A Los Angeles City councilmember furiously criticized the Burbank Police Department after security video appeared to show two officers dumping a homeless man in front of his field office on Thursday.
“I am extremely livid today,” Councilmember Paul Krekorian said.
After pulling up to the curb on Lankershim Boulevard near Weddington Street in North Hollywood, the officers uncuffed the man after he got out of the back seat. Then, the man dropped to his knees as the officers drove away. Krekorian said the man appeared to be having a mental health crisis.
“Without giving any aid to this person,” he said. “Without determining if there was anyone who could provide services to this person. They dumped him in North Hollywood.”
Krekorian’s staff tracked down the man about seven hours after he was abandoned. He told them he was homeless and had a broken leg.
No, I’m not talking about mass migration generally. I am talking about specific people taking specific groups of people and utilizing power to either move that group or prevent them from moving, in order to intentionally do harm to a completely separate third party.
The weaponization aspect, specifically. After thinking about it further, I can put it in a historical context. It could be similar to driving peasants into a medieval-era fortified city before you besiege it, in order to put greater strain on the food supplies. Or perhaps if Attila the Hun had intentionally driven various tribes ahead of him in order to weaken and destabilize the Roman Empire.
It may be defensively oriented as well, you have the old European tactic of putting Jewish communities in the pale of settlement, creating a buffer between potentially hostile states and any citizens they might care about.
That said, it’s at least as old as settler-colonialism.