One more key and urgent lesson from yesterday's insurrection in the USA

There is one more lesson from yesterday's insurrection in the USA, one that has been made clear through the recent BLM protests and over decades beforehand: police have been infiltrated by far right wing extremists. 

(Given the apparent gross incompetence of US security/intelligence organisations - who either ignored or missed weeks of increasing online chatter , one has to wonder whether that also spread into the FBI, NSA, etc.)  

It gets the most attention in the USA, where it is possibly worse than anywhere else, but recent decades have seen two competing trends in policing: 

• an increase in hardline militaristic us vs. them thinking; and
  
• force commands keen to bring police into modern expectations of inclusivity and diversity, so they better reflect the communities they are meant to serve .  

In addition, there has always been the inadequately acknowledged mental and emotional scarring of policing, which I have covered previously. 

My opinion is that the scarring enables the spread of authoritarianism trends, trends which are exacerbated also by things such as police oaths etc putting order before law. 

There were some police yesterday in the USA's capital who were complicit in the execution of the insurrectionists' plans - and may, for all we know, have helped in the clearly extensive preparations. 

Others actually did their jobs - as best they could given the treasonous lack of preparation. 

There is a need, in the USA and Australia at least, to see how far the evil of white supremacy has seeped, and root that evil OUT. 

This is nothing new. 

In Australia, one former politician talked about how he prevented police murdering a suspect back in the 30s; in the USA, no whites were killed yesterday - just as no whites were killed despite the widespread violence at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, although at least two black people were killed by police in that city during that period on flimsy pretexts. 

Here in Victoria, police aggression and bias at mid-level have resulted in some communities (including mine) having extreme distrust of police - to the extent that police no longer have the social licence they need to operate. 

Either police fix their problems, or the community finds an alternative way to meet its needs - but NOT vigilantism, which is just another expression of the mob rule we saw yesterday. 

Get rid of extremism, bigotry, and bloody-mindedness ... or be defunded. 

It is also important to keep in mind that this problem is not limited to nations like the USA and Australia: the killings and abuses committed by police in central Africa are equally appalling, and, in fact, given their lethality, worse. 

Police everywhere need to remember they are there to protect and serve communities - not their bigotries.