There’s a horrible person by the name of Alan Swinney, a 51-year old member of the so-called “Proud Boys,” who was just sentenced to ten years in jail for violent assaults against demonstrators in Portland, Oregon who were protesting the George Floyd murder.
Swinney was found guilty of “shooting a man in the face with a paintball gun, and he discharged bear mace on multiple occasions — spraying some people directly in the face — and aimed a loaded Ruger .357 magnum handgun at a crowd.”
Swinney, who describes himself as a “white nationalist vigilante cowboy,” was associated with ex-President Donald Trump’s “MAGA” movement. I’m so glad he’ll be stuck behind bars for years. What I want to talk about here, though, is how prosecutors characterized his actions: Swinney “instigated and committed violent acts under the banner of free speech and pro-police sentiment.”
We members of the Coalition for a Better Oakland are also pro-police. There are some people out there who say that we’re rightwingers, if not outright Trump supporters like Swinney, because of our pro-cop stance. Our opponents would like nothing better than for the public to identify us as Republican neo-fascists. That is a lie. It can’t be stressed enough that our Coalition is strictly non-partisan. I have no idea how our 250 members vote, nor do I care; I, myself, am a proud Democrat. I would be very resistant to a far-rightwing “Proud Boy” or anyone of that ilk being in our Coalition, and would oppose it with all the forces at my disposal. What all our members have in common is respect for the police. Being pro-cop isn’t a Democratic thing or a Republican thing, it’s an American thing.
Speaking of Portland, I read about a Black city councilman up there whom I admire a lot. His name is Mingus Mapps, and he’s “nudging Portland to a more centrist — and controversial — position on police funding.” Mapps defeated a so-called “progressive” in his election; he wants the City Council “to pump more than $5 million back into the Police Bureau” to boost hiring. He has no love for the Black Lives Matter protesters who have devastated Portland in recent years. “If you’re breaking windows downtown in order to somehow improve the lives of Black people, I can tell you as a Black person that doesn’t improve my life one bit.” Don’t you wish our City Council had truthtellers like Mingus Mapps on it? Maybe after the next election, we will!
Needless to say, Mapps’s forthrightness has earned him enmity from some quarters. The Associated Press quoted a guy named Bobbin Singh, founder of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, whose website says its purpose is “to re-imagine and transform our criminal justice system,” which means, of course, to defund the police. “The question before us,” he said, “is not that complex. It’s binary. Either you support racial justice or you don’t.”
Ridiculous oversimplification. Thank God these defund-the-police types like Singh are being repudiated across the country in election after election. They remind me of those Japanese soldiers who refused to believe their country had lost World War II. Some of them hid out in caves on Pacific islands for decades, waiting to fight Americans in battles that never happened. They died in those caves, delusional to the last day of their lives, while the world moved on.
Steve Heimoff