Jeh Johnson head of Homeland Security and Bill Bratten, NYC Police Commissioner were all over the tube this weekend, commenting on the shootings of Philando Castile in Minneapolis, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and five police officers in Dallas. These occurrences are horrific and there can be little doubt that the events in Dallas were a direct result of the previous shootings of Castile and Sterling by police in what appear to be, on early examination, murders.
Bratten and Johnson are two of our more senior, more involved and more reputable officials but they still have not let go of the defensive positioning that has kept us from stopping this horrendous crime wave by the police that has lasted for too many years.
Until our law enforcement leaders understand and accept, that all it takes is the smallest percentage of bad apples to create the sense that our police are doing their jobs wrong , nothing will get fixed.
For years, we have been listening to pundits and pols say it is only a tiny percentage of bad cops that are causing the problems. So what? Are we supposed to accept that and just go along with it? That one percent is exactly what has to be changed because when we give a person a gun and a badge, we are taking away his freedom to fail. We are saying, this person has the power of life and death and there is no room for error. And yet there have been far too many of those errors and that situation must be changed.
In too many of our police departments across the country, especially in poorer more rural departments, there really is no training. Too many of those departments hire lowest common denominator applicants because that’s all they have available to them or because those that are being hired are relatives or friends. This is not acceptable and worse, it is not functional. The police officer pictured in the Minnesota video, standing outside the car door, screaming hysterically as he points his gun at a woman and child, just after shooting her boyfriend, is not a man who should have a weapon or a badge.
And speaking of guns, they are still the problem. The black kid who went to the protest rally in Dallas with an AR15 strapped to his chest because it is his right to do so, is too stupid to be allowed to carry a gun, no matter what the Second Amendment says. It’s a terrible thing to say, but it is today’s reality, that a black kid who brings an automatic weapon to a public demonstration is just looking for trouble. Thankfully his older brother, with a cooler more functional head, made him surrender the gun as soon as shooting broke out or that kid may have been dead today.
The victims in both Baton Rouge and Minneapolis were both legally carrying guns. Legal or not, the act of having a gun was what led to their deaths. I am not going to get into defending this statement against all the reasonable objections to it. I am just saying that none of the seven deaths would have happened in a nation where the indiscriminate freedom of gun ownership had not run amok.
This morning, General Michael Flynn, who is being vetted as a Trump VP, proved he really is dumb enough to run with Trump. When asked flat out what he thought of the videos of the killings in Minneapolis and Baton Rouge he babbled on about nothing while trying unsuccessfully to exonerate the police in the shootings. It is this blind avocation to defend anything that threatens white society that puts the whole country in danger.
There is an enmity between certain bigoted or non-functional elements in certain police departments and the black community they are supposed to be serving but are really at odds with. If we don’t recognize and attack it we will never solve the problem.
In 2015 there were one thousand deaths by police shooting. Of those victims; 507 were white, 250 black, 158 Hispanic, 58 of unknown origin, 18 Asian and 13 Native American.
This year, so far, police officers have been killed in the line of duty at a rate of once a week but a cop kills a citizen 3.5 times a day. Those rates are both too high.
In England the police were responsible for the deaths of two people so far in 2016, two people in all of 2015 and only one person in 2014.
Only one English police officer was killed in the line of duty, so far, in 2016, shot by an American ex- marine, with a gun. Maybe it really is about guns.
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Obama says that we are not as racially divided as we appear. If he really believes that, he is grossly naive. This country is far more divided than it should or can safely be. If we are ever to close this divide we must first admit that it exists or we can never think to make it go away.
Leon Wolf writing in Red State, penned what is probably the most important thought on this situation yet. It is that if the black community could really believe that law enforcement would righteously bring police who committed crimes against the black community to justice, there would be a lot less thought given to retribution and revenge. Coming from where it does, this is amazing and coming from anywhere it is very true, because that’s probably the biggest part of the problem. Too many cops have walked when it looked like they should have gone to jail. It’s a huge problem because perception as often as not, becomes reality
Michael Eric Dyson uses the most egregious example of what black people fear and hate when he describes a white man wielding a machete, caught on camera; who is allowed by two police officers to just walk away. If that had been a black man he would now be dead. If anyone thinks that this isn’t true, they are a fool, living in a false paradise.
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Lanra Bakare writer for the Guardian makes a valid point, when he admits that in Britain there is just as much, if not more adversity between the police and blacks but in England the cops don’t carry guns so they aren’t shooting blacks. This says less about prejudice and more about the availability of guns.
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Obama has tried to strike a calm pose, attempting to move both sides from violence but there are so many aspects involved in the overall picture and there are so many people with so many agendas that it is almost impossible. Many attacked him for going too lightly on the police in Minneapolis and Baton Rouge but only a few days later many others are blaming him for going to harshly on those murders and causing Dallas. He can’t win. No one could. There are too many disparate elements involved in this controversy to ever allow for any kind of simple solution.
Of course the concentration has been on racial issues but just look at the characters involved. In Baton Rouge three of the four cops that killed a black man, already helpless on the ground, were black. In Minneapolis the officer who killed the young black man was Hispanic and his partner was Asian. Sure race was a factor, we are a country of many races and we don’t always blend smoothly but this is about much more than race. This is about guns, societal violence, police training, poverty, education and many other issues that inject themselves into the most complicated problem we face as a nation.