Quick post with a few thoughts because I'm out the door...

First off, history is just rife with stories of the police conducting extrajudicial killings, slaughtering union protests (i.e. the Ludlow Massacre), using paramilitary force and deputizing local thugs.

Where do these clowns go when they retire? To work "security" at Goldman Sachs and for people like Donald Trump or land in cush jobs doled about by their corporate masters for their on-call protection while they were in uniform.

Here's a bit on our current NYPD Commissoner. a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/bratton-de-blasio-after-kil...">"After the Killings, Bill de Blasio and Bill Bratton Now Have the Most Critical Relationship in New York"

When Bratton was a young beat cop in Boston, he policed civil-rights and antiwar demonstrations in which de Blasio could have easily been a protester. (“No, I would have noticed him, he’s so tall,” Bratton says with a laugh.) These days, Bratton spends his off-duty time with one-percenters who he says disdain the mayor; de Blasio’s downtime is more likely to be spent sweating in souvenir T-shirts at the Park Slope Y.

Baldwin 1966 article " A Report From Occupied Territory"

 Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco—is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.

This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.

Seems pretty self-explanatory to me? I suspect that those trying to confuse the issue of Black lives actually mattering to public servants of all sorts are using anything they can to distract from the fact that Black lives actually DO matter, should matter to public servants of all sorts - and that in reality they do not matter to those who are supposed to be protecting them and serving their interests.

Only a banana Republic allows so many of its most easily identifiable as likely vulnerable (non-billionaire and therefore worthless in real money) citizens to be ever-so-casually falsely arrested, wrongly fined/imprisoned, beaten and killed without repercussions to the perpetrators in many cases, indicating tacit approval or, as with Hillary, even spoken approval of a Mayoral perpetrator in the cover-ups of police murder of citizens - who happened to be Black.

Lol, think I need a break; recently read something causing me to spit nails...

Edited to add, obviously not aimed at you, dkmich!

Actually, they're arguing about a hashtag that became a movement. Since the hashtag was known and said the essentials, why not keep the name everyone knows? Especially by now?

Edited to add that people's lives matter all the way through, and that in a wealthy democracy, all people have a right to a decent one with decent pay for decent housing, decent food and other necessities once common to most within industrialized democracies, without discrimination, harassment or a hail of police gunfire, the latter only being a more final abuse among many.

We all know that any American of Colour has a better chance of being discriminated against than most other assumed-to-be-poors - right up to being murdered by police for Existing With Naturally Darker Skin and I really am not comfortable with arguments about the name of a movement against the common and often consequence-free outright murder of identifiable population segments by those being paid by their tax money to protect them.