“Law and order” rhetoric was used as a defense for police brutality, and both the rhetoric and the brutality triggered urban rebellions that in turn triggered more rhetoric and brutality. And no one could explain all of this better in early 1968 than a giant of a man and thinker and writer, the former convict turned Malcolm X disciple Eldridge Cleaver, who had become minister of information for the Black Panther Party. “The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the social order,” Cleaver explained. “A conflict of interest exists,
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