Hector and the Search for Happiness, Quote 4

‘Death to the infidels!’ Why it’s time to fix Hollywood’s problem with Muslims

We all know that today's war is more of a media war than the good, old war with weapons. As the article correctly points out that what's happening in Middle East, what's happening in Muslim-majority countries around the world due to the world's sense of security & misrepresentations of Muslims countries as full of lecherous, evil, gun-toting Muslims, & the treatment of Muslims in Western countries is down to one fact only, which is that Hollywood movies have a big contribution in destroying the reputation of Muslims as responsible citizens of their countries, wherever they reside.

This narrative of all Muslims being evil is so ingrained in public's mind, with the help of media & Hollywood, that when Hollywood tries to tell a good story, like "Lions for Lambs," or "Redacted," the general public shun those movies, & those movies do horribly at the box office & later on, as rentals. The Western public wants to see Muslims being labelled as evildoers. That's why, movies like "American Sniper," & TV shows like 24, Homeland, & Quantico do great in the West.

Then, these same Western countries decry violence against Muslims in their own countries, & complain that Muslims in Muslim-majority countries seemingly hate them. That's their hypocrisy. Why make such movies, shows, & news media, which depicts Muslims as nothing less than barbaric individuals & then complain that Muslims don't like the Western public. Actually, Muslims are very forgiving people that they watch those movies, know that they are being discriminated & misrepresented, but still, they are not out to kill & hurt people in the West.

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/mar/08/death-to-infidels-time-to-fix-hollywoods-problem-muslims

Great convo w studio execs in LA. Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative,” tweeted John Kerry on 16 February, along with a photo of himself in a Hollywood meeting lounge with executives from Universal, Warner, Fox, Disney, Sony, Dreamworks and other big players – overwhelmingly middle-aged white men in suits.

One can’t help imagining there were some awkward moments to this “great convo”, though. Especially if Kerry queried what Hollywood had done to counter the “#Daesh narrative” so far. Even more so, if he asked what juicy counter-terrorism stories they had coming down the pipeline. Looking at the current output, such as Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Rock the Kasbah and London Has Fallen, you could easily get the impression that Hollywood is part of the problem, rather than a potential solution.

If you accept the notion of a “war of narratives”, it’s an area where the extremists have done most of the running. Still ringing in Washington’s ears and heading its PowerPoint presentations is the declaration the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri made in 2005: “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.” Isis/Daesh has been sending a steady stream of video content on to that media battlefield, the relative sophistication of which has filled western commentators with a mix of horror, concern and admiration. The US and its coalition partners have floundered over how to respond.

Kerry’s visit to Hollywood comes a month after the State Department revamped its Countering Violent Extremism programme. Since 2010, that role had been performed by the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC); its counter-messaging often leaned towards counter-productive messaging. One of its strategies, for example, was to engage directly with Isis jihadists on Twitter, but that only served to legitimise their voices. The CSCC also put out a parody recruitment video, repurposing Isis’s violent propaganda footage and broadcasting it under the seal of the State Department. “Run, do not walk to Isis land,” ran the text of the ad. “Travel is inexpensive because you won’t need a return ticket!” As the TV satirist John Oliver remarked: “You are banking a lot on any potential militants understanding that that is sarcasm.”

“If our message is that Daesh is a criminal organisation that represents a distorted view of Islam, the US government is not the best conveyor of that message,” says Richard Stengel, undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the State Department. “The best conveyors are local people and Muslims and clerics and NGOs. So, rather than be in the business of doing tit-for-tat tweets with Daesh, we realised that we have an expertise in funding and messaging. What can we do to empower, amplify, optimise the messaging that’s out there already? That’s the central paradigm shift.”

This is by no means the first time in the 21st century that the White House has turned to Tinseltown. Just a month after 9/11, George W Bush’s top adviser, Karl Rove, convened a similar council of movie execs for a counter-terrorist pitching session, although it apparently came to nothing. There was no discussion of putting government propaganda into movies, it was reported. “Content was off the table,” said Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Pictures Association of America.

Content was also off the table at Kerry’s Hollywood trip, it appears. “It wasn’t about asking them to make an Islamic Harry Potter,” says Stengel. “It’s not like the cold war, trying to insert positive narratives into movies. It’s connected in the largest possible way to defeating Daesh. It was an opportunity to talk to these people who shape content around the world, who shape the American brand around the world. An opportunity to go to them and say: ‘What can you do to help?’ in what [Kerry] has called the generational struggle of our time.”

But if Hollywood has any meaningful role to play here, content is arguably exactly what should be on the table. Throughout its history, American cinema has employed a lamentably narrow set of stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. “They’ve been the most vilified group in the history of Hollywood,” says the academic and author Jack Shaheen. His book Reel Bad Arabs surveys some 1,200 depictions of Arabs and Muslims in the movies. By his estimation, roughly 97% are unfavourable, coloured by orientalist myths, racist demonising and xenophobic paranoia. “At most, three dozen or so had balance, or what I would call positive images. In the rest of them, Arabs are either terrorists or shady sheikhs or people you would not want to associate with. Those images continue to pervade our psyches.”

There are too many egregious examples to list. Selected highlights would include True Lies (Arnold Schwarzenegger versus fanatical yet incompetent Palestinian terrorists, who detonate a nuclear device in Florida), Protocol (Goldie Hawn becomes concubine to a lecherous oil-rich sheikh, so that the US can build a military base in his country), Network (“The Arabs are simply buying us,” rails Peter Finch’s rebel presenter), and 1998 thriller The Siege (in which Arab-Americans are rounded up after a New York terrorist attack. The critic Roger Ebert wrote: “The prejudicial attitudes embodied in the film are insidious, like the antisemitism that infected fiction and journalism in the 1930s”). And special mention must go to William Friedkin’s 2000 thriller Rules of Engagement, in which Samuel L Jackson’s marine goes on trial for massacring a crowd of Yemenis, but is exonerated when it turns out they were all gun-toting evildoers, even the women and children.

Rules of Engagement was “probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs by Hollywood”, protested the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee at the time. But then 9/11 happened and things became even worse. Old-fashioned Islamophobia is still thriving, as demonstrated by current release London Has Fallen, in which Gerard Butler saves the world from yet another brown-skinned, detonator-happy terrorist with an Arab-sounding name, and dispatches evildoers with lines such as: “Get back to Fuckheadistan, or wherever you’re from.” Meanwhile, counter-terrorism-themed TV series such as 24, Homeland, Sleeper Cell and NCIS reiterate the “all Muslims are potential terrorists” notion, with the added point that they’re on American soil now. “Hollywood and television have created an even more dangerous precedent by vilifying American Arabs and American Muslims in particular,” says Shaheen. “They’ve blended the old stereotypes from ‘over there’ with new stereotypes from ‘over here’.”

When Hollywood has made attempts to address the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts directly, the casualty list has been high: Lions for Lambs, The Messenger, Stop Loss, Green Zone, In the Valley of Elah, Grace Is Gone, Redacted – all of them flopped at the box office. Even The Hurt Locker, with its Oscars and all-round acclaim, was greeted with widespread indifference by the American public, taking just $17m (£12m).

Only a handful of Afghanistan/Iraq films have struck a chord with US audiences: Zero Dark Thirty, detailing the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, made $95m domestically; Afghanistan action thriller Lone Survivor made $125m; and overshadowing them all is Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, based on the real-life Navy Seal Chris Kyle, who holds the record for the most kills in US military history. It took more than $350m, making it the highest grossing movie of 2014 in the US.

When viewed through the prism of “countering the #Daesh narrative”, these movies make uncomfortable viewing. Zero Dark Thirty took a relatively nuanced approach to the war on terror, but controversially depicted Arabs being tortured. Both American Sniper and Lone Survivor narrowly focus on US military personnel and their efforts to kill nameless, faceless “bad guys”. Wider questions about American foreign policy, or how ordinary Afghanis and Iraqis felt about being invaded, are sidestepped in favour of heat-of-the-battle immediacy. In its opening minutes, American Sniper gets in the “all Muslims are potential terrorists” trope, as Kyle guns down a woman and a child who both try to attack US troops (the attack did not happen in real life). It gets worse from there on in. Not that the reality was much better. In his autobiography, Kyle wrote: “I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives.”

These are the narratives the US has been sending out on to this ideological battlefield. Shaheen is not alone in wondering what role they have played, not just in the rise of Isis, but in the decisions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, not to mention the manner in which those wars were conducted, from the high levels of civilian casualties to atrocities such as those at Abu Ghraib. And how can these mythologies not play into the increasingly Islamophobic climate back home? Republican presidential nominees are presently engaged in an arms race of anti-Muslim rhetoric, against a background of vandalised mosques, threats, shootings and general discrimination. Isis’s own atrocities have contributed to this climate, of course, but homespun narratives seem to be fanning the flames. The release of American Sniper triggered a reported three-fold increase in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab threats.

“When you create this fear and it manifests itself in hate crimes, bias and bullying, then it alienates people,” says Humera Khan, the founder and executive director of Muflehun, a counter-violent-extremism thinktank. “Society is telling you: ‘You don’t belong.’ It is reinforcing what Isis is telling them.” Islamic extremists represent, at best, 100,000 people out of a worldwide Muslim population of 1.6 billion, Khan points out, but with the exception of the occasional token “good Muslim”, these are overwhelmingly the ones we see on our screens. She offers an analogy: “Imagine if you introduced someone to white people only by way of the Ku Klux Klan, but then said afterwards, ‘Oh, by way, there are some good white people out there, too.’”

In stereotyping Arabs and Muslims, the US also reinforces stereotypes about itself, Khan adds. Muslims around the world watch Hollywood movies, too – in greater numbers than Americans. “When these movies play in majority Muslim countries, the assumption is, ‘Look: they’re misrepresenting us again.’ So for the average person who’s not interested in Isis, the impression is: ‘America doesn’t like us.’ When you think about Isis’s message, that this is ‘a war against Muslims’, that’s exactly what they’re showing.”

Mirroring Washington’s recent shift in counter-messaging, Hollywood also seems to be taking a different tack: it is now coming at the Afghanistan/Iraq wars by way of comedy. Perhaps the studio bosses looked at their casualty list of box-office bombs and wondered if all that death, torture and moral complexity wasn’t putting people off. Having repeated the history as tragedy, Hollywood is repackaging it as farce.

Rock the Kasbah is an all-too-literal example of this. The movie ... draws on the true story of Setara Hussainzada, a Pashtun teenager who bravely tested post-invasion waters by entering Afghanistan’s new X Factor/Pop Idol equivalent, Afghan Star (women singing or dancing was strictly forbidden under Taliban rule). Hussainzada was already the subject of a 2009 documentary, also titled Afghan Star, but in Rock the Kasbah, she’s discovered in a cave by Bill Murray’s jaded rock promoter. He puts her into the spotlight with the aid of some fellow Americans: a twitchy soldier, two corrupt arms dealers and a sympathetic prostitute, who operates out of a trailer on the edge of town. From a “#Daesh narrative” perspective, they could represent the horsemen of the apocalypse, but the comic tone places the gruesome realities of war well in the background. As one review put it: “Rock the Kasbah gives the impression that the nation’s ideological rebirth would have been impossible without the gumption of a hasbeen music manager learning to shed his cynicism.”

It’s a similar story with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which opened in the US this weekend. Again, the plight of war-ravaged Afghanistan is largely window-dressing for the journey of our war-reporter heroine, Tina Fey, a fortysomething singleton who is pitched into the battlefield and the hard-partying expat “Kabubble”. One character lets the cat out of the bag by describing it as “the most American-white-lady story I’ve ever heard”. A few Afghani characters do get speaking parts in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. One is a clownish local politician, basically a standard-issue “lecherous Arab”, played by the British actor Alfred Molina. The other, Fey’s Afghani helper, Fahim, is that rarest of things: a male Muslim movie character who is intelligent, educated, empathetic and not the slightest bit lecherous. That bad news is he’s played by an American actor, Christopher Abbott, best known as Charlie out of Girls.

There’s more of this to come. Such as War Dogs, formerly titled Arms and the Dudes, about two real-life Miami stoners who made a fortune illegally exporting arms to Afghanistan with US approval – directed by the guy who made The Hangover. It sounds like a cross between The Wolf of Wall Street and Pineapple Express. Then there’s War Machine, in which Brad Pitt plays General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, who famously talked himself out of a job in a profile for Rolling Stone magazine, by expressing his contempt for Barack Obama and his administration. It could be a great satire – and there is certainly a place for those in cinema, when you think back to movies such as Catch-22, M*A*S*H, Dr Strangelove, or even Three Kings or Team America. There have been a plethora of fine American documentaries chronicling this era, too. But again, what does it mean for the battle of narratives?

For Hollywood, it can look like a case of “damned if we do, damned if we don’t”. Either they take a purely US-centric point of view and dehumanise Arabs and Muslims – which plays right into the #Daesh narrative. Or they take a critical look at the US’s military and foreign policy failings – which also plays into the #Daesh narrative. What are they supposed to do?

A good start, says Shaheen, would be to stop perpetuating the same blinkered, divisive rhetoric as our enemies. It wouldn’t take much. “There really needs to be a couple of blockbuster films that squash these stereotypes, as well as some responsibility on the part of our political leaders, who are encouraging voters to hate their fellow Americans. It has to come from the top.” He cites the way Hollywood cleaned up its act with regard to racist depictions of African-Americans, Jews and LGBT characters.

Khan agrees: “If they were just more responsible in their portrayal of Arabs and Muslims, that would actually help the environment on the ground.” What happens on the ground, in Syria and Iraq especially, is obviously paramount if anything is to change, but movies absolutely have a role to play. “Is any narrative going to be sufficient? No. Is this a necessary part of this landscape of needs? Yes.”

Just as the US likes to think of itself as the world’s policeman, it is also unquestionably the world’s storyteller. That narrative supremacy comes with certain responsibilities, now more so than ever.

In the meantime, we can take comfort from the fact that even jihadis can’t resist a good movie. ...

The Function of Police in Modern Society: Peace or Control?

A good read on creation of modern police force. Before the creation of police forces, & their resultant brutality, societies used to take care of miscreants in their midst through a mix of force & rehabilitation. Then came the modern police force, which was created by elites to control the poor masses of the society. I will extend it even further & say that then those elites started to control the government to control the masses, too, & hence, laws are made & enforced in today's society, all over the world, to effectively control the poor public.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL-Hn_XjlS0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: The ongoing debate and protest around police brutality and how best to hold law enforcement accountable generally have one underlying assumption: the police’s role is to serve and protect the population. Police reform advocates are demanding reviewing police practices and increasing accountability through body cameras or civilian review boards with teeth.

A lot of people have told us in Baltimore and around the country that they need police, because the same people that are being affected by police brutality also live in high-crime areas, where policies have created a cycle of violence and the war on drugs is raging, there’s mass incarceration. And these areas are dangerous. People are driven to violence and desperation. And they need police to protect themselves. How do you respond to those arguments? And why do you think it’s important to bring up the history of police when having these discussions today?

SAMUEL MITRANI, ASSOC. PROF. HISTORY, COLLEGE OF DUPAGE: Well, I don’t think that people are wrong to say that we need police. We live in a very violent society with a lot of poverty, with increasing inequality, and all the problems that the society creates lead to more and more violence, the people who are ground up by the system. So I can totally understand people’s desire to be protected from those problems.

But I think the problem is the way that the police system that exists in this country was created isn’t actually to solve those problems. And I think the reason people say they need police is because that’s the only thing we can conceive of, it’s the only answer we’re given to the problems of crime, of violence, and really, I think, ultimately of poverty. But I don’t think the police are a very good solution to those problems. I think we really need to think about other kinds of systems. And I don’t think you could have a society like ours that grinds up so many people and that doesn’t defend itself with something like the police. But I think we need to understand where they come from.

NOOR: And so talk about where they come from, because I think a lot of people will be surprised to learn that the modern police force is only about 150 years old. There was no police force as we know it until the middle of the 19th century. Talk about where they came from and why they were instituted. And also I think people will be interested to know what form of police and law enforcement existed before the modern police force.

MITRANI: Well, I think there’s two different systems, if you’re talking about the United States, that existed in the 19th century. One was a system in the South which was really designed to control slaves, and it came out of slave patrols. In the North, in cities, you got police as a wage labor economy developed.

So I actually want to start by talking about the system that existed before, which is more or less a system of elected officials responsible for enforcing order. But they didn’t have a lot of separation from the population. So you’d have a constable elected in a small town, but that person would make their living by having their own farm. And they’d be called on when necessary. They could raise a posse. But the whole tradition of having a posse was a tradition of having the population itself be organized to deal with a specific, immediate problem–there’s a murderer loose, you know who did it, you have to catch the person.

That’s very, very different from the system we have now, with a military force of people whose professional training makes them separated from the population. They wear uniforms. They are full-time police officers. That’s something which really emerged as you got huge numbers of people in big cities, like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, starting in the 1820s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, who we re no longer linked to the elite.

At an earlier time in the cities, you’d have a whole idea that people could move up. You started off as an apprentice. You could become an artisan. There was a much smaller group of people who were totally separated from that path and the people who were separated from that path, but there was some idea of controlling, didn’t live that far from other people, who were much more embedded in the society. But by the 1850s especially, you got more and more people who really had very little chance of moving up, who were going to be workers their whole lives. And this is especially true of immigrants coming from Ireland, coming from Germany, coming from other parts of Europe at that time in the northern cities.

And so people who were business people, wealthy people, were really scared–oh, man, in this city, there’s a whole huge number of people over there. We don’t know what they’re doing. They’re totally out of our control. They don’t necessarily like what’s going on, because they’re paying them extremely low wages. Many of them are forced into prostitution. So in that situation, elites develop the idea of a police force to put some control on those people.
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Definitely true. And also there’s plenty of racism against free people of color in the North during this time period, who had a better situation than slaves, but it’s not like they were treated equally to the white population, or even to the immigrants at that time. But in the cities like Chicago, their numbers are very small at the time period I’m talking about.

NOOR: And so talk about what was happening. Talk about the social turmoil, especially in the later half of the 19th century, in big cities like Chicago. And even in Baltimore, we had huge strikes here as well, and in New York, of course. So talk about what the turmoil revolved around and why the elites felt so threatened during this time period.

MITRANI: Well, there’s a basic truth, which is nobody really likes having a job. I mean, basically, having a job kind of sucks if what you’re going to do all day every day is go to work for somebody who pays you just enough to survive. You have no chance of owning your own business, which increasingly became true at all these cities–in Baltimore, for sure.

So people resented that, and they organized. And they had a preconceived idea that they were citizens of this republic, especially the white people who had been raised this idea, and they had the idea that they had the right to some better situation.

So coming out of the Civil War you had big organizing campaigns, big strikes, big conflicts over this new wage labor economy. In 1867 in Chicago there’s a general straight strike for the eight-hour day. Then, in 1877, there was a huge strike, which started on the railroads, and it reached big proportions in a bunch of cities across the country.

Actually, Baltimore is one of the cities where it get the most violent. And Baltimore at that time basically didn’t really have a modern police force. And so the strikers were put down with the National Guard. The National Guard came into Baltimore, shot down quite a few people ... . Chicago already had a police force that had been created in the few decades before, with a lot of violence put down those strikes. And after that, the business people who had been suffering from the strikes, who’d been struck, they raised from their own pockets enormous sums of money. In Chicago they bought the police Gatling guns, they bought them artillery pieces, they bought them muskets in order to make sure the population could be kept under control, because they were really scared.
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Now, what’s interesting is, ... , because as this wage labor economy was developing, that was also the time when you had a big increase in crime and you had a big increase in the numbers of people who were more or less pushed out of the system, who had no easy place, no easy way to make a living. So you had more petty crime, you had more prostitution, you had more street crime of all kinds in the late 19th century then you had in the first half of the 19th century in all these big urban cities. And so people also felt the need for some protection from this kind of disorder at that moment.

So, in Chicago, at least in the 1880s, some liberal politicians made an attempt to make the police more serve the population a little bit, reestablish some legitimacy. They did this by providing some services, like taking people to the hospital. They really publicized the things they did that were needed. And they especially developed this new ideology of order, which said what everybody says today: we need the police. They’re the thin blue line protecting civilization from anarchy. And we can’t possibly live without them; otherwise, things will go out of control. And this is something that got reinforced, especially after this Haymarket bombing in 1886, when there was another huge strike wave across the country and in Chicago. There was a bomb that went off that killed seven police officers. The aftermath of that: this idea of the police as the defenders of order and civilization against these crazy anarchists who are class conscious became implanted in a lot of the population’s mind. But there were still lots of people who resisted that, who organized in unions, who organized to resist police brutality (they didn’t use the term then, but that’s what they were resisting), and these people pushed the police back time and again.
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I think it’s a deep problem that there’s no easy solution to. We have a society that rests on violence in 100 different ways, starting with the military overseas with all the people in prisons. And how to keep this huge, violent system in place? Well, you have thousands and thousands of men with guns who are armed and trained to do so. But you also have to make them legitimate.

NOOR: And so, tying this back to today, there’s a lot of well-intentioned, serious activists around this country that want to live in a more peaceful society, and they want police to be held accountable. What lessons of the past do they need to understand to move the conversation forward? ‘Cause right now we’re stuck in a system where people are trying to, some would argue, put Band-Aids over a gaping hole that is the issues we have with law enforcement today, the killing of unarmed black men around this country and the numerous cases of brutality that are ongoing.

MITRANI: ... I think the problem is we live in this kind of society.

I think really that the needs of working-class people and of poor people need to be put first. This country has plenty of money that people shouldn’t be pushed on the streets, which need to have afterschool programs and very fully funded public schools all over the country that can get kids off the streets and give them a decent job. I think it, actually, everybody in the country should have the right to a job that provides enough money that you can live a decent life. This country is perfectly rich enough to have that.

That’s not on the table right now, unfortunately, but if you really want to talk about solving the problem of crime, you’ve got to address the problems that create crime. And I don’t think that the police do that. The police are a system that has violence to deal with the immediate problem created by a criminal right now in front of you.

So what I would say for activists is to push for all these issues and see how they’re related. I think that the more that the needs of working-class people, the needs of ordinary people can be pushed and put first, the more that we can demand the things that we actually need and not accept that the needs of business people and of bankers should come first, the more we have a chance of dealing with the problems in front of us. But that’s not so easy to do.

NOOR: ... I wanted to end with bringing up two points. One is the racial, the historical racial animosity law enforcement has to people of color, especially African-American people. And there were moments where police acted in solidarity with striking workers and the working class, and those police officers were either fired or removed from the police force in other ways. Can you briefly touch upon both those points?

MITRANI: Those are two very big points. The first point, I think, is central to the problem today. I think we had a situation where the police that I first started talking about, that developed in the 19th century, really developed in reaction to the development of a wage-labor economy with immigrant workers. But in the 20th century in the North–in the South the story is somewhat different–really the key story is a great migration of black people into the northern cities to form a key section of the American working class, and then to be the people who are the last hired, the first fired, who face all the problems created by the society first of all. And so the police have been used to keep that population in line, really since the 20 century. And you’ve seen this time and again with the rights in Chicago in 1919 through the ’50s, through the era of the black movement in the ’60s and ’70s, when in Chicago–I’m sure people know about the police murder of Fred Hampton, led by the state’s attorney, to really try to put a lid on that movement. I think the current system of mass incarceration is in part a reaction to that movement and an attempt to get young black people, especially young black men, off the streets. So I think that’s absolutely central to any discussion of this.
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And on the one hand, police are workers. They’re hired to do a job. And that creates all kinds of problems for the police themselves, the same kinds of problems that other workers can face. They can face very difficult working conditions, etc. But the nature of their job kind counterposes them to the population every single day. And I think many police officers start a few people through a very negative, almost cynical lens. I don’t think most police officers don the uniform thinking, what I’m going to go do is brutalize people. No. But what you’re forced to do every day kind of counterposes you to the population. And I think in that context it’s too much to expect very many police officers to side with the population. It would take a real act of bravery for a police officer to do so, and they would face some real repercussions, although it’s happened before. The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League in Chicago is an example of that, when you had a big mass movement and the man named Renault Robinson challenged a lot of what was going on with police brutality in Chicago. I know this story in Baltimore less. But it’s possible. But I don’t think we can ... expect it to be the rule.