Same As It Ever Was

With the events in LA over the past week -- particularly the borderline inherent ability of the police and the military to radically escalate otherwise peaceful situations by both instigating and inciting violence -- I thought I'd share a collection of politicial cartoons from from the late 1960s and early 1970s. If you were unaware, the police forces in the United States are a direct descendant of slave patrols from the 1700s. The people who were charged with re-capturing enslaved people and beating them into submission before returning their all-but-dead bodies back to the plantations they escaped from. The police force as we know it in the United States was born out of violence, and the notion of "to serve and protect" was very much limited to the wealthy plantation owners who paid them.

The notion of excessive police brutality is not new, and these political cartoons from roughly a half century ago show it carried on through the 20th century. And that these cartoons still resonate a half century after they were made shows it carries on to today.

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