A week of the US paying for police brutality training, the UN admitting Israel might be committing a war crime and more police being deployed to the NYC subway

Hi, I’m Marcela: I’m a comedian, I live in Brooklyn, and I really like to tell people how to feel about the news. After wowing zoomers all over on TikTok by giving them news with a sense of humour and anarchy, I decided to start a weekly Sunday newsletter to share my feelings about more news. 

My newsletter has evolved into this beautiful news column for shado which also covers international news. I hope the newsletter keeps you informed and makes you laugh a little. We live in hell and I believe humour helps keep this place a little bit cooler.

I’m sharing my feelings about states in the so-called USA paying for police brutality training, UN says so-called Israel may be committing a war crime and more police being deployed to so-called New York City’s subway. 

Onto the news… 

News that made me say brutality is taught

Police departments in 46 states paid for police training that encouraged police brutality against anyone who was not a white cis man which explains why police are so good at being racist and violating people’s rights. You have to be trained to be that evil. No one is born like that. Unless their name is Netanyahu or Biden. I’m sure their first words were YAY settler colonialism!

Police being trained to be brutal proves once again what I and everyone else who has been screaming “abolish the police” over and over again into the abyss have been saying. The police’s purpose is to maintain a racist patriarchal transphobic economic hierarchy, not to keep us safe. If the police were here to keep us safe, they’d be getting training on how to dismantle settler colonialism. They’d at the very least be helping us roast Joe Biden on the internet. 

I’ll be honest, when I first read the news that the police were paying a company money to teach them how to brutalise us, I was shocked. I thought that this was already part of the police academy training. I didn’t think they needed extra training. However, after further thought it does make sense that the police would need a reminder on how to maintain their brutality skills. Even doctors have to take a recertification test to prove they’ve maintained their skill set. 

What’s extremely upsetting about all this, other than the police brutality part, is that we are paying for this. We are paying for police officers to go to a conference where they are taught that constitutional rights are just suggestions. I’m not a fan of the constitution because I will never be a fan of anything written by racist white men. However, it seems to me that avoiding the constitution and the law isn’t something that requires additional training. Donald Trump does it every day and you know that man hasn’t ever been trained to do anything. 

Why do police need to be trained at all? Why do we need to pay for them? If the purpose of the police is to be racist misogynistic enforcers, why doesn’t the government just go to a MAGA rally and sign up the first 1000 people that show up for police service? MAGA people already have guns, racist uniforms, and enjoy racism, so the government doesn’t have to use our labour to fund them. They’ll do it for free! 

It would make me feel better knowing I’m not paying for my own oppression. However, letting a bunch of self-funded racists become the police would make it clearer to us what the police’s real purpose is. Hence, in order to keep tricking us that the police are here to keep us safe, they make us pay for their racist training. It would never make sense for us to pay for something that harms us, right? Unless we live in a dystopian nightmare where we’ve been taught the police are good for us and marijuana is bad for us. Which we do! 

News that made me say let’s get real

The United Nations said so-called Israel starving Palestinians in Gaza may be a war crime of deliberate starvation. I had to pull out my thesaurus and double check whether “may” was synonymous with “definitely”, “for sure”, “absolutely”! It’s not, so “may” is the wrong word to use for this situation. “May” is what you use to inquire about whether Trump’s hair is real. Trump’s hair may be real? “May” is not what you use to describe what the occupying Israeli government is doing to Gaza.

What the so-called Israel is doing to Palestinians is absolutely a crime in every single category of crime. It’s a war crime. It’s a crime against humanity. 

It is really frustrating watching an international organisation that supposedly cares about human rights refusing to definitively call out Israel for its crimes. No, I’m not expecting the United Nations to send a text to Netanyahu stating can you please stop starving people, you genocidal monster. Though I think they should. I am at least expecting them to say yes, Israel is committing a war crime. If you can’t say that starving people to death so you can steal their land is a war crime, what are you doing? At this point it seems like flat earthers are more in touch with reality than the United Nations.

Only someone who is completely out of touch would see the videos we’ve seen and say maybe this is a war crime. Even if the United Nations doesn’t believe in collecting evidence through doom scrolling, there is evidence from their BFF, the World Bank, that says, “half the population of the Gaza Strip is at imminent risk of famine”. Famine caused by Israel treating aid trucks like people who are trying to get into an exclusive night club. 

The UN secretary general has said that so-called Israel needs to immediately let aid into Gaza before it’s too late. So why say it “may” be a war crime? I know it’s because there hasn’t been a trial blah blah blah, but we are past all that. At some point can’t we just say fuck the made up bullshit and get real. I know getting real is not in the United Nations’ vocabulary because they would have to rename themselves the United Nations for Maintaining Colonialism.

I’m just tired of living in a world where institutions hide behind institutional procedures to protect the powerful. Someone with a tight fitted suit wakes up every morning, goes to their job, and refuses to call a thing a thing because the suit is sucking up some of their soul. The suit tells them yes, I know what you see with your eyes. However, if we went around calling out world leaders for being genocidal monsters based on what we see, then we will have to find them all guilty of every crime.

News that made me scream into the abyss…again

The so-called New York City police commissioner or as I like to call him, Martin Luther King’s nightmare, announced that the NYPD would be deploying 800 police to “battle” fare evasion on the subway. Obviously the best way to “battle’ fare evasion would be to make public transit free but that would mean we live in a world where things make sense, which we don’t. Why solve a problem with a solution that is good for everyone when you can come up with a non solution that is bad for Black and brown people! 

Over 90% of subway arrests are Black and Hispanic people while Black and Hispanic people are less than 50% of the city’s population. To which Eric Adams responded, that’s exactly why we should do it! Eric Adams read the book Animal Farm and he has been using it as his manual for leadership. He thinks he can do racist things without us calling him out for it because he is Black. Well, I’m here to tell you that I see right through your KKK robe Eric Adams.  

The reason why most subway arrests happen to Black and brown people is because policing is racist. Wow, who would have thought that a system created to enslave Black people would be racist? Me, says Eric Adams as he cheers on the cops in the subway. 

The racism in policing in this case looks like most of the police presence being in predominantly Black and brown subway stations. I can anecdotally attest to this by saying that the subway station where I definitely do not hop the turnstile never has cops because it’s in a neighbourhood with many running shops and coffee shops aka it’s a white neighbourhood. 

Additionally, the police are more likely to arrest people for subway evasion in predominantly Black and brown subway stations than they are in predominantly white and Asian subway stations. It’s almost as if the police wake every morning with the goal of being racist just like I wake up in the morning with the goal of not screaming into the abyss. I fail every day but the police succeed every day. 

In addition to being racist, the fare evasion enforcement punishes poor people for being poor. To which Eric Adams laughs with joy! Eric Adams became mayor to maintain a socioeconomic racial hierarchy and he is doing so well at it he might be promoted to governor of so-called New York state. 

Last but not least, the fare evasion enforcement doesn’t actually save the city money. In 2022, it cost over 150 million dollars in NYPD overtime pay to catch fare evaders costing a little over 100 thousand dollars! Give me a second while I scream into the abyss.

So yes, the purpose of the police on the subway is not to battle fare evasion or keep us safe. It’s to maintain the great American values of racism and hatred of poor people.

I took a break from the news to share a video of my first thought when I wake up every morning. 

@feelthenewswithmarcela My thoughts when i wake up wvery morning #leftistsoftiktok #leftistsoftiktok #standupcomedy #standupcomedian ♬ original sound – Feel the News

See ya later,

Marcela