‘Coping’ mechanism: Ford workers request company stops providing US police with vehicles amid reckoning on cop violence

The Great Awokening has finally pulled into the automobile industry amid the growing Black Lives Matter movement. Ford’s CEO is apparently not on board with the idea though, praising the role of law enforcement. 

In the United States, two-thirds of police cars are Fords. Now, some Ford employees want to put a stop to that, with a number of black and white workers penning a letter demanding that the car manufacturer backs out of the police market. 

The internal letter is made out to Ford’s CEO Jim Hackett, it states that throughout the company’s history “the vehicles that Ford employees design and build have been used as accessories to police brutality and oppression” and that the car maker has exacerbated “racist policing practices that plague our society.” 

Hackett was quick to rebuke such sentiment. In an office memo — known internally as “The Huddle” — he stated that he agreed that more “transparency and accountability” in police operations are needed but that both he himself and Bill Ford believe that the “first responders that protect us play an extraordinarily important role in the vitality and safety of our society.” 

The letter and memo were acquired by Jalopnik, “a news and opinion website about cars,” and comes after several videos of Ford police vehicles being used to violently disperse protesters have circulated online.  

Ultimately, Hackett writes that “holding” these “two thoughts together” – of respect for both the movement and local police forces – was possible and that because of this, Ford will continue to “do both.”   

Recently, corporations have been quick to pander to the demands of BLM, with many starting to publicly distance themselves from the police. Such corporate giants as IBM, Microsoft and Amazon have all pledged to stop supplying facial recognition technology to police forces over the past month.  

More broadly, over a hundred brands recently boycotted Facebook for the company’s perceived profiting off of hate speech and fake news.  

Ironically, among the list of those companies which have boycotted the social media giant is Volkswagen, the car manufacturer who for years faked their vehicles emissions numbers and who also, infamously, used slave labor from concentration camps in its earlier years.

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