Post by Kelli Jae Baeli on Jun 8, 2020 18:25:19 GMT -6
Let's be clear. The perhaps well-meaning Defund the Police movement (most notably on Twitter) is not a Democratic movement, nor wise. It's an extreme, and extremes are frequently terrible choices. What we need is reason, justice, equality, accountability, compassion, and ethics. We need to abolish hate, white entitlement, and systemic racism; and that begins with rebuilding law enforcement.
The Defund the Police movement is being used by the Alt-Right (and especially the traitor in the Oval Office) to undermine the work so many good people are doing. Don't allow yourself to be part of the small groups who go at something with an all-or-nothing annihilation stance. If your house has structural damage from a hurricane, do you burn your house to the ground? No, you repair and rebuild your house.
Likewise, if there are no cops at all, what happens when your daughter or grandmother calls for help when a man is following her on a dark street? When someone is trying to break in? What happens when there’s an active shooter at a grade school? Do we need as many police as we have? NO. Are we overpolicing? Yes. The problem is largely in the way we address underlying issues that cause lawbreaking behavior in the first place. To wit:
If a person robs a convenience store, do we ask why? Most often, it's because that person is poor, or has an addiction problem. So why not address poverty and provide drug rehabilitation?
If a person robs a convenience store, do we ask why? Most often, it's because that person is poor, or has an addiction problem. So why not address poverty and provide drug rehabilitation?
If a person is arrested for smoking marijuana and thrown in jail, what purpose does that serve, when we already know marijuana is used medicinally, and also perhaps as an escape from the stressors of life. Why not legalize it across the board and then help those who have stressful lives. Again, is it because they have little opportunity? They're poor? They're sick and can't get healthcare? There is always an underlying issue that causes bad behavior.
Policing ought to be reserved for those more rare occurrences of violent crime like murder, rape, domestic abuse, child abuse. And even then, there are underlying issues that never seem to have the resources behind addressing them. Let's put that money normally used to militarize the police into community services, higher wages, vocational training, child care services.
Policing must never be a profession for those who wish to misuse authority and work out all their hatreds on others.
We need to maintain law and order, but that phrase has also been both usurped and corrupted by Agolf Twitler. Law and order isn’t a Police State, nor is it a dictatorship, an authoritarian regime, or a fascist state. Law and order means that those who break serious, consequential laws, should be stopped and punished fairly for their crimes. (see my other post on how I think we could abolish prisons and punish in another way entirely). Law and order means that when the people need help, a police officer is to take seriously his or her oath to Preserve and Protect. Anything short of that is a flirtation with a failed state, which is exactly what we are teetering on the precipice of.
No, what we have to do, is fix the police we have, and that means expunging the bad cops and keeping the good cops. And yes, there are cops. This ironic black and white mentality has got to . The world is full of gray areas. There are good and bad cops. Good and bad protesters. Good and bad white people. Good and bad black people. Good and bad leaders and politicians. Our votes, legislation, policies and laws must always incentivize the good in all people and in all issues. Structural and systemic change is the only way to do that.
I was heartened to see that the Minneapolis City Council decided to disband and rebuild their police. They are setting an example for the rest of the nation. Council President Lisa Bender said, "We are here because here in Minneapolis and in cities across the United States it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety is not keeping our communities safe. Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period."
A veto-proof majority agreed that the Minneapolis PD had agreed that the city police department was "not reformable” and said further that “we're going to end the current policing system."
This is what must happen, and I believe for the first time in our checkered history, it actually will happen. That is primarily thanks to something as simple as a cell phone. A device that has the ability to record video. We can see the truth, now, and we can share it widely. Amplify it. And now, all those who blithely turned a blind eye in the past, can no longer look away. Because what’s happening on our streets, in our neighborhoods, and in the hearts of a small but big enough number of people is at once an example of everything we should NOT aspire to be. And we the people, in order to form a more perfect union, must stand up, speak out, demand the changes that we need. It's our only hope of saving—not just the American Experiment—but the human experiment as well.