![]() ![]() Levy Armstrong was charged with multiple misdemeanors for participating in a 2014 Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall of America that drew thousands of people. "It was a very hurtful decision to fly a flag that for many has represented oppression, has represented silence amongst police officers and the thin blue line that they do not cross when it comes to police misconduct and abuse," she said. On Thursday, Levy Armstrong said she expects more from Busse, someone she knows from the years they worked at the University of St. 6 attack on the Capitol - and say it should no longer be flown. ![]() Law enforcement leaders in some communities have defended the symbol, while others have said that its original meaning has been co-opted by racists and insurrectionists - a version of it was carried at both the Charlottesville, Va., "Unite the Right" rally in 2017 and at the Jan. The debate in Bloomington comes amid others across the state and nationwide over the appearance and meaning of pro-police flags. We are committed to addressing our mistakes and finding opportunities where we can do better." "We apologize and will be having conversations with members of our community who have been impacted by this. "The City of Bloomington recognizes that the flying of the Thin Blue Line flag has caused much pain in our community," the statement read. Hussein asked Busse to apologize and for the Bloomington City Council to pass a resolution banning flying the flag.īusse issued an apology in a statement released Thursday afternoon. ![]() "If your constituents are telling you and the council that the flag is racist, offensive and openly hostile, why did you even consider flying it in the first place?" Loyd said at a news conference Thursday alongside community members and activists, including civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, CAIR-MN Executive Director Jaylani Hussein and NAACP Minnesota President Angela Rose Myers. Furor in the streets has given way to tense negotiations over municipal budgets, but despite a few modest efforts to curb police budgets and reassign nonviolent duties to other city departments, the overall dynamic, across a country riven by state violence, has remained largely static.A flag flown in support of law enforcement at Bloomington City Hall this month was an insult to residents and a tone-deaf gesture in a year dominated by calls for police reform, a group of activists said Thursday.Ī version of the "Thin Blue Line" flag that features a blue line across a solid black background was raised for one week starting May 16 in recognition of National Police Week, a move Mayor Tim Busse shouldn't have taken, said Tahm Loyd, a member of the Bloomington Antiracist Coalition. They operate as islands, their derision for the populace they purportedly protect on full display. Their mentality is flag-draped, all noblesse oblige and wounded besiegement, but their actions are those of armies accountable only to their own leadership. They are protected by " law enforcement officers’ bill of rights" laws in more than a dozen states, which cushion them from the legal fallout of felonies and abuses by the egregious doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields them from lawsuits against constitutional rights violations by unions that embrace without qualification the worst offenders in police forces and exercise considerable power over municipal governments with both flush finances and the implicit threat of a heavily armed and punitive membership. The blue line is both a border and an elevation, hanging above the threat that needs to be eliminated. According to Jacob, the blue line both divides and saves: It separates the black stripes representing civilians above it from the black stripes below it, which represent criminals, a distinct category from people worthy of protection. flag in a stark photonegative scheme, save for a broad line of blue. The flag, which has gone on to earn its creator’s company, Thin Blue Line USA, a healthy living selling related merchandise, literalizes this vision: a U.S. The phrase “the thin blue line” is older, perhaps first popularized in 1922 by New York City police Commissioner Richard Enright, who used the phrase to describe police as “that intensive battle line, the first line of defense against criminality.”īy the 1980s, the phrase had gone fully mainstream, propped up by a symbiotic relationship between increasingly powerful urban police departments and sympathetic media in Errol Morris’ 1988 film of the same name, a judge told the camera that police were “the thin blue line that separates the public from anarchy.”
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