Accountable Policing
The number of executive orders and social media posts flowing from this administration makes it difficult to discern initiatives central to the establishment of fascism. Often, the titles of the executive orders simultaneously attack people and ideas while obscuring their real impact and intent.
One of the first executive orders, issued January 20, 2025, entitled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” illustrates the pattern. This order could easily be titled the opposite: Restoring Censorship and Ending Free Speech. Most legal experts and concerned citizens recognize this order as a tool designed by the administration to “punish its perceived enemies, such as civil servants and researchers who study how propaganda and conspiracy theories travel online.”
Stanford Internet scholar Renee DiResta observed, "What we [are seeing] is right-wing efforts to disrupt research that the right sees as challenging its dominance on social media, reframed as being somehow anti-disinformation research. It's really anti-criticism,"
In the few months following that initial effort to curtail criticism, we have seen a series of executive orders attacking institutions of higher learning, curricula designed to advance critical thinking, and the rewriting of history.
These executive orders are the codification of a barrage of short blasts over Truth Social. Without any constraints imposed by reality or concern for facts, the daily posts offer a strange combination of attacks, feelings of victimization, and policy initiatives.
Adam Gabbatt, writing in the Guardian noted:
No political leader has used social media quite like Donald Trump. But his recent posts on Truth Social, the social media platform he founded in 2021, have become increasingly bizarre: the president using the lack of scrutiny afforded by the platform’s small user base to truly let loose.
In the hundreds of “Truths” since he took office, Trump has variously used Truth Social to reimagine himself as a king and to urge Americans to “BE COOL!” as the stock market tanked in the wake of his trade war, the president’s seemingly random use of capital letters, punctuation and inaccurate spelling consistent across the messages.
Trump’s posts broadly fit into three categories: attacking perceived foes, reposting praise, and posting no-context images or videos of himself, like an elderly relative in a family group chat.
In this atmosphere it is difficult to discern serious initiatives from the constant “noise” of outrageous, cruel, and ignorant pronouncements.
Recently, Trump signed two executive orders that threaten the very fabric of our daily lives and hold the potential to completely alter how we understand our relationships to the use of police powers and local self-determination.
The most dangerous effort is to “protect” local police. It is hard to imagine a more lethal or protected group of people in the United States. As Elie Mystal, writing in the Nation observed:
Holding police officers accountable when they commit crimes or violate the constitutional rights of those they’re allegedly here to “serve and protect” is one of the most difficult things to do in law. The police are protected by powerful, well-funded, and well-lawyered unions. They are protected by the judicial doctrine of qualified immunity, which prevents them from being personally sued for monetary damages when they damage or destroy property or lives. They’re protected by prosecutors and district attorneys who work alongside them and are often reluctant to charge them with crimes. And then, even when police officers are charged with crimes, they are often protected by sympathetic (white) juries who give the cops a pass when they brutalize or harass unarmed citizens. The entire system is designed to help cops get away with crime.
In this atmosphere it should startle everyone to see an executive order entitled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” In the order, using aggressive language, asserting dubious facts, and claiming to protect only “innocent” citizens, the full power of the Federal Government is being directed to defend police officers accused of abuses and crimes, to prosecute state and local officials, and to bring vast federal resources together to police people.
There should be no question that we are witnessing a scaffold for martial law and for the deployment of military power to be used against people who disagree with Trump and his agenda.
In Detroit we have more than sixty years of experience in holding local police accountable for their actions. In the months to come we will need to draw on that experience, on our imaginations, and our courage to exert the control of the people over the forces of destruction.