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.

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. With surprising tales of vicious mutineers, imperial rich. 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. Read 217 reviews from the worlds largest community for readers. 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. Blue, with the flag of the UK in the upper hoist-side quadrant and the. 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.” Two equal horizontal bands of red (top) and black with a centered yellow emblem.

Blue and black flag