Tag: Police Reform

Riots are the Language of the Unheard

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “riots are the language of the unheard,” because rioting is the only way for the oppressed to grab the oppressor’s attention.

I can’t help but notice that those who are comfortable, content with the

George Floyd

status quo, and not at risk of being brutalized or murdered by the police, are also first in line to condemn rioting.

Let’s face it. A white person, especially a wealthy, white person, is rarely threatened by police violence – unless you are someone like Jeffrey Epstein who threatens to expose the hypocrisy and corruption of other rich, white people.

The hysterical pearl-clutching we are now witnessing from comfortable, white citizens condemning the riots in Minneapolis is the socially acceptable way of condoning police brutality.

After all, these commentators (like Tucker Carlson) have considerable excess energy stored up from their lack of protesting (much less rioting) against the grotesque acts of excessive force used by police as they regularly murder black people in this country.

Members of the white establishment are free to jog down their streets without fear. Whereas, black joggers are always at risk of being shot by white vigilantes, racists who know they can probably get away with murdering a black person (unless a video of their crime happens to go viral).

The video of George Floyd’s murder shows not one but three police officers kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s passive body, pinning him to the ground. His hands are secured behind his back as he repeats his last words, “I can’t breathe.”

The cop looking towards the camera is unmoved, ignoring the dying man’s pleas for help, for just enough room to breathe. His conscience is unfazed as he literally snuffs the life out of Mr. Floyd.

It’s not the first time America has heard a black man’s suffocating request for breath. Nor will it be the last. At least, not as long as there are public officials like this Mississippi mayor who defended the police by saying, “If you can say you ‘can’t breathe, then you are breathing.”

Prosecuting the cops involved is just another sop thrown from the master’s table.

Yes, prosecution and conviction need to happen. But America’s violent, over-the-top policing problems are not due to a few bad apples. No, the bad apples are spilling out of rotten barrels.

Don’t forget that the cop pressing his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck had been reported for the excessive use of force numerous times. Yet, no action was ever taken to discipline him, to address his misbehavior, or to evaluate his penchant for cruelty, much less to get him off the streets.

The state prosecutor is already talking about the extenuating circumstances that may work in the policeman’s favor when the case finally goes to trial.

Week after week we see the class-based, racist, violent culture of America’s law enforcement establishment. All of it testimony to the fact that our police academies, training, and supervisory mechanisms are all broken. In fact, the entire policing establishment of this country needs to be torn down to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.

Our police are too militarized. They are obviously trained to protect themselves first instead of serving their communities.

Too often they approach the public as it we are the enemy – an attitude entrenched by America’s ludicrous cross-training with the Israeli military, an army which exists only to pulverize Palestinians. It’s no wonder that pulverizing people of color has become a weekly news item for us.

The well-known “solid blue wall” of uniformed unity, where all cops are expected to cover for other cops no matter their crimes, weeds out the honest men and women who refuse to conform to the prevalent culture of might makes right.

What else can we conclude but that there is an element in police culture that condones sadism.

Let’s be honest. Power is intoxicating. Holding power over others can be an elixir to certain pathological personalities. Giving a gun and a badge to someone with an authoritarian personality, twisted by psychopathic tendencies, is a recipe for policing disaster.

Put that person in an environment where his love of control and leanings towards violence are rarely if ever rebuked by his peers (because they have been weeded out as unfit weaklings), and you have what we see in America today.

The police murder people in our streets with seeming impunity.

God’s people need to wake up.

The comfortable white church must shake off the scales of its class-based slumber. The police don’t look at us and assume that we must be criminals, unless perhaps you are among the white under-class struggling to survive. Whereas, that is exactly how they look at people of color, and the poor of all colors, who dare to get too uppity.

Our black, Latino, and Native brothers and sisters live in a completely different world. Frankly, had I been born and raised in their world, I probably would be rioting, too.

Now is a time for white leaders, especially white leaders in the Christian church, to stand up and shout like hell, to rock the boat and insist, not just on prosecutions against murderous cops, but on a complete overhaul of the American system of policing, as it currently exists.

The problem is not a few bad apples but a nation filled with rotten barrels, all spilling rotten, racist, violent thugs into our streets cloaked in blue uniforms. (No, I am not describing all police officers. But don’t evade the point by resorting to straw-man bluster.)

Now is not the time for white Christian leaders to condemn rioting.

Now is a time to repent for our decades of inattention, while we ignored our fellow citizens of color, refusing to take their stories seriously.

Now is the time to listen to the stories of non-white Americans and to confess our self-centeredness that says, “If it doesn’t happen in my neighborhood, then it ain’t my problem.”

Except, wherever the Image of God is being oppressed in this world, it IS the Christian’s problem.

Whenever flagrant, systemic injustice digs its privileged knees into the exposed necks of people loved by God – in a supposedly “Christian country,” no less! – God’s real people must see our national illness as the church’s problem to address.

No, now is not the time to condemn rioting.

Now is the time to condemn the establishment’s war against the poor, the weak, the sick, the powerless, and the marginalized.

Now is the time loudly to condemn social injustice. Now is the time to condemn the power-brokers who exploit their power at the expense of the powerless.

Now is the time for Christian leaders of all colors to stand and shout together, “No more. We demand change. We demand justice for all. And we demand it right now.”

Now is the time for Christian leaders blessed with the expertise, ability, access, and opportunity to roll up their sleeves and work for a more equal, more just society.

The time for peace and quiet is loooooooong gone.

Growing Up Black in America, A Conversation with my Son-in-Law #blacklivesmatter #policeshootings

Some months ago, I asked my son-in-law what it was like to grow up black in America.

I had recently watched the following video about this question, and I wanted to know more about his own experience growing up in the mid-west.  Did his parents have similar talks with him?  Please watch:

“Yes,” he said. “They did.”

“My mother would never let me go out in anything but my best cloths.  She told me that I was always representing my people, and I had to be careful that I made a good impression.  I couldn’t let others get the wrong idea about me, to think that I was a trouble-maker because of the way I dressed.

“As I became older, she would remind me to always be polite and cooperative when the police stopped me while driving.  I had to be careful not to give them a reason to feel threatened or make them nervous.”

I now know that his mother waited nervously for him to return home every time he went out, praying that her son was safe, that he had not been pulled over or arrested, detained or questioned for the crime of being a black youth  in a white neighborhood.

When I was a growing up, my mother never once warned me about behaving myself because I was a representative of my people.

She never made me wear my nice clothes when I went out to play for fear that someone might see me as a trouble-maker or criminal-wanna-be simply because of the way I dressed.

I never gave a second thought to “being friendly and polite” to the police when I was driving, no matter the neighborhood I was passing through.

But then, I am white.

And that, my friends, whether you are willing to believe it or not, makes all the difference in this country of ours.  There ain’t no such thing as a post-racial America.

When I first posted the above video on my Facebook page, an old acquaintance angrily commented that she found it highly offensive!  Why?  Because these black folks were complaining about the way police officers treated them…

Of course, my friend was a church-going, white woman.

Yes, folks. Black lives do not count for much in white America.  Discrimination is alive and well. Racism lives, to some degree or another, in all our hearts.  Simply recall the very abbreviated list of recent incidents listed below:

Starbucks closed 8,000 of its stores earlier this week as it provided racial sensitivity training seminars for all its employees.  This after employees in a Philadelphia store called the police on two black men sitting at a table waiting for a friend.

The two young men were taken away in handcuffs for the crime of waiting at a table without first buying a cup of coffee.  Honestly, would that ever have happened to a white customer — who wasn’t filthy, drug-addled and brandishing a weapon?

We all know the answer.

MSNBC recently hosted a televised forum called “Everyday Racism in America” where average black Americans told their stories of coping with everyday racism as a matter of survival.

Black men, women and children continue to be needlessly assaulted, shot, wounded and killed by police officers across this country.  31% of the people killed by police in America are black, even though they only compose 13% of the population.

According to the national data base Fatal Encounters, “black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.”

Perhaps you were as shocked as I was to learn about Gregory Hill, the father of 3 now-orphaned children.  Mr. Hill was killed by Florida police when they shot at him through his garage door. Someone passing through the neighborhood, picking up their child from school, called the police to complain that his music was too loud.

If Mr. Hill had been white would he be dead today, shot and killed for drinking a beer and listening to loud music inside his own garage? We all know the answer to that question.

In 2014, the Bundy family staged an armed standoff after commandeering a public lands facility.  Brandish high-powered rifles, they threatened to shoot any law enforcement officers called to the scene. Not only were none of the Bundys or their armed supporters ever shot, but early this year their case was dismissed from court.

Compare that to what happened in a Florida court’s treatment of Mr. Hill’s family.

When Mr. Hill’s widow filed a civil suit against the police, not only were the police officers who killed her husband found not guilty, but she was awarded a whopping settlement of $4.  1 dollar per life (counting the 3 children), which was later reduced to 4 cents because 99% of the blame, according to the court, belonged to Mr. Hill.

For those who have the eyes to see, the brutal evidence is self-evident every single day. Black lives do not matter in this country.  Well, in Florida, they are worth something.  About 1 cent each.

Every Christian in this country, but especially every white Christian in this country, must make it our duty to stand with our brothers and sisters of color and do whatever we can to speak out and oppose this ingrained, systematic, unreflective wickedness that sees the other as less than themselves.

The multi-ethnic, inter-racial church of Jesus Christ ought to be in the front lines of this struggle.

Durham, North Carolina First To Ban Police Exchanges With Israel (The Forward)

The first paragraph from today’s article in The Forward reads:

“The City Council in Durham, North Carolina, has voted unanimously to bar the city’s police department from international exchanges in which the officers receive ‘military-style training’ in a slap at such programs held with the Israeli army and police.”

This is excellent news. I hope that it is a first step in a nation-wide movement to delegitimize (as Benjamin Netanyahu loves to lament) the military policing tactics used by Israeli authorities.  They are criminal methods as employed within Israel and the Occupied Territories.  They remain abhorrent, criminal and immoral when exported elsewhere — as I mentioned in an earlier post about police lynchings in America.  It is a travesty that an international exchange program allowing Israel’s apartheid policing philosophy to infiltrate this country was ever condoned in the first place.

I encourage you to read the article if you want to know about Israel’s influence in our police academies.  I intent to write about this in the near future.  For now, here are a few additional sources (here and here).

When Police Officers Become Executioners

 

John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute and author of the book Battlefield American: The War on the American People, has written an important and very timely article at The Greenville Post.  It is entitled “Enough is Enough: Police Violence Plagues America.”

The ghastly stories about unarmed black citizens, such as Stephon Clark, being gunned down by police officers have become an almost daily occurrence.

It is unconscionable.  It has to change.

Below are the article’s closing paragraphs.  I encourage you to read the entire piece:

“You want to save lives?

“Start by doing something to save the lives of your fellow citizens who are being gunned down every day by police who are trained to shoot first and ask questions later.

“You want to cry about the lives lost during mass shootings?

“Cry about the lives lost as a result of the violence being perpetrated by the U.S. government here at home and abroad.

“If gun control activists really want the country to reconsider its relationship with guns and violence, then it needs to start with a serious discussion about the role our government has played and continues to play in contributing to the culture of violence.”

The gun control movement needs to confront this looming shadow of an increasingly militarized police force that all too frequently (and needlessly) resorts to deadly force, especially when confronting people of color.

Thankfully, African-American students at Parkland High School are beginning to gain some attention as they describe their fears as black citizens living in an increasingly militarized America (here, here, and here, for only a few examples).