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. Continue reading →