Tag Archives: police killings

Political Rants

Week to forget.

Another one of those weeks when it’s hard to know what to focus on. So many disasters and revelations in such a short time, I’m guessing that many of the media folks who took this week off (and you all know who you are) are chomping at the bit to get back. I, for one, am disgusted by what’s happened this week, and frankly I can’t find anything positive to say about it.

It keeps on giving.It was a week that started with the obscene bombing in Baghdad, the death toll for which has exceeded 250. As has long been the case, this provoked some small response in American culture because of the magnitude of the crime, but the degree of “hair-on-fire” apoplexy about terrorism has been relatively minimal due to the cultural distance between Iraq and the United States. As these attacks move closer culturally to the U.S., our politicians get more worked up. Forget this export we call “freedom” – that bombing is our gift to the Iraqi people and it just keeps on giving.

Decisions were handed down on Hillary Clinton’s damn email and Tony Blair’s god-awful warmongering. Guess which one got more coverage in the U.S. It gives you some notion of what’s important to our great leaders. They lose their minds over some freaking private email server, but news about the enormous case against Blair and Bush over the Iraq invasion – the act that spawned the bombing I spoke of earlier – is met with a collective yawn.

What really disgusted me, beyond the sickening loss of life in Baghdad, Turkey, and Bangladesh, are the domestic shootings that made their way into the news cycle this week. The senseless killing of Philando Castile, caught on his girlfriend’s smartphone, is just sickening, as was the point-blank shooting of Alton Sterling – both incidents illustrating that there is no way for African Americans to feel safe.

Cap that off with the vicious, calculated assassination of five police officers in Dallas (six other officers wounded, as well as one civilian) during what was otherwise a very peaceful, very positive protest march, and it’s clear that we have some serious challenges before us. By all accounts, the police in Dallas behaved very well during the protest, which makes this last piece all the more painful. My hope is that the entire Dallas community can come together and show the rest of us how to overcome violence with compassion.

So yes, you can have this week, totally. I’m out.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

What does it.

As Americans, we crave the simple solution. Just give us that one thing we can do to make a problem go away. There has to be an answer, right? Anything can be fixed. The trouble is, the actual world is more complicated than that. Most of our problems will not yield to easy answers. In fact, very often, if a solution to a serious problem is even possible, it is likely to be a very complex, multifaceted, and inconvenient one. That’s the last thing we want to hear.

What California used to call a riverAnd yet, here we are, faced with enormous challenges, decades – even centuries – in the making. Problems like climate change, a matter so enormous most of us just turn away. For those of us who believe the overwhelming scientific consensus there is a human role in climate change, far too many feel that this is something that can be solved by driving a Prius and screwing in a few LED light bulbs. Those are good things, but this is not the type of challenge that is going to yield to small-bore actions carried out at a personal level. This will take a major reshaping of our economy, our use of resources, our entire approach to the Earth. Half measures won’t do it.

Same thing with regard to the rash of police killings of unarmed black men.  It’s easy to lay it on the cops, and sure, police practices nationwide need reform, but this problem runs much deeper than law enforcement. Issues of race and racial exclusion on a profound level, reflected in government policy at the local, state, and national level, have brought us to where we are today. The practice of criminalizing black life goes back to slavery, to be sure, but so does shutting black families out of certain neighborhoods and effectively confining them to others. This is a case wherein justice delayed is truly justice denied – keeping these families out of home purchases in the years following World War II denied them the ability to build equity, increase their wealth, and move into the middle class. Employment discrimination contributed to this, of course. New rules for the police won’t undo that sad, sick history.

No quick fixes, people. We need to find solutions that match the scale and depth of the problems we’re attacking. Easy just won’t do it.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

By another name.

Cleveland’s police department has been issued a lengthy set of restrictions by the Justice Department in response to a pattern of systemic abuses and unconstitutional practices, according to the 110-page DOJ report. We know about some of the most egregious recent racially charged cases, such as the massive police chase after and killing of a black couple whose car backfired (which recently ended in acquittal of one officer), the killing of Tanisha Anderson, as well as the Tamir Rice case – one of the most heinous examples of police brutality in recent memory. Cleveland’s mayor has signed on to sweeping changes for the department, which may be a step in the right direction.

We're ALL on the hook for this outrage.This is, however, an issue that isn’t going to be solved through police reform. Yes, dialing back police tactics is a necessary component, but it is just one element in a far more complex picture. Black Americans have been treated like shit since emancipation (prior to that as well, of course). Black life has been criminalized nine ways from Friday, starting with the virtual enslavement of African Americans in the post-reconstruction era (as chronicled by Douglas Blackmon in Slavery By Another Name) through their continuing persecution in the modern era (see Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow). Couple that with the kinds of exclusionary practices in housing policy and employment that Richard Rothstein at the Economic Policy Institute writes about, and you will get a sense of how we’ve gotten to this place.

We need to face the fact that we have a deeply racist history as a nation – one that far outlasted slavery. It is a central theme of the American story, pervading every aspect of Black life, from the homes they live in to the jobs they are able to get to their ability to stay on the right side of the law. After decades and decades of regressive policies that restricted black families to some of the poorest areas in the country, kept them from prosperity, and subjected them to aggressive policing, we need to do more than tinker around the edges.

This is the civil rights challenge of our time. Confining reform to police departments is like blaming teachers for disadvantaged young people’s inability to succeed in school. We need to make bolder moves, and we need to start now.

luv u,

jp