How America Exports #Police #Violence Around the World | The New Republic
▻https://newrepublic.com/article/158297/america-exports-police-violence-around-world
... the police response to the protests has illuminated what Smith calls an “unmasking of American exceptionalism,” in which the policing practices that we’ve exported to other countries have been newly exposed as they’ve been deployed on the streets where we reside. The antecedents to our recent experiences can be dropped like pins all over a map of the world. For instance, as Schrader relates in his book, before tear gas was used on protesters in the U.S., it was used in Vietnam “as an offensive weapon to target people”—not as a tool for de-escalation, he says, but one of “suffering,” because it targeted innocent bystanders. “If a war logic is structuring our police forces, then what we’re seeing on the streets is exactly what we play out in other countries, in our relationships to other countries,” said Smith.