A poise assumes some sort of equilibrium. To achieve some sort of poise is to find balance given the combined conditions of one's body and the surface one is standing on.
A poise changes then as the environment changes, or when one's body changes, or a combination of the two changes.
You can do all sorts of things with this, but for now I want to briefly illustrate the relationship of the police to the public.
What the public is finally finding - it took long enough for the white majority to discover what minorities of color have long known - is that the police are indeed an occupying force not themselves subject to the rule of law.
This is happening as the forces of domination behind capital and empire eat into the white majority itself, and the entire public as a whole becomes more aware of the nature of the police, as it turns its guns onto the whole of exploitable society.
This is of course something that was bound to happen - sorry guys, should have done something earlier - which is now coming into fruition.
The police too have become aware of this awareness, so that the poise of the police relation to the public sphere is ratcheted to more extreme states of equilibria, in which both parties are terrified of and hostile to each other.
So that the default position of an individual officer is to be cocked and loaded, and the default position of the victim is to be in abject terror, a state in which nothing that happens is for the benefit of anyone, at least in the long term. In the short term, nothing is specifically for the benefit of the victim, to be sure.
So you have situations in which a cop issues directions to someone, in which one wrong move is grounds for execution because the psychological stakes are so high, and the terrorized victim, unable to reason or follow directions, attempts to anyway, and ends up shot, tazed, or choked. Other times this mere introductory phase is short-circuited, and the exchange is opened with a barking gun.
The steady evaporation of the reformist impulse in this increasingly heated environment is apparent, as is the case with society's other institutions tasked with keeping the shape of something indefensible.
