How Minns laid the groundwork for Monday's police brutality + some lighter bits and pieces
Cheek's recap on the week that was.
What a week, hey. The irony does not pass me that the theme of my last three newsletter introductions has been the insanity of the news cycle. Perhaps we should accept that this is the new pace of things - though for the sake of our collective wellbeing, I sure hope not.
For those of us in Sydney, the gravity of the news hit particularly close to home this week. Thousands witnessed first-hand the shocking police brutality deployed against peaceful protestors at Town Hall on Monday night. If you weren’t there yourself, you probably knew someone who was.
Until this point, many (white) people on the left understood police violence as a real but distant concept - something weaponised against criminalised minorities, not something that played out en masse and indiscriminately in the CBD streets. It goes without saying that what we saw on Monday is not new - certainly not for First Nations and refugee communities - it’s just that on this occasion it was at scale, and there were thousands of people with smartphone cameras at the ready. Still, that the NSW Government was willing to sanction and stand by this level of force, all the while telling us that what we see is not real or ‘out of context’, is a terrifying indication of where we are headed. Check out this week’s Decoding the Discourse section for Hannah’s explainer on how Minns set the legal context for this to play out.
That horror aside, there have been some lovely pockets of joy this week, community solidarity being a big one. Bad Bunny’s history-making Super Bowl performance also made that cut, as did a silly little Cheek Valentines meme brainstorm to cap off our Thursday afternoon - keep your eyes peeled for those to be posted later today…
That’s all from me today. Hope you have a wonderful, love & community-filled weekend.
Kalila Welch, editor of Cheek Media Co.
