A self-inflicted injury
And a short essay on defunding the police...
One of the complaints about the Occupy Wall Street movement was that the people behind it couldn’t figure out what their demands were or if they should have any demands at all.
Unsurprisingly, it’s hard for people to give you what you want if you don’t know yourself.
Now we have “Defund the Police” and a lot of people don’t know exactly what that means.
Does it mean getting rid of the police entirely and replacing them with social workers who will drop by and give you aromatherapy if your house gets robbed?
Does it mean cutting the police budget so they can’t get itchy trigger fingers on surface-to-air missiles?
Or does it mean disbanding the current police force and forming a new one?
That’s what Camden, New Jersey did in 2012 and so far results appear to be encouraging. Apparently, Camden was a hot mess and the police force was so corrupt it couldn’t be fixed, so they fired everyone and started over.
Approximately 100 of the fired police officers were brought back and now if you work as a cop in Camden you’re expected to knock on doors, introduce yourself to the people you’ll be policing, talk with the residents about what they think needs improving and if a confrontation arises, attempt to de-escalate the situation before using force.
The use of deadly force is the last option.
Crime and complaints against the police in Camden have dropped sharply and if you want more details, here’s a link:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-jersey-trnd/index.html
At first glance “Defund the Police” seems like a great slogan if you’re trying to convince undecided voters to vote Republican, but if you actually mean “Reform the Police” or “Restructure the Police” that’s a horse of a different color.
As always, the devil is in the details and I’ll stop now before I think of yet another cliché.
Lessons from a ride along
Way back in the late 1970s I did a police ride along and one of the things we did that night was break up a huge party that had gotten out of hand.
There were way more drunk kids than sober cops and the first drunk kid that gave the cops any lip was thrown across the hood of a cop car, handcuffed and shoved into the backseat like he was on his way to jail.
After the party broke up, the cops let the kid go and when I asked about it was told they never intended to arrest the kid, but they had to control the crowd; show them who was boss and what would happen if anybody resisted.
Seems like that tendency to escalate a confrontation to gain control and show people who’s in charge is now biting the cops in the ass and has people wondering if there isn’t a better way to do things.
One thing we should be able to agree on
Wherever you stand on police defunding, reform or restructuring, I’d like to think we could all agree on the need to get rid of the people who prove to be unsuited to police work.
According to a recent article by the Associated Press:
Officer Derek Chauvin had more than a dozen misconduct complaints before putting his knee on George Floyd’s neck.
Officer Daniel Pantaleo had eight misconduct complaints before putting Eric Garner in a chokehold.
Officer Ryan Pownall had fifteen misconduct complaints before shooting David Jones.
Here’s a quote from the AP story:
“In recent years, there have been dozens of examples of officers who had numerous complaints against them of excessive force, harassment or other misconduct before they were accused of killing someone on duty.”
If you want more details, here’s a link to that story:
https://apnews.com/7b9f13682c9ccb3bbc138e9aae2a7efe
Misconduct complaints can be as minor as a cop being impolite so take that into account, but if the police can’t or won’t rid themselves of bad cops, they shouldn’t be surprised if people want to change the way things are currently being done.
Because the way things are currently being done has caused a lot of problems.
Stay safe, everybody.