Sing Kumbaya later. Here’s Four Primary Points to Reform our Police First.
George Perry Floyd, a Black American, was pulled out into the street, lynched, and murdered at age 46 by four police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His killers were three White or European American cops and one Asian American cop. Mr. Floyd’s criminal background is not relevant here. The man had served his time in prison and served his Houston, Texas community for years as a volunteer. He finally moved north into the Upper Midwest to start life anew. There wasn’t one single thing George Floyd did or was alleged to have done that warranted his slow, brutal death by a man who taunted him at times with what sounded like sadistic glee.
Yes, we need major police reform now all across the United States of America. The entire United States, a constitutional, democratic republic, needs urgent reform now and desperately so. We must not abolish our police forces, but instead reform or replace them immediately in three primary areas.
First, we need community oversight that is also democratic and transparent. Every city, town, parish, tribal reservation, and county jurisdiction, if they have not yet done so must shift to democratic community oversight. This may include re-creating the role of police as defacto paramilitary enforcers to instead become community servants. Cops must live in the jurisdictions they work in as part of belonging to the community.
Second, defund, not abolish, the police. To implement what “Defund the Police!” actually means, i.e. to review funding and reallocate police resources to non-police agencies and departments such as health care, dealing with addiction, homelessness, affordable housing, public sanitation, public infrastructure, etc. Doing so will allow for a stripped down, leaner community-based police force more focused and thus more efficient on policing, i.e. to serve and protect the public. Indeed, police reform may require increasing the number of police to actually serve and protect the public while non-police agencies focus on non-police public health, housing, infrastructure, and other social services.
Third, demilitarize the police. Yes, we must move to demilitarize the police and stop the flow of military hardware from the Armed Forces to the cops. Yes, SWAT teams for certain jurisdictions, of course, but how many, where, and for whom? Reviewing the relationships between local law enforcement and the FBI, ATF, ICE, Homeland Security, etc., is a necessary aspect of such purview.
So, three reforms: democratic community oversight, defunding and reallocation of resources, and demilitarization.
There’s one more reform, one perhaps more serious than the other three and one that certainly presents difficult challenges: reports and allegations of police brutality shall be reviewed with serious efforts to break apart the insidious and unethical Police Code of Silence. This code of silence corrupts the Thin Blue Line between cops and their communities, allows for both corruption and brutality to go unchecked. Criminality and division results. Criminals, including crooked and abusive cops, must be brought to justice. Securing and upholding our individual liberties demand we all hold each other and our public servants accountable. Our singular freedoms work only if we also acknowledge and uphold our social responsibilities. One large city, Camden, New Jersey, abolished its police department largely in part to exorcise entrenched, endemic police corruption and brutality.
The latest round of killings of Black Americans by police are clearly acts of murder. Indeed, they are lynchings, abusive and hateful lynchings by those sworn to serve and protect. These murders have convulsed our country again. First Ahmaud Arbery was killed in Brunswick, Georgia on the 23rd of February this year. Then Breonna Taylor was murdered in a fusillade of bullets in Louisville, Kentucky on the 23rd of March. The sadistic, slow, asphyxiation of George Floyd on the 25th of May blew open a nation already torn apart. The deaths and injuries kept coming. They keep on coming, too. Tony McDade, a Black Transgendered man, was shot dead by cops in Tallahassee, Florida, on the 29 of May, 2020. David McAtee of Louisville, Kentucky, known as Yaya the BBQ Man, was shot dead by cops on the 1st of June 2020. The list keeps growing.
These terrifying murders pushed a nation already traumatized by the Covid-19 pandemic, an economic collapse, climate change, asteroids nearly every other weekend, endless wars and threats of world war, impeachment proceedings, mass extinction, and the cruel and stupid behavior of one jerk of a U.S. president gone over the edge. Donald Trump usurped the American presidency by manipulating and intimidating the Electoral College after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million people. This shamefully, indeed dangerously incompetent buffoon revels in threats of civil war and labels peaceful protesters all “looters” and “thugs” to be walled out and shot at. Trump called the nations many Black and Hispanic immigrants and refugees are from “shithole countries,” but calls Alt-Right White Supremacists “very fine people.” He ignores the U.S. Constitution, teases his Red-hatted goons to punch out his opponents, and calls for the police to stop being “nice” when making arrests and even go rough people up.
This didn’t even start with the cops killing our fellow citizens listed above earlier this year. There was Eric Garner on 17 July 2014 in New York City. Michael Brown on the 9th of August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Freddy Gray in Baltimore, Maryland on 19 April 2015.
Remember Trayvon Martin? Shot dead wearing a hoodie in Sanford, Florida? On the 26th of February 2012? Black Lives Matter sprung up out of this in 2013 with demonstrations and riots across the country lasting well into 2016 and 2017.
This is part of a larger cycle of civil unrest and low-level domestic warfare, too, beginning with the Wisconsin Insurrection of February – June 2011. That was followed by the Occupy Wall Street revolt in September 2011 that morphed into Occupy Earth/Occupy Everywhere and eventually became what we called the Occupy Movement of 2011-2016. There was the Water Protectors Movement galvanized by the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests springing up on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in April 2016 and spread across the U.S. well into February 2017.
These events dovetailed with the chaotic election campaign of 2016 resulting in the usurpation of the American Presidency by Donald Trump, a corrupt, White business tycoon from New York in 2017. His “election” was followed by waves of protests and marches continuing to this day in 2020. Many of the anti-Trump Resistance actions were peaceful, but violence erupted and grew as Usurper Trump egged on his followers. The so-called Alt-Right came out in force on the Far Right and was sometimes challenged by Antifa on the Far Left. Violent fights and skirmishes broke out between them and between them and the police and other demonstrators. These fights flared from Washington, D.C., to Portland, Oregon, to Sacramento, California, to Charlottesville, Virginia.
There was a large uptick in hate crimes, especially on the Far Right by various White Supremacist groups. This was also against a background of right-wing militia revolts such as the ones led by the Bundy family and their allies in Nevada (2014) and in Oregon (2016), and growing, ugly outbursts of mass shootings and gun massacres that seem to grind on and on. This low-level war of sorts is waged on multiple fronts including cyberspace, mainstream mass media, social media, financial institutions and markets, and within divided government institutions, fracturing political parties, and angry communities.
What must recognize Americans are embroiled in a form of LIC or Low-Intensity Conflict, a type of intermittent, civil war among and between disorganized yet highly networked groups and individuals. We all need deep, structural transformation of our local and global systems, not merely changes and reforms. To do so, however, we as a species must find ways to accept what is so before we can move to change what we seek to change. We must learn to work together in spite of what divides us and find common ground. The extremists on the Far Right and the Far Left as well as the fanatics among our many religions will fight these moves. Love ‘em and leave ‘em, I say.
We must find ways to practice the practices of compassion, lovingkindness, forgiveness, flexibility, courage, love, and the backbone to stand firm in the face of violence, hatred, and bigotry to fight for justice. We must find our capacity for empathy and respect. And know when to let go and move forward. If others call this approach “radical,” let them, for being radical simply means going back to the roots of something, i.e. something already rooted.
At different times in our nation’s history many have spoken up for justice, representation, and, indeed, recognizance – to simply be seen, and, yes, sadly, resorting to violence when they don’t feel seen as human beings. Yes, people have a need to be seen, to be recognized, and to be listened to, not just heard. When you say, “I hear you,” did you actually listen?
The list is long: homeless people, Native Americans, Latinx, women, Blacks, Asians, working class folks, immigrants, children, the elderly, the disabled, veterans, those with chronic illnesses of all kinds, people from different religions and subcultures, people from across the spectrum of different sexual, gender, and relationship identities, on and on, as, gosh, the list of our diversity is so very rich. Now Black human beings are rising up, again, with or without their allies, to demand the rest of us understand Black Lives Matter!
Yes, we often don’t know the best words or actions. We mess up and will mess up again. Life is messy! Then let’s root ourselves deeper in our messes. Aye, root ourselves deep into the dirt, deep into the soil, root ourselves deeper into our network of communities. Let’s find new ways to work together. Again, if this is radical, then embrace this. Embrace your roots. Let’s embrace our roots together! Why do we make doing so, so difficult?
Yes, we live during a time where so many overlapping crises and wicked problems converge and overwhelm us. Our world feels apocalyptic. Just know all these things shall pass. We are, however, at choice as what steps we take to respond to our communal challenges. We are at choice as what steps we choose to take as we move forward. We are all at choice as to how we show up as we move thru our lives.
Right now, however, we must not just change and reform our police but transform our communities including our police. If you wanna all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” around the campfire together as One People, well, we’re all gotta work and work damn hard to get there. Violence often appears the easiest way out, doesn’t it? Yet resorting to violence, resorting to what should be the last resort usually makes every problem much more difficult to resolve.
William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 3 June 2020
Monday 8 June 2020
Updated Wednesday 10 June 2020
Reviewed Wednesday 17 November 2021
City of Seattle, King County
State of Washington
The Constitutional Democratic Republic of the United States of America
Planet Earth
Sol
*Updates on New Info re Defunding and/or/versus Abolishing the Police:
Beckett, Lois. “Families of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant on protests: ‘White supremacy is on its way out,'” The Guardian, June 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/08/trayvon-martin-oscar-grant-tamir-rice-police-killings-protest.
Doubek, James. “Former Chief of Reformed Camden, N.J., Force: Police Need ‘Consent Of The People’.” National Public Radio (NPR), June 2020: https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/08/872416644/former-chief-of-reformed-camden-n-j-force-police-need-consent-of-the-people.
Holder, Sarah. “The City That Remade Its Police Department,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 2020: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/how-camden-new-jersey-reformed-its-police-department.
Kessler, Ben. “Calls to reform, defund, dismantle and abolish the police, explained.,” NBC News, June 2020: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/calls-reform-defund-dismantle-abolish-police-explained-n1227676.
Lachmann, Richard. “The Police Will Do Everything They Can to Resist Accountability – They Have to Be Defunded and Demilitarized,” Jacobin Magazine, June 2020: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/nypd-police-slowdown-defund-demilitarize.
Milgram, Anne. “How a new kind of policing saved America’s most dangerous city,” CNN: Political Op-Eds/Social Commentary, June 2020: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/13/opinions/police-camden-minneapolis-george-floyd-milgram/index.html.
Nonlinear Community. “The Solution Is More Police Officers Not Fewer. Or to Abolish the Police. Or to Improve Their Sleep.” Daily Kos, June 2020: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/6/9/1951546/-The-Solution-Is-More-Police-Officers-Not-Fewer-Or-To-Abolish-The-Police-Or-To-Improve-Their-Sleep.
Rivera, Bridget Eileen. “Abolish the Police? Yes, and Here’s Why.” Demcast, Grassroots Media, June 2020: https://demcastusa.com/2020/06/06/the-case-to-abolish-the-police-and-how-to-replace-them/.
Uetricht, Micah. “”Policing is Fundamentally a Tool of Social Control to Facilitate Our Exploitation,” An Interview with Alex S. Vitale.” Jacobin Magazine, June 2020: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/alex-vitale-police-reform-defund-protests.
Copyright © 2020, 2021, 2022 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.