In a fast-trending headline from Minnesota, Alex Mingus points out hard truth about America:

‘They don’t keep us safe. We keep us safe.’ Good Samaritan criticizes police as he accepts award from St. Paul cops.

Mingus then gets right to the business end of the problem.

After Interim Police Chief Jeremy Ellison gave Mingus the award, Mingus took off his sweatshirt to reveal a T-shirt that read, “Smash White Supremacy.”

He said in an interview Monday that he wore it “because the police are one of the strongest arms of white supremacy in our world. They started as slave catchers and they haven’t changed much. All that the police do is protect rich white people’s property.”

Protect rich white people’s property? Mingus suggests it’s undeniable how slave catchers rebranded as police, thus making America into long-running white police state.

This seems right. It helps explain, for example, why a “Black lives matter” movement that emphasizes the importance of human life runs into opposition from angry whites who demand violent police protection for… just property.

General Sherman even warned about this exact thing as he demonstrably tried to end a Civil War in what the brilliant military thinker described then as the most humane way possible: his soldiers burning rich white racist people’s property to the ground in order to stop them from expanding and perpetuating a white police state that killed Black people.

“They set a thing on fire, glass was broken, property damage is unacceptable” is what slaveholders said in the Civil War. And it’s what today’s rich white people seem to bitterly complain as if proving Sherman’s moral warnings right.

Mingus is giving us insights into why rich whites from the 1800s and today would completely downplay a depressing fact that Black people needlessly are being killed by police who claim a mission to protect property.

To make a finer point, many white people in America (especially billionaires from South Africa born to German parents who grew up profiting directly from Apartheid) don’t seem to care for Black people’s lives at all unless those Black people can be treated as owned property (e.g. slavery is the foundation of tipping culture).

History obviously plays a key influence and even may be an accurate predictor in these matters.

If we don’t see governments taking active measures to move away from racism, showing up with evidence of anti-racism, then expect to see more racism.

For example, the state of Minnesota was undeniably founded on systemic oppression and exploitation. Despite that they’ve allegedly engaged in some hard work of reversing their legacy. The police chief’s award ceremony in St. Paul for the clearly anti-racist Alex Mingus is just one example.

However, Kansas City (Missouri, really, which was founded with the aim of expanding and perpetuating slavery) has an even worse history than St. Paul, Minnesota.

…slavery in western Missouri was often just as brutal as elsewhere in the South. […] Intimate relations… [caused] the worst forms of physical and psychological abuse. […] Owners continued to rely on slave patrols to monitor slaves’ movement but now sanctioned extreme violence as they worked to control an increasingly unruly slave population. [After] regular slave patrols became unreliable, many owners turned to Confederate guerrillas, who ruthlessly helped them maintain slavery.

And on that point, to date western Missouri has shown sparse if any signs of anti-racism or undoing their “ruthless” method for perpetuation of slavery (as opposed to say very obvious work in eastern Missouri)

Western Missouri police actually seem to be on the opposite end of the spectrum, the wrong side of history: stand accused of repeatedly and clearly perpetuating, enabling and ignoring slavery practices, if not simply failing to stop them.

Ten years ago a hostage crisis was exposed, which centered on a central Missouri group that captured a runaway woman to enslave her for many years.

Bagley allegedly forced the girl to sign a “sex slave contract” and branded her with an “S” tattoo for slave as well as a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for slave. Bagley allegedly told the girl that the sex-slave contract “never” ended, according to the indictment. Bagley then allegedly “beat, whipped, flogged, suffocated, choked, electrocuted, caned, skewered, drowned, mutilated and hung” the girl to enforce the contract… [in a] home indistinguishable from its neighbors save for the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag flying from a pole in the yard. […] The woman’s nearly seven years in captivity ended in February 27, 2009, when she had a heart attack from the electric-shock torture and was hospitalized.

Seven years a hostage. How did Missouri police miss this gruesome slavery case, in the heart of a region created to expand and perpetuate slavery?

Fast forward to 2021 and a Kansas City police officer was accused of systematically exploiting and raping black women for decades.

Golubski, whose investigation led McIntyre to prison, faces allegations in a lawsuit that he used his police badge to exploit vulnerable Black women for sexual favors and coerced some of them into fabricating testimony to clear cases he investigated. In at least one instance, he is accused of repeatedly raping a woman whose children he’d promised to help get out of legal trouble.

You have to keep in mind that “coerced” testimony is a huge deal, because Kansas City police used it to systemically oppress Black people.

In 1994, Kansas City, Kansas, Police arrested Lamonte McIntyre for a double homicide he didn’t commit — sending him to prison for more than two decades before he was finally exonerated. […] As it turns out, the only evidence police had to charge McIntyre was his first name, and the coerced testimony of two eyewitnesses.

In other words if the white supremacist police force even catches wind of your name, you are at risk of being sent to prison for decades for crimes you didn’t commit.

Trust is non-existent in this environment, given that being identified by Kansas City police at all immediately brings life-threatening risks.

We need to get into the gruesome details for a minute to see just how widespread and common the abuse of Black women is; an unbroken connection to Missouri’s deep history of slavery practices.

During two days of sworn depositions, S.K. detailed rapes, beatings and being forced to crawl on her hands and knees while wearing a dog collar. Her allegations led to federal charges for retired KCKPD detective Roger Golubski. […] S.K. asked for breaks and needed tissues as she detailed a period of her life beginning when she was in middle school. S.K. asked for breaks and needed tissues as she detailed a period of her life beginning when she was in middle school.

A white police officer was directly engaged in slavery of black girls, depicted as “rapes, beatings and…dog collar”.

The first point here is that a dog collar and beatings are relevant and important to other stories surfacing in Missouri news, coupled with police failure to investigate.

The second point is “across state lines” because that again brings us to… Missouri. While S.K. escaped and survived, testimony indicates other victims may have been killed and their remains hidden in the river on the Missouri side.

The third point, and I want to make this very, very clear is that police dismissed important reports of modern slavery in Missouri as untrustworthy.

At one point, S.K. said she told her aunt. At first, she was supportive. The aunt forced S.K. to go to the police department. S.K. said she was scared and refused to get out of the car. The aunt went inside without her. S.K. thought “that day in the car was going to be the last day that I would ever feel any pain from this man.” But again, S.K. was let down. When her aunt returned from inside the police department, she was angry. “She said that I lied,” S.K. testified. “That’s a good man of integrity. He wouldn’t jeopardize his job…”

Here’s a sobering thought. His job also wouldn’t be jeopardized if he had compromised the police force into collaboration. Police detective Golubski doesn’t seem to be an individual acting alone.

Testimony from victims describes many police officers involved with him, and how he described himself as region-wide “boss”.

The racism is so pervasive in Kansas City that schools in 2021 were literally fielding petitions to bring back slavery.

Nearly two weeks after a racist petition to bring back slavery circulated at her daughter’s school, Julie Stutterheim is still angry. She says it was yet another example of a racist incident at Park Hill South High School in the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri.

Was the petition started by the Kansas City police department? Seems likely.

Speaking of starting trouble, do you know who won the war to end slavery? White people with white skin did.

General Grant was white obviously. So was Sherman. Celebrate them, right?

White racists falsely grouse they are worried that if they celebrate anti-slavery acts of white people (e.g. Grant destroying the KKK) then somehow that will make them hate white skin.

Holscher has been getting emails over the past couple of months from White parents complaining that they are worried about their kids being taught to hate their White skin.

Being taught to hate racists means you can still love white people, because those white people were and still are anti-racist.

It’s really that simple.

This is important context for the next chapter now unfolding in Kansas City. The police department refused again in 2022 to investigate reports of slavery.

And then a Black woman in Kansas City escaped… from a white man holding her as his slave.

Missouri [hostage detained with a dog collar] who escaped house of horrors told rescuers that sicko killed two of her friends

Remember the dog collar?

Killing two of her friends suggests this slaver also is a serial murderer, which was exactly the kind of warnings that Kansas City police tried to dismiss.

TONY CALDWELL: I am a little upset right now. The reason I’m upset is because we got four young ladies that have been murdered within the last week here off of 85th and Prospect. We got a serial killer again. And ain’t nobody saying nothing. CHANG: The Kansas City, Mo., Police Department called these reports, quote, “unfounded.” But a horrific discovery is now raising new questions.

Why did the police refuse to properly investigate reports of a serial killer? They set out to silence and push back the community, more specifically to undermine protection of Black women who were being victimized as a systemic level.

The Kansas City Police Department made a statement addressing the community testimonies and called them “completely unfounded rumors,” dismissing the concerns. Local news outlets followed suit, in essence, silencing any ongoing community voices which maintained concern of the missing Black women.

One would think given the high profile Golubski case that “unfounded” would be exactly the wrong word for police to hang their hat on.

The Kansas City Defender highlights how local newspapers breathlessly parroted the word “unfounded” into public relations, allowing police to ruthlessly chill concerns about a serial killer.

As the story unfolds now, Kansas City police look a lot like Golubski again — actively denying evidence about modern day slavery, that was in fact accurate and of an emergency nature.

“That was the description of the guy we were talking about and that was the location we said they were being taken from. That’s exactly what we were telling people. I’m just sorry that it took so long, but I’m grateful that she found a way out. I’m sorry people didn’t act on it sooner, and it’s absolutely tragic that the other young ladies didn’t make it. It’s horrible.

Golubski should be the back story to every single article on this new case. His outrageous abuse of Black women appears to be something of a norm in Missouri political circles, not an exception — state-sanctioned slave catchers obviously drag their heels on reports of Black women being abused by white men (including by the slave catchers themselves).

Is anyone really looking into whether the police were actually involved in this case and covering it up like Golubski would have done, not just turning a blind eye with “unfounded” comments?

The Kansas City Defender asked the police how “completely unfounded” was an exact phrasing chosen by police instead of something more like “no evidence” (opening the possibility of more evidence).

We base our investigations on police incident reports of criminal activity. We do still maintain that there is no indication that what you guys reported was accurate and there was no indication that there was anything that supported that claim. We share what information we can publicly, many times from the scene, of incidents of violent crimes when there is a report or an investigation underway, there had and has not been anything that corresponded to your reports on social media and the web which is why we refuted that report and said that the claims were unfounded.

This response reads to me like it was written by the disgraced detective Golubski himself, it’s so tone-deaf, patronizing and ruthless.

Kansas City police are basically insinuating that if Golubski doesn’t file a report on himself enslaving a Black girl then it can’t be investigated as a crime.

After all, anyone saying they have an absence of evidence does not mean they have some kind of evidence of absence. “Unfounded” was the wrong word given that reports were based in something… which turned out to be TRUE.

Kansas City police seem deeply implicated in the systemic disappearance, torture and death of Black women.

When you think about an epidemic of missing Black women in America it makes it all the more depressing. For police to sit back and do nothing, claiming an absence of evidence in the face of a national crisis, sounds like police sealing fate, pounding the nails into innocent victim coffins.

Data from the National Crime Information Center found that 19,545 Black women ages 18 and over went missing in 2020. Nearly 71,000 Black girls ages 17 and under went missing last year. “The numbers are spiking,” Natalie Wilson, a cofounder and the chief operating office of Black and Missing Foundation Inc. (BAMFI)… As with hate crimes and harassment, vulnerable communities may not come forward to report missing cases out of misunderstanding and fear. A common misconception is that people need to wait a specific amount of time before reporting a missing person. But this is not the case.

In conclusion, there seems to be a systemic problem in Missouri when you look at the quantitative and quantitative reporting of racist crimes against women there.

And while that problem is clearly related to deserved mistrust and confusion in police reporting procedures, a far more troubling question that nobody seems to be reporting in this new story about an escaped slave is whether modern-day white supremacist threats to national security (even serial killers) are in fact collaborating with police…

…something that Alex Mingus just warned us about in his police award ceremony.

America’s brutal history of state sanctioned violence against women of color is not just history.