draw the decidedly retired Godwin’s Law cartoon below:
“Obama called for action to stop the conflict between police and protesters and black and white, admitting previous approaches, including his own, are failing.”
Ya think?
“I’m not naive. I have spoken at too many memorials in the course of this presidency,” Obama said. “I’ve seen how inadequate words can be at bringing about lasting change. I see the inadequacy of my own words.”
He added: “I understand how Americans are feeling. But, Dallas, I’m here to say we must reject such despair. I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem.”
In Bill Quigley’s ‘Baton Rouge: “Put Those Damn Weapons Down!”, the author is quoting General Honore’s attempts to stop police and Guard violence as he entered New Orleans in 2015 to ‘direct the military recovery’ post-Katrina. His lenghty narrative shows how far from that ‘command’ police are now, especially since…Dallas.
In “Robot Cops Are Racist, Too, by Elliot Sperber, the author not only indicts the first-ever extra-legal assassination by robot (drone) and the breath-taking implications of that, but makes the case after the larger clip below that “dismantling police brutality, racism, inequality and poverty in general requires more than simply reforming or even dismantling the police. It requires dismantling the root of the police – property relations.”
“Not only violative of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (which ostensibly protects people from deprivations of life, liberty, and property absent due process of law), the killing of Johnson illustrates the degree to which the decisions of the police function (much like the decisions of sovereign dictators, in the notorious Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s schema) as the law itself. Extending from the exceedingly militarized, and excessively empowered police, coupled with the ongoing, unaccountable murders of mostly people of color by police, this virtual martial law suggests that the so-called global war on terror has materialized domestically in the hardly hyperbolic form of a racist dictatorship of the police.
Although many may deny it, it is nevertheless a fact that, as an institution, the police is racist through and through – irrespective of whether or not particular cops harbor racist views. This is because, among other reasons, as an institution the police is an appendage of the larger institution of property. And property, in the US at the very least, is inextricable from racist dispossessions, and reproductions, of wealth. That is, in addition to manifesting other aspects of domination, property is racist.”
(the rotten Commie…)/s
In his ‘The President Is Wrong About Dallas, Wrong About Race’, Wm Boardman deconstructs and calls bullshit on Herr President’s comments on ‘the racist hate crime by a lone wolf sniper’.
If I have my dates right, these killings by police were after ‘Dallas’; obviously there were others. Killed y Police on Facebook has 617 corporate media accounts since Jan. 1, 2016 of them:
#TylerGebhard
#VincentValenzuela
#DelrawnSmall
#PedroVillanueva
#CaineRogers
more news of note:
Keegan Stephan Jul 9: Man Who Filmed #EricGarner Death to Be Jailed After NYPD Abuse: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Man-Who-Filmed-Eric-Garner-Death-to-Be-Jailed-After-NYPD-Abuse-20160707-0024.html …
Just in from Valerie Jarret and the White House (in part):
“In recent days, we have been flooded by requests from Americans asking what we all can do in our day-to-day lives to take on our challenges and maintain the unity brought by grief.
Is there anything more American than that — ordinary citizens from every corner of the country asking what they can do in their communities? As the President said in Dallas, that’s the America I know — an America that’s never seen a problem it can’t solve.
Yesterday, the President brought together law enforcement officials, civil rights leaders, activists, faith leaders, academics, and state and local elected officials to discuss these challenges and how we can all take steps together to build trust and ensure justice for all Americans.
And tonight, President Obama will keep the conversation going about the challenges we face — from racial inequality to how we build trust in our communities.
The President will host a town hall where he’ll hear from officers, parents, students, and families affected by the violence of recent weeks. Participants will raise important questions, search for answers together, and most critically, seek to understand the different realities each of us face. We will all be able to learn a lot from their example.”
‘Central to this effort is implementing the recommendations of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing….ha ha hah…ha.
Good night, and Good Luck. The Hypocrite-in-Chief is Bullish on ‘Conversations, isn’t he? Pfffffft. Reign in your FBI and cops! Make sure the killer kops are prosecuted! De.Mil.i.tar.ize them! Oh, yeah; you’re outta here, aren’t you?
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
among a lot of good stuff, nice on the sperber. gets to the root, imo. everybody, everybody in this society knows this cuz if you tell a story of a certain looking-person crossing the wrong side of the street, tracks, or town, & cops showing up to escort them back to the right side, w/most extreme prejudice, necessary or not. everybody knows this is true, though no doubt would try to deny it, hem and haw about some bad apples or whatever. this is THE function of the police; getting kitty out of the tree & acting as school crossing guard is all window dressing.
btw, i’m content to believe the police are full of crap in a fire fight & act like cowards just like the rest of us, make false statements, misidentify things, etc., etc. and that mr. lone shooter spent time in the heroin wars in afghanistan & came back ptsd’d to the gills or tim mcveigh pissed off & went on a rampage. however, i just point to the false flags of sniper fire in maidan square in kiev & in the 2011 uprisings in damascus, both of these in the middle of legit (as far as i know) anti-gov’t protests. and perhaps in other places i’m not aware of. the strategy of tension: manufacture or exacerbate conflict b/n disparate groups in order for the actually dominant forces to exert greater control over the conflicts those forces have created or worsened. is that’s what going on re “another shooting” (sic) in Dallas? i don’t know. the capitalist infection is opportunistic, to say the least.
you’ve made me consider again how many folks are considered and called ‘suspects’ by the cops, even while you intimate they might be not only ‘driving while black, brown, in an upscale neighborhood, or going to their own doors in said neighborhood, and are treated accordingly. best practices, yanno. it reminds me a bit of drone assassinations by this administration: if any person could prove posthumously that they were indeed innocent’, their families could get some of the US’s blood money to compensate them.
the sperber was fascinating to me since i’m a newbie as far as marxist thought or anything close. i wish i could remember some of these essays better, but one or two of them had mentioned ‘white cops’ as the enemy. clearly, that’s not correct, in that many black cops have executed black, brown, white, whatever, citizens. the larger point is yours: when a cop zips on the uniform of those protecting capitalist property, they are just the enforcers, period. we see studies claiming that ‘otherwise good cops’ are highly influenced by those they’re with on some ‘operation’ or other, but it’s hard to tell.
that may get us right back to the ‘few bad apples’ just spread the rot. yep, whoever wrote that crap rhetoric for O made it sound like ‘let us get those kitties outta trees’; we don’t want to contend with craziness and violence. sure, most cops are terrified, so they shoot first…just in case. and the experts who testify in their defense trials have gotten great at showing that truth, and ballasting the scotus decisions that have allowed them to act with almost total impunity.
it’s gonna get bad out there. the drone will likely become ubiquitous, the oppression and military responses to protesting will get more ‘full metal jacket’ (if that’s the right expression). w/ the attacks in europe, surveillance will get ramped up. heh. i just read a piece via pop resistance warning people to be awful damned careful writing about this stuff online and in social networking.
i can’t help it; even tho the link is to pierre’s place, this is on topic and funnier that all giddy-up, the wag:
strategy of tension: speak of the devil…ugh. we are all housewives battered by the evil hubby of the state. sounds like Bruce Schneier would have made a great advisor to the French state in “the battle of algiers.” don’t torture more than necessary, his advice to torquemadas everywhere.
did you click on the tweet to read the quote? close to: “we should be very careful about arresting people for speech.” below that tweet he lampoons: ”
“Torturing people is something we should really really probably almost never do.” and “More from the admirably principled Schneier on jailing people for thought crimes: “We should do it better.”
so yes, you nailed it; how silly of me…clearly you’d read. swear i’ll learn to read one day soon… ‘strategy of tension’, yes, a great concept, thanks, >>> manufactured consent as Truth, repeated often enough>>>reified.
dunno about recent ‘dallas’ and jfk, but when you corrected me on saying the sniper killings we in LA, i thought…why hadn’t i associated it? so what is the buzz they’re selling?
that “strategy of tension” thing is not mine, of course. “playing all sides & in bed w/everyone.” taking the dallas sniper thing at face value, is the connection w/JFK that both are (supposedly) an “assault on the State” itself? no doubt. but perhaps there’s, well, not read meat, more like a teaspoon of bacon bits, for the more “conspiratorially” minded? “it’s just like JFK!” but who knows what’s up w/JFK? saying “it’s like JFK” is an empty signifier that gets certain people’s wheels a-spinnin?
on France, people really need to watch Battle of Algiers to be reminded the French gov’t is an old hand at this kind of crap. just how does a guy load up some kind of big work truck w/ explosives and no one notice?
nope, i didn’t know it was your construction, but wiki says: The strategy of tension is a theory that Western governments during the Cold War used tactics that aimed to divide, manipulate, and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, and false flag terrorist actions in order to achieve their strategic aims.”
yes, ouch. i looked at the imbd of the film, it sounds they narrated the atrocities against the liberationists well, and didn’t fall into the trap of romanticizing the protagonists. it’s on youtube: 2 hrs worth. ooof. subtitles, no doubt.
the op-eds are mushrooming now, and ive read a few good ones, but this is a fascinating analogy: ‘The “Fundamentalism” in Police Operations’, by Steve Martinot
he gets a few things wrong, imo, in his attempt to paint with a wide brush, but makes a great case that ‘the police’ (writ large) is a fundamentalist religion, self-congratulatory as hell, in ‘saving’ secular civil society from violence. he of course goes back to the police-constructed ‘criminal’s failure to obey as total justification for assassinating him/her.
but it’s sincerely worth reading.
operation: gladio is the prime example of the strategy of tension. are we in a gladio b? many americans would resolutely refuse to believe what the CIA & NATO got up to in gladio.
anyway, Martinot: i think it’s interesting, but i don’t quite buy it. i think it’s b/c the specifically religious component is missing, the State actively recruits psychopaths, cop is a job not a religious worldview, the promise of reward is not the Gold Shield in the next life but some pretty tangible rewards here & now (theft by cop now exceeds things like purse-snatching, mugging, etc.), cops aren’t quite as immune to cynicism, irony, and self-parody, at least older ones. a religious fundie never, ever laughs at his fundy-hood. i think the sadistic, machismo part of being a cop is a huge deal. not all religious fundies are political in the jihadi sense, and those that are, i think, view themselves as rebels against some kind of political status quo. in their protection of property rights, cops are status-quo conservatives
maidan was easily gladi 2.0 or more, dunno about damascus, but probably (i just haven’t followed it enough to have much idea about the events, agitprop an players there. for you and thd, though, i’d grabbed this tweet from wikileaks earlier; you may be able to make sense of it. not i.
i see i steered you wrong, given that martinot was speaking of the po-po culture being fundamentalist, analogous to religious fundamentalist extremism is as per roy’s book review. wider than christianist religions, i’d imagine the book analyzed it. but i think it fits in a lot of ways, especially with the police unions, and the arrests for thought crime and ever-burgeoning ‘anti-police’ us/them binary social construct.
“It is almost as if they were operating as a fundamentalist sect within secular society, a sect that says, either you are for us or against us’. It is in religious fundamentalism that we find a strong confluence of separation from society, a self-determination of universal truth allied with an assumed purety (sic) of thought, producing an insistence on living according to rules and ethics strongly at variance (if not antithetical) to those of surrounding society.”
“…Roy’s description of religious fundamentalism as follows. It is a separation of religion from culture, brought about by the negative impact on religious life of a secularization of society. The secularizing process isolates the fundamentalists, who respond to the broader cultural milieu as “other” through a process of self-insulation and cultural purification.”
still don’t buy it 100% but it’s a useful analogy to think thru. the police officer is not the same thing as the air force cadet, but hasn’t xian fundyhood (evangelicalism) permeated the USAF? and there is def a lot of that going on quite literally w/in copdom as well. one, well I, starts seeing intersections b/n fundyhood & fascism. hurray! go godwin jason! in any case, in US 20th c history, for much of the century, religious fundies believed & preached RETREAT from political society, somewhat cloistered away quasi-cults awaiting Jeebus the Great Smitemeister upon the sins of the failed promised land, New Sodom. homogenizing culture ovetook them. it’s not absolute of course. nobody retreats from anything in this society. as one country wag says in the movie version of “Elmer Gantry,” “i get drunk 3, 4 times a year. then i go get saved. both of ’em duz me a world of good.”
love the gantry quote. ;-) yes, cadets in the springs were ‘reported and disciplined’ for not attending christian worship on sunday, although i forget the sect or flavor of the services. not ted haggard, lol. and some cadets were etching bible verse chapters and lines on their freeking bullets, which meant they were definitely feeling part of a modern crusade.
the police fundie extremism as per martinot wasn’t gawd-based religion so much as a belief system whose rules, tenets, and even language separate them from ‘secular’ (civil) society. now that those police were killed in ‘dallas’, the meme is out there that ‘yep, the ferguson effect’, and the unions are going batshit crazy about the fact they are now ‘being hunted’. and there is some weird self-congratulatory thing along with it, akin to: “the few, the proud, the latrines!” oopsie, i meant ‘marines’.
there were several things i disagreed with, like his contention that government is powerless to stop them from their hideous missions and killing soooo many citizens, esp. people of color (in his lexicon, or did he say mainly black?).
i’m not sure where you were heading on the retreats being overtaken, etc., , but one of the great retreat cults to my mind is the LDS church. although i’d have to say that by now, a mormon girl can get pregnant while unmarried…and not be banished; that’s a good thing.
kind of OT, but wth is up w/the continual comparisons b/n the recent dallas thing & the JFK assassination????? another article again today at NYT discussing this.
Such a great town hall meeting. Erica Garner’s question sidelined.
The very interesting thing about Obama’s speech at the memorial service in Dallas is that, unlike his rhetoric and delivery at the memorial service in Charleston, he played white mainstream Protestant religious themes and styles. How very Dunham of him.
Dallas has a police department supposedly in the midst of “reform” and yet this Robocop action comes with the police chief’s initiative or approval. Now, I hear that New York’s Police Department is also in the midst of reform.
But the result that some wanted, the stoking of a race war has not yet happened because of the President’s pandering and anodyne statements. Of course, he refused to be the skunk at the funeral of the representatives of the thin blue line.
Which begs the question. Was Governor Greg Abbott grilling and exploded a charcoal starter can or what is it that happened to the Great Secessionist in the midst of the racial tension.
But now we are Americans together once again fighting terrorism in revenge for what happened on the French Mediterranean coast. Socialist President Francois Hollande extends the suspension of the Rights of Man on Bastille Day. Does that not say how far into the crapper Western Civilization is? And the siege of Mosul is about to begin.
Meanwhile, the daily protests in Chicago have continued and the police are upping the charges to felonies to try to shut down freedom of speech and freedom of assembly–preferring more the freedom to not be heard and the freedom to be ineffective.
holy smoke, you watched? for you it may not have been punishment-gluttony; for me it would have been. erica garner’s question sideline, eh? i’d read a blurb that said they just couldn’t figure out on what charges the cops could prosecuted. BS in a bottle.
i did read that he threw bible quotes around liberally, and took some skewering again (paul street, maybe) for doing so after throwing jeremiah wright under the bus.
yep, dallas’s new black top cop was reforming the dept; same thing in SF when another man was murdered for failing to obey just after dallas (iirc).
NC gov just signed a bill giving the offishull okey dokey to keep cop cam videos from the public. the ‘reform or close’ rikers calls caused the jailers to get tasers and something else.
felonies, more? jasmine richards was the first; she’s still out on bail. ironic about socialist hollande doing that on bastlle day; ya couln’t make some of this stuff up.
i got waylaid by family phone calls and emails, but b is narrating the coup attempt in turkey. i never watch the news, so i was shocked to hear the prez’s name is pronounced ‘erd-o-wan. ;-)
i’ll be back, but there’s an alleged military coup afoot in turkey.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2016/jul/15/turkey-coup-attempt-military-gunfire-ankara
https://www.rt.com/news/351345-turkey-coup-military-ankara/
more serious than Nice, Dallas, etc. NYT says, “how will this affect Erdogan’s support for the war against ISIS?” i spit up coffee on that one. maybe some in the military revolted cuz they are tired of him supporting ISIS? NYT also now identifies Erdogan as “Islamist” in a headline. so *now*, he’s an Islamist? we are all in the devil’s propaganda toyshop in this country, ain’t we?
now i may have this wrong, but doesn’t everyone w/ a laptop or smartphone know that he’s been supplying IS (etc) with oil for their lorries? but on ‘islamist’, the wiki says he came from an ‘islamist political background’, not that folks can’t change entries…
he’s claimed that the gulenists (sp) were behind it; an hey, ho! there’s already a hashtag! https://twitter.com/hashtag/Gulen?src=hash
assange put up some tweets about cia and gulen…dunno.
MoA is indispensable. RT, via CNN, reports that turkey cut the power & sealed off Incirlik air base.
https://www.rt.com/news/351606-usa-incirlik-base-turkey-blocked/
and this: ‘Turkish PM: Any country that stands by cleric Gulen will be at war with Turkey’, reuters
reputed CIA-asset Gulen is in pennsylvania. b/c of course he is. but this statement is a direct threat against the US. as much of a gigantic jerk erdogan is, i give him some credit for telling the US to go stuff itself. who knows whether Gulenists in the military are behind this or not? the statement is still highly significant.
i read b’s ‘why the coup failed’ and the comments spit-balling reasons for it. but some sites are saying that erdogen wants the US to extradite gulen to turkey. i gotta agree with you; this is the funniest tweet i’ve seen so far:
this the potentially most interesting:
wapo, mebbe? ‘read about the long list of PA charter schools gulen ‘inspired’. wot? nah, i dinnae click in; busy day here. but yes, some are saying erdogan is ‘a moderate’.
a writer at NEO suggested that the US losing its airspace and refueling, tra la la at incirlik is by ay of holding the US hostage (my term) until they extradite gulen. but lol:
someone put up a video said to be both clintons having a gay old time ith gulen (i didn’t click the video)
jason, no more room for nested comments up yonder, so i’ll stick this here. i’d forgotten about dave (‘Killology’) grossman’s sense of divine order, but this is a great example of what martinot was alluding to, i think.
“Jeronimo Yanez, the St. Anthony, Minnesota Police Officer who fatally shot Philando Castile, underwent “Bulletproof Warrior” officer survival indoctrination that imparts what one police trainer calls a “paranoid” and“militaristic” mindset.
In May of 2014, reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Yanez underwent a 20-hour seminar on “Street Survival” taught by Illinois-based Calibre Press, which teaches courses on the subject to police officers nationwide. The company’s “Street Survival Seminar” overview displays a monomaniacal focus on that most important of all policy considerations, “officer safety.” It treats every police encounter as a combat situation in which only one life truly matters – that of the government’s armed emissary, not that of the citizen who is supposedly being protected and served by him.
Calibre’s“Bulletproof” lectures are jointly taught by Glennon and David Grossman, a retired Army Lt. Colonel and former Army Ranger who originated the now-common conceit that police and military personnel are “sheepdogs” blessed with the “gift of aggression” and who have a divine duty to deal out violence against “wolves.”
one man who runs a private security company that’s never (iirc) used deadly force says he won’t even hire anyone who believes that their safety comes first. i’d stuck a video of him up once upon a time, and yep, his trainees wore camo clothes, but he and his credo seemed legit to me.