Photo credit: Blaine Schultz
A march took to the streets of Bay View on Saturday evening.
There’s certainly nothing in the long, intractable, white acceptance of violent, life-ending racial inequality in American policing to inspire confidence the growing national demand for real, substantive changes in police practices will make any difference this time.
But America is a democracy where we’re free to continue working together to create a “more perfect union” guaranteeing all Americans equal treatment under the law. But first we have to admit we’re not nearly as good at creating simple-minded, political bumper stickers as the enemies of racial equality.
Activists like “Defund the Police” for its shock value, but the enormous downside is providing catnip to every rightwing simpleton on the Internet. The proof is the gleeful embrace of the phrase by the nation’s Simpleton-in-Chief. Donald Trump keeps adding to his enormous mountain of 19,000 documented presidential lies absurd fabrications about Democrats abolishing police departments and disconnecting 911 lines.
If John Lennon were still around to write slogans, activists would poetically urge: “Reimagine the Police.” Police reform is a positive, hopeful political movement, not a negative one. In fact, many of the reforms activists seek aren’t very different from those intelligent police leaders have been suggesting for years.
Cops Aren’t Social Workers
Police officers themselves are the first to say they shouldn’t be expected to act as social workers. They resent having society’s problems loaded onto them. No less of a top cop than former FBI Director James Comey wrote in The Washington Post defunding police makes sense “if it means relieving the cops of responsibilities they shouldn’t have—such as truancy, mental health interventions, homelessness and substance abuse. If people want to pay for someone else to handle that and leave police to the business of law enforcement, it would be a blessing.”
Well, that’s exactly what police demonstrations are advocating. It doesn’t make sense for police to punish citizens for problems folks can’t control—mental illness and drug addiction—while rightwing Republicans are slashing funding for every social program that could reduce those problems. The whole idea behind reordering police funding is police shouldn’t be doing jobs they’re not trained for and aren’t very good at. Police intervening with the mentally ill in crisis increase the likelihood of violence rather than reduce it. If the mentally ill survive, they end up in jails with inadequate medical care and punishing conditions that exacerbate their illness.
|
|
The historic racial imbalance in policing creates special problems when police are put into schools to handle disciplinary problems that once were considered part of education. African American children are being fast-tracked into the criminal justice system before their lives have barely begun. At the same time, there’s little evidence so-called school resource officers do much of anything to reduce the likelihood of proliferating mass shootings in American schools, which almost always are ended by officers called to the scene.
Shifting Funding to Community Building
Reducing police funding, which accounts for 47% of Milwaukee’s entire 2020 budget, should flow naturally from moving services that shouldn’t be done by police in the first place to more appropriately trained professionals.
But one enormous expense for police departments nearly every American should agree to defund is all the ominous military hardware police have purchased in recent years from the Pentagon. Opposition to the militarization of domestic policing spans the political spectrum from left to right. The rightwing libertarian Charles Koch Institute documented $6 billion in taxpayer funds wasted by police on battle-ready U.S. military equipment including armored vehicles, grenade launchers, machine guns, night-vision goggles, surveillance aircraft and—get this—bayonets. At least 11,949 police officers somewhere in America are prepared to use bayonets on U.S. citizens should the occasion arise. Just a guess, but they’re probably not envisioning using them on white suburbanites.
An overwhelming 74% majority of Americans now support the continuing protests across the country demanding an end to the routine use of lethal police tactics against African Americans. In a Washington Post-Schar School poll, 69% also said the police murder of George Floyd represents a broader problem in law enforcement and only 29% thought it was an isolated incident.
Public Opinion has Changed
That’s an enormous shift in American public opinion toward the police since 2014. That was the year Black Lives Matter protests began over police killing two unarmed black men — the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and an officer using a deadly choke hold in New York City on Eric Garner whose dying words, like Floyd’s, were “I can’t breathe.” At that time, only 43% said those deaths indicated a problem in policing and 51% considered them isolated incidents.
Nearly every American politician but one is starting to realize racial inequality in policing has to change. Trump just keeps raving about ordering the U.S. military into the streets to “dominate” Americans protesting police practices.
That’s why the most important step in finally ending racially violent American policing is replacing an openly racist American president.
For more of our coverage of the protests occurring across Milwaukee, click here.
