"We Condemn the Excesses"
Power doesn’t “condemn the excesses” when it feels fragile. Power reaches for condemnation when it has already decided the outcome: keep the tools, contain the moment, and move the fight somewhere the public won’t follow.
The phrase doesn’t open accountability. It closes it.
“Excess” labels violence as an execution error instead of a governance choice. It preserves the baseline—normal force, necessary force, lawful force—and isolates the spill as an aberration. The state sacrifices a tactic, sometimes a person, never the permission structure.
That is the move. It has a long history. It leaves bodies behind.
I. Amritsar, 1919: Condemn the Man, Keep the Empire
British troops fired into a trapped crowd at Jallianwala Bagh on April 13, 1919. The killings triggered outrage across India and Britain. Parliament held inquiries. The Hunter Commission condemned General Dyer’s actions. The British state removed Dyer from his command and barred him from further service in India.
But the empire didn’t revisit colonial authority. It didn’t renounce emergency powers. It didn’t treat mass coercion as the problem. It treated one general’s “mistaken notion of duty” as the problem, then continued governing with the same architecture.
The condemnation punished the spill and laundered the baseline.
II. Bloody Sunday, 1972: Time Does What Bullets Can’t
British soldiers killed unarmed civil rights marchers in Derry on January 30, 1972. The state moved quickly: it announced an inquiry and produced the Widgery Report within months. Widgery largely backed the soldiers’ account and helped close the case while the political stakes still burned. That speed mattered more than the content.
Then the state reopened it decades later. The Saville Inquiry (opened 1998, reported 2010) declared the killings unjustified; Prime Minister David Cameron apologized in Parliament.
The reversal didn’t threaten the underlying authority because time had already done its work. The families carried the cost; the state carried the continuity. Even now, prosecutions have largely failed, and courts cite evidentiary decay and delay as the limiting condition.
This is the upgraded form of the move: the state doesn’t need to lie forever. It only needs to defer truth until truth stops biting.
III. Kent State and Attica: The Domestic Pivot
In the United States, the move works just as well on domestic soil.
When the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State in 1970, officials called it tragic. They also treated protest as the underlying provocation and “order” as the overriding necessity. The legal aftermath delivered diffusion: no criminal convictions for Guardsmen, a delayed civil settlement, and a statement of regret. The state condemned the bodies, kept the doctrine, and moved on.
At Attica in 1971, the cover-up was even sharper. New York State retook the prison, killing hostages and inmates alike. Officials initially blamed prisoners for the hostages’ deaths until autopsies proved law enforcement gunfire was responsible. The state ran the standard conversion: inquiry, findings, paperwork. Yet, the Attica Task Force pursued indictments heavily against inmates, while accountability for state violence remained minimal.
Attica proves the point cleanly: Condemnation doesn’t require enforcement. It requires narrative closure while leaving the pipeline untouched.
IV. Minneapolis, January 2026: The Protocol in Real Time
This is why Minneapolis matters. It shows the handoff happening right now.
On January 7, 2026, federal immigration enforcement killed Renée Good during “Operation Metro Surge.” Officials expressed regret. They promised review. The surge continued.
On January 24, 2026, federal officers shot Alex Pretti during a protest. DHS moved fast on the one thing that matters in these cycles: narrative. It declared the force justified before independent actors stabilized the evidence. Body-worn camera footage created contradictions that the declaration didn’t wait to answer.
Minnesota and its two largest cities sued to stop the surge. They led with evidence preservation. They went there first because everyone who has watched this movie knows where the system wins: evidence control, chain of custody, jurisdiction, and timeline.
Reporting describes a broader DHS pattern: officials repeatedly treat officer-involved shootings as justified before investigations conclude.
That isn’t “excess.” That is a permission structure.
The Maintenance Cycle
When officials say “we condemn the excesses,” they are buying three specific things:
Baseline Protection: They isolate the spill so nobody contests the tool.
Tempo Control: They replace pressure with procedure, letting time dilute the outrage.
Evidence Control: They centralize facts inside the apparatus while outsiders litigate for access.
They don’t need to ban dissent; they can price it. They don’t need to deny harm; they can docket it.
If nothing makes the next repetition harder:
if authority doesn’t shrink
if evidence doesn’t become automatically accessible
if consequences don’t land quickly on insiders
then the phrase didn’t mark a boundary. It marked a maintenance cycle. It wasn’t a limit. It was a reload.