He knew it would be stupid to post that tweet. He had actually said to himself, as he thumbed-up the "send" gesture, "It's probably stupid to post this tweet." But he'd done it anyway. He was mad, he needed to vent. The internet would know just how, his joining in with a cacophony of other angry voices. He hadn't given his own concern a second thought at the time, though, nor of the 8chan brigade that immediately descended from the cyber-ether to light up his n-list with death threats, hate speech, his address (or, at least the fake one he spoofed), his phone number (ditto). That was normal. The people who wrote these things were typically hundreds of miles away, where the conservative half of the country had anaphased years earlier. There were, of course, always the stories of young black men, reckless online, being dragged out of their homes, never seen again. But in a world ruled by informed probabilistic behavior, an educated adult worried little about things with a 1/10000th chance of killing you.

  But then he'd gotten the email. The one on his personal account. The account his parents had set up for him as a child, that was only used for official business, that he was to guard more closely than an SSN (after all, it was worth more). The email that included his real address, his real phone number. And suddenly, he didn't feel safe in his apartment anymore. So he'd stayed home from work, begun packing clothes, batteries, replacement s-cells, food; backed up and wiped his home storage, just to be safe. That took too long. It was another thing he shouldn't have done.

  At 6:45 pm, a knock sounded on the door, and a gruff voice announced, "POLICE, OPEN UP," and his heart froze in his chest. This was how it always started. It was a callback to when there WERE police: before the public lost confidence in law enforcement; before their rights to weapons, their unofficial immunity in the courtroom, all of that, was stripped, deemed too dangerous in the hands of an institution rife with corruption and abuse; before departments around the nation, unable or unwilling to face a reality where they had to use amiable coercion rather than cruel force to maintain order, disbanded en masse; before the people, true to the American spirit of ingenuity, turned to technology and dogged practice to self-police their own communities.

  That had been the good news. Ubiquitous personal surveillance, accountability to one's neighbors, and a nationalized forensics service that provided unbiased expertise when necessary had lowered crime to previously unimaginable levels (after a brief rise, during which many activities previously deemed crimes were recognized as the treatable social dysfunction that they were). The bad news was that many of America's men in blue were unprepared for the realities of unemployment, being unemployable, pariah-hood. So some - a fractional minority, to be sure, but enough - fell back on what they knew, the core traditions ensconced and enshrined in police practice from the days when departments had first formed, as slave-catchers and Ku Klux Klan offshoots, security for the wealthy or sundown towns: they ganged up and started killing n*ggers and poor people.

(Originally written in 2015, a few months after the Ferguson protests and shortly after Freddie Gray was murdered.)