By Elaine Magliaro

Charlie Pierce wrote a post for his Politics Blog at Esquire about some of the police forces in this country acting like “armies of occupation.” He noted that President Obama was to host a meeting earlier today that would focus on “the problems that we’re having with policing in this country, especially if we are black and come across some nervous cop with an itchy trigger-finger.” Pierce said he thinks that meetings are good…that meetings can help. He added, though, that he thought this meeting with the president was likely to be “absolutely fking useless.”

Pierce:

This is not a meeting that should happen in Washington. In fact, this is not a meeting that should be a single meeting. This is a meeting that should take place in every city and in every town and in every county in America. We have a lot of fun every Thursday with our tour of what’s goin’ down in the Laboratories of Democracy, but there is a serious purpose behind our semi-regular weekly survey. The real damage to democracy, to civil liberties, to economic justice, and to most of the progressive accomplishments of the 20th century is being done at the state and local level. And the people who are doing that damage are the people who one day will be members of Congress. That is the way it goes now. And, while the crisis in our local police forces has been encouraged by policies set in place by the national government, the implementation of those policies has been handed over to local officials with disastrous results.

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