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.
I’d like to know when weaponized population became a thing.
You have places bussing homeless to other places, creating a sort of homeless person hot potato where they get bussed from place to place.
You have Abbot bussing new border crossers, with no information or instructions, to random cities for political points.
You have Russia trying to push migration westward to economically and politically pressure NATO.
You have people in the Middle East refusing Gazans any exit, leaving them in the line of fire.
Probably more examples, but that’s just a few semi-related ones off the top of my head, of civilians being turned into various sorts of location-based proxy weapons. It seems to me this doesn’t go that far back in history, and is specifically a feature of the modern age. And all of this in the midst of a time when birth rates are declining to a level insufficient to fuel the modern rat race.
Are we (me too) surprised pickahu-ing? We have been told mass migration was coming as part of climate change. You mix in economics and I am thinking this is just the beginning if we don’t start to honestly address our issues.
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.
It may be a modern phenomenon due to slavery being outlawed globally. Traditionally many of the refugees and others you mentioned would just end up as slaves.