We broke up a theft ring this weekend that clearly had a faulty exit strategy. The University of Wisconsin Police Department was hit with criticism from parts of the school’s student body after it posted a tweet in which the flag was seen hanging on the wall in the background of a photo. 9 for Law Enforcement Appreciation Day in a since-deleted tweet. Democratic Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul posted a picture of the flag on Jan. Some agencies, like the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, stick thin blue line decals on squad cars. In Wisconsin law enforcement, it appears that the flag is still seen as a symbol of solidarity and strength for the profession. “I don’t think that’s going to go away, the flag’s not going to go away and probably it will be affiliated with whoever the next kingmaker of the Republican party is.” 6 riots and insurrection, that’s an important moment to say hold on, who’s really interested in law and order?” says Nolan Bennett, a political science professor at UW-Green Bay. 6, the people yelling that blue lives matter killed a police officer as they tried to overturn the results of the presidential election.īut the flag is likely here to stay as a symbol of the conservative movement and its white backlash politics. The protests furthered Trump’s embrace of the pro-police flag, and abdication of the stars and stripes, supercharged the political meaning. The flag’s use as a pro-cop cudgel culminated last summer, when a large and multicultural group of protesters responded to the killing of George Floyd, saying with a collective voice nationwide that cops should stop shooting, choking, kneeling on and harassing people of color. “So, in this way the thin blue line flag kind of steps into the role played by the Confederate battle flag over the past 70 years or so.”
“There’s no question that this flag’s political meaning in the Trump era has come to be a direct response to Black Lives Matter and an interpretation of Black Lives Matter,” says Steve Kantrowitz, a UW-Madison historian who studies white supremacy. The flag was prominently flown alongside tiki torches and other symbols of hate at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. The Black Lives Matter movement has grown in response to the continued killing of Black people by police officers and the flag’s use has grown alongside as a blue lives matter backlash movement spread. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for police to take that stance.” “It very much puts police on the side of an ideology that might be very, very exclusionary and dangerous to significant groups in the United States who deserve their protection,” Meyn says. The blue line represents the division between societal chaos and order, with cops at the center holding back the forces of evil.Įven without the newfound political connotations, the idea that the police are the only thing standing in the way of society decay, can be unhelpful, according to Ion Meyn, a criminal justice professor at the UW-Madison Law School “Pedestrian Bridge Conservative Flag Activist in Minnesota with Thin Blue Line flag in front” By Tony Webster via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0 But the phrase “thin blue line,” has been around for nearly a century. The flag, a black and white American flag with one blue stripe, gained prominence after the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Mo. Among the throngs of angry QAnon followers, militia members and other various flavors of Trump supporters were off-duty cops from across the country.
Police officers were brutalized by people carrying the thin blue line pro-police flag who in some cases used the flag poles themselves as a weapon, videos showed. In the mayhem, one Capitol police officer was killed and dozens more were injured. Capitol - spurred on by the president’s rhetoric, tweets and orders to alter the election results by carrying out a coup attempt. 6, a crowd of violent insurrectionists descended on the U.S. Behind Trump, hanging from two construction cranes, was a massive pro-police thin blue line flag. Yet during this appearance, Trump, the 45th President of the United States, was not standing in front of an American flag. Trump arrived in southern Wisconsin two months after a white Kenosha cop had shot Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, seven times in the back, sparking a renewed round of protests for racial justice in Wisconsin and across the country. In late October, then-President Donald Trump - in the midst of a scorched Earth re-election campaign that touted a pro-law enforcement message and painted him as the candidate of “law and order,” - appeared at a rally in Waukesha.
0 kommentar(er)
