The Suicide of “GI Joe” Gliniewicz—A Poster Child for a Non-Existent “War on Police”
November 5, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On September 1, Fox Lake Illinois cop Charles Joseph Gliniewicz died from one or more gunshot wounds. News reports said before his death he radioed that he was chasing three people engaged in "suspicious activity.” Four hundred heavily armed cops, helicopters, snipers in camouflage and dogs launched a massive search for three “suspects”—two white and one Black, in the almost all-white suburb of Fox Lake.
Now authorities are admitting that Gliniewicz killed himself, in fear that he was about to be exposed for embezzling money from an Explorer Scouts program to, among other things, pay his online porn bill. The whole story has yet to emerge, and perhaps never will, but the admission by authorities that Gliniewicz killed himself came at the same time as reports that before his suicide, Gliniewicz tried to arrange for a gang member to put a hit on a village administrator because he feared she would discover he had been embezzling money.
From the very beginning there were indications that Gliniewicz’ death was not a murder. The three suspects who were the targets of the militarized invasion of Fox Lake were detained and released within a week, to almost no press coverage—even as images of the manhunt continued to be invoked to paint police as under siege (see “Exposed! The Real Story Behind a Shooting in the “War on Cops”). When the county coroner told the media that, based on the evidence so far, he could not rule out the possibility of suicide, he was publicly attacked by high ranking police officials who said this was "completely outside of policy, procedure, protocols” that a coroner is supposed to follow. Those attacks on the coroner were given all kinds of airtime and print space in mass media. In light of how this case turned out, those attacks on the coroner stand as a self-exposure of what kinds of policies, procedures and protocols authorities pressure investigators to follow when there is a need for a cover-up in a police-involved death.
Until yesterday, “G.I. Joe” Gliniewicz—as he was memorialized—was a poster child for the fictional narrative of a “war on police.” Thousands of police from around the country and others attended his funeral, followed by a mile-long funeral procession marked with blue ribbons in support of police. The so-called “Blue Lives Matter” movement made Gliniewicz a martyr and a hero. Fox “News” that claimed “In America today the blue uniform has a bull's-eye on it.” But so did mainstream liberal ruling mass (that is—ruling class) media. A USA Today columnist wrote, after Gliniewicz’ death, that his “murder” (this before anyone was even charged with killing Gliniewicz, let alone convicted) was connected to “the rhetoric of ignorance and hate” in the movement against police murder and terror. NBC News featured Fox Lake residents saying things like “I think it’s time we rally around our law enforcement and stop the madness."
The media continued this portrayal even as evidence mounted that he was not murdered, and even as he left a record of all kinds of outrageous criminal activity all over the place. Compare that with how they rush to condemn the victims of police murder as “bad guys,” who must have been doing something wrong. How they dredge up irrelevant gossip and bullshit about the victims, and promote the authorities' story no matter how absurd unless or until a video completely exposes the police as liars (and even then—as in the case of Eric Garner—the media acts to whitewash police murder).
The Gliniewicz incident concentrates the way the ruling class media routinely promotes the myth of a “war on police” regardless of evidence. And at the same time they vilify victims of an actual reign of police murder. That pattern is in synch with, and serves a genocidal agenda of a ruling class carrying out mass incarceration, police terror, and un-punished murder by police.
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