Curated and distributed into Politics | Racism | Equality
A Violent Police Is No Police
The need for a solution to end police violence is rising exponentially
Who gave the police this authority? You did, with your vote, or because you did not cast your vote. Only 55 percent of voters use the option.
The US policemen are trained in the art of Killology — it is a real thing; please bare with me for the next few minutes. Rayshard Brooks was asleep in his car blocking the drive-through; 43 minutes later, when the officers wanted to handcuff him for drunk driving, he grabbed a taser from a police officer and ran. The officer fired bullets into his back. Atlanta City Police Chief Erika Shields resigned after the incident, saying, “… it is time for the city to move forward and build trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.”
Police have taken many lives in the past years. Who threw the first punch — is a long debate, and no one admits fault.
Protestors against police violence are facing police brutality. Some of the scenes may be distressing in this video:
In a utopia, protestors fighting police should be like two siblings fighting with one another. But a loving parent is always present who can immediately resolve the issue. That parent is not Donald Trump or the violent police of this dystopian world.
Who ordered violence against the protestors? It is a never-ending blame game. If you said something, he’d probably sue you.
Trump is fond of firing off lawsuits to get back at his critics. ~ A CNN report
If another young man or woman dies today, whose fault would it be?
Are the police allowed to use violence against common people, or the protestors? Aren’t we better off without a violent police? Some of the cities are thinking to defund police and reimagine new measures for public safety.
But is it a fair assumption to blame every police officer or the entire system because of a few individuals? It seems it is not a case of a few bad cops anymore but of a culture that has gone wrong.
No justice no peace, no racist police. ~ Protestors chant
Police attitude
The best step might be to check the IQs of all the police officers. The morons killed Rayshard Brooks when the entire country is already mourning and protesting against the killing of George Floyd. It is simply an utter lack of common sense.
Police have a taser, a gun, and a crime database access. If a complaint involves someone with a record, the officer has to be more careful in dealing with that person.
An officer has to be brave as well as cautious. The officers are required to do the right thing, morally and legally. If they make a mistake, it can mean life and death for you and me.
Dallas Police Department Chief, David Brown, said that we are asking cops to do too much in this country. The officers are not equipped or trained to handle many of their assigned duties.
The state has a monopoly on violence
Do you know that the President of the USA, represents the state, and can shoot anybody if he wants to?
Did you know this before you voted for Donald Trump? Did you know that you were giving him the power to shoot to kill?
The government has legal authority to use violence, and it is a defining feature of a state. But the police officers, who are morons, under the bizarre leadership of the current President, are a nasty bunch to manage monopoly on violence. It is like giving a gun to a monkey — no, it is like giving guns to a zoo of monkeys.
The United States has earned a bad reputation for cases of police violence; it has reported far more killings by police officers than Europe.
Blacks are more likely to die
Blacks are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by the police than whites because of a racial bias in policing.
Why? It is history. The anti-black Jim Crow laws ended in 1965, but their spirit is still here. Jim Crow was a derogatory phrase meaning “Negro.”
For much of US history, police officers have been implementing laws that had been explicitly intended to control black people. One of America’s first law enforcement units were the slave patrols tasked with catching and returning slaves who had escaped their masters.
“We have the power to pass stringent police laws to govern the Negroes — this is a blessing — for they must be controlled in some way or white people can’t live among them.” ~ An Alabama planter after the end of slavery
The police system has maintained the tradition of slavery under the umbrella of legal authority.
“Police have been given carte blanche to terrorize Black communities for far too long.” ~ Movement for Black Lives
Bill Clinton added another 100000 to the number of police officers in high crime neighborhoods that were primarily black areas.
But the problem is more complex than we might wish to believe. A Harvard study says as police pulled back after brutality protests, homicides increased in black neighborhoods. “My estimates show that we lost a thousand more lives, most of them black as well, because of an increase in homicides,” said Harvard’s Roland Fryer.
The police officer always acts in self-defense?
Do you know about the brutal beating of Rodney King in 1991?
Of the four officers involved, three were cleared. Within hours of their release, the 1992 Los Angeles riots started. The six-day rioting killed 63 people with 2,383 injured. The rioting was ended by the involvement of the California Army National Guard, the United States Army, and the United States Marine Corps.
The public image of the police as the good guys is what allows them to get away with violence against the popularly stereotyped bad guys — black people dealing in drugs.
The police prosecutors usually claim that the officer acted in self-defense. The police officers have “Qualified Immunity”; they are always acting in the scope of their duty.
“A public official is immune from lawsuits unless their exact conduct has already been ruled as unconstitutional in a previous case.” — Qualified Immunity Definition
Trained in the art of Killology
In North Carolina, it takes 16 weeks to become a police officer that is less than the time required to be a licensed barber.
“If you are not a killer, if you can’t kill a human being, you need to find another job,” said a police trainer, Dave Grossman, an expert in Killology.
“Killology is the scholarly study of the destructive act, just as sexology is the scholarly study of the procreative act.” — as defined by Dave Grossman on killology.com.
Dave Gross man teaches his crazy art to police morons 200 days a year. The officer who shot Philando Castille had taken a class based on Grossman’s Killology.
Bob Kroll, the head of the police union in Minneapolis, said he supported Killology training after it was banned by the mayor Jacob Frey. He also attended a Trump rally wearing “Cops for Trump” shirt.
Coaching programs that are full of inconsistencies and confusion, lack of accountability, and unchecked bias increase the probability of violent events against all and especially blacks.
Guns and aggression
A few years back, in the city of Los Angeles, the police began using a new device, called gunfire locator. The machine detected gunshots in all directions, as if it was placed in the middle of a war zone. We live in cities full of guns.
When confronting criminals, the officer has to decide and act in a split-second. In such a situation, the officer can make a wrong judgment call.
Approximately 400 police officers have been injured so far during the protests, and two have died. The remaining officers must be feeling angry or anxious at this time. Seven Minneapolis police officers have quit their job.
“If communities don’t give police that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need,” Attorney General William Barr warned in a speech in last December.
The rising aggression of the protestors after the killing of Rayshard Brooks, must be making the officers even more irritable. These circumstances require the protestors, in more than 70 cities, to remain nonviolent or they’d lose the moral high ground.
How to stop police violence
The broken windows theory is related to zero-tolerance policing — it means that if the smallest of crimes are not handled firmly, the crime rate can quickly increase. It implies that the police officers should be well equipped.
The police have been armed to the teeth during the past three decades. The cops act as if they are at war with the common man — who pays their salaries.
In 2014, the UN Committee against torture condemned police violence and excessive use of force by law enforcement in the US, and highlighted the “frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals”.
The United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent’s 2016 report noted that “contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.”
“Please don’t be too nice like when you guys put somebody in the car..”~ Donald Trump said to law enforcement officers.
Obama wanted more accountability and he stopped the transfer of military-grade equipment to police but it has been resumed again under what is known as the 1033 Program. At this time, stopping police violence is a matter of political will that is not there.
Reform efforts have failed in the past
Police bias training, police body-camera policy, increased accountability, reduction in excessive force violations, and developing community trust — are the police reforms that are always promised everywhere but never implemented in true spirit.
Simply promising more police reforms may not work this time.
Obstacles to reform
- Police Unions are the biggest hurdle in the reform of the police system. They can stop the mayor from doing anything.
- Dismissing the police officers is a long process, and around 25% of the fired officers are rehired or reinstated after appeals required by the union contracts.
- If pushed hard, police unions threaten inaction against criminals.
- There are 18,000 local, state, and tribal law enforcement agencies. It is very difficult to establish standardized ethical and professional practices in all of the agencies.
- The federal government can step in to investigate police departments for a pattern of civil rights violations.
- If the unions don’t act and the federal government doesn’t act, what can you do to get accountability? You can sue them. But remember that civil suits against cops are impossible to win — in part due to the broad influence of Rule 609 in civil courts. In rare high profile cases, the ten big-city police departments have paid one Billion dollars as settlements in the last five years.
There is a bill in the Senate at this time, and the supreme court may decide to end the qualified immunity, but the President has sent a signal that qualified immunity is off the table.
The way forward
- The established police culture is going to resist each reform effort. Police have to be restructured. For example, New Jersey dissolved the city police department and required officers to reapply in 2013. It resulted in a drop in police brutality and complaints.
- Defunding the police means moving away from a traditional concept of public safety that relies on policing and punishment; and reappropriating funds into housing facilities, mental health services, and community organizations. It is to lessen the role of police in the daily life. Like they don’t have to respond to the homeless, or arrest children in school.
- A significant share of the taxpayer’s money is spent on policing. For example, the City of Los Angeles spends $3 billion — 30% of its total budget — on policing.
- A new model of policing is in the process of implementation in Chicago. Experiencing a historic low of public trust, the Chicago Police Department is trying to reinvigorate its community policing initiative.
- Kerner Commission report — Martin Luther King Jr. called this report a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” This report criticized federal and state governments for failed housing, education, and social-service policies. Its most famous passage warned, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
On June 14, 2020, James Clyburn, a black Democrat, and House Majority Whip, said that young blacks fearing police is a recent phenomenon. He also said that nobody is going to defund the police, but a restructuring of police is unquestionably needed.
On June 12, 2020, Donald Trump announced that he was finalizing an executive order that would encourage police departments nationwide to meet the most modern professional standards for the use of force, including tactics for de-escalation. He is also encouraging pilot projects that allow social workers to accompany law enforcement officers to work together. He also said that he was not defunding the police, and the government is going to train them more. Trump said that what would you do, when you made that 911 call late at night? Who would come to help you? The audience clapped loudly at this point.
“It was a beautiful scene,” Trump sees beauty in how National Guard can disperse protestors in minutes, “it was like a knife cutting butter.”
Conclusion
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced .” — James Baldwin
All of us have a responsibility to think about our behavior. We have to unlearn the centuries-old ideas about racism.
Gun control is a sensitive issue. As long as the people and criminals have easy access to guns, the police will continue to make mistakes where split-second decisions involve life and death.
There is a need to change societal attitudes. We need to spend on education, equal pay opportunities for any color or gender, affordable housing, a fair tax system, health care, drug rehabilitation programs, mental health care, and that would be just a start.
No matter what happens, do not think that violent protests would do any good. Political anarchy will create the exact social and economic problems here as it would create in Rwanda or Burundi. Stop and think what Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Dr. King would have said in this situation. They would have advised to use nonviolence — a well-established strategy that gets definite results.
If you plan to take part in protests, make up your mind to be nonviolent. The fools who are using violence in the protests do not know that the moment these protests are labeled violent, the state will have the legal as well as the moral right to use maximum force. Don’t let the protests become rioting.
The government cannot act until the protestors don’t lose the moral high ground. The protestors have a right to protest peacefully.
If both sides start using violence, the forces of the far-right or far-left may use this opportunity to start a Second Civil War in the USA.
The protestors are becoming violent in many places. The need to come up with a practical solution, implemented nationwide, is increasing exponentially. But considering the beauty the President sees in the use of violent force, the issue is far from over.
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This post was liked by my publishers and they distributed it into Equality, Society and Racism:
This post was liked by my publishers and they distributed it into Politics, Equality, and Society: