Week of 06/15/2020

Defund The Police?
They Brought It On Themselves!
– by David Matthews 2

The actions of the past few weeks seem like a strange Bizarro-world version of “Animal House”, where the authorities are the ones that are escalating to all-out criminal activity instead of the rogue gang of misfits and losers.

Lives are lost through abusive police activity.  Protests ensue.  But rather than letting the protests run their course, the police commit even more abusive and even blatant criminal activities.  And then another life is lost.  And then another.  And it just repeats itself.  The most recent incident (as of this article’s posting) is in Atlanta, where a man’s murder is caught on surveillance cameras.  The police chief has resigned.  The officer in question has been fired.  But it wasn’t enough.  Protesters blocked a major interstate highway and burned the Wendy’s restaurant where it happened to the ground!

You would think that the various law enforcement agencies would get the message and knock off the abuse, but they don’t.  Instead, they escalate and attack the protesters and even the reporters covering it, starting the cycle all over again.

So now there is talk about either dismantling the police, disbanding the police, demilitarizing the police, or otherwise defunding the police.  An idea that is pissing off police officers and a certain orange narcissist.

And yet, what in the goddamned hell do you expect the public to do?

First, let’s get the old B.S. out of the way.  Yes, yes, yes, we know “not all cops are bad, not all cops are evil, not all cops are abusive, not all cops are racists, not all cops are fascists”, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah!

Yes, we have seen and will soon see, in increased levels, the incidents of “good” police officers doing good things to the community.  Some will show up to meet with the residents in the neighborhoods they previously drove past in haste.  They’ll pull over drivers and give them coupons or gift cards for following the rules of the road.  You’ll see stories in the media of police officers doing good deeds and good works to reinforce the tired old regurgitated message about “not all cops are monsters, it’s just a few bad apples”.

Here’s the problem: every single public act of kindness and generosity by law enforcement is negated by every case of brutality and cruelty and death at the hands of those supposedly “few bad apples”.  The police can do twenty kind things, fifty kind things, a thousand kind things, and they will all be ruined by one wrongful murder.  And it’s not just the police that it happens to.  We’ve seen that with doctors.  We’ve seen that with lawyers.  We’ve seen that with teachers.  We’ve seen that with social workers.  And we have certainly seen that with politicians!  All good deeds are erased by just one bad one.

And we’ve already done the “weed out the bad apples” bit.  It didn’t work!  We tried reforms.  We tried body cameras.  We tried oversight.  They do not work!  The reforms fail.  Body cameras are ignored or switched off.  Oversight is subverted.  “Weeded out” officers end up going to another community and doing the same things there.  Innocent people are still being singled out, abused, and even killed by law enforcement.

It takes protests, people marching in the street, to fire those “bad apples”, never mind arrest them for criminal activity.  Does that sound like progress to you?  Does that sound like the law enforcement agencies have “learned” anything?

What they are doing during these protests makes it even worse!  An unarmed 75-year old man is shoved to the concrete by police officers, with cameras recording it, and not only did the officers do nothing to help this bleeding elderly man as they marched past him, they restrained those that tried.  Thankfully that elderly man is still alive (as of this article), but he suffered brain damage from the incident.  Even more despicable is the slanderous claim that the incident was “set-up”.  A slanderous claim propped up by a certain orange-skinned narcissistic coward who hid in his bunker just like a certain infamous Iraqi dictator and demanded that others “dominate”.  The same coward who ordered a path brutally cleared from protesters in front of the White House just so he could stage a photo-op.  Using chemical weapons on the protesters, no less!  How very “Saddam” of this coward!

So we have four options.

Option one is to try reforms again.  Try more oversight.  Try more body cameras.  Try “better vetting”.  However, we have seen these fail again and again and again, which have led us to more protests and more rioting.  This not a viable option anymore.  The events of the past few weeks have proven it is not a viable option anymore.

Option two is to capitulate.  Give in and let the abusive thugs egged on by that orange-skinned narcissistic coward just run wild.  Again, not an option.  This is not China.  This is not Iraq under Saddam Hussein.  This is not Libya under Moammar Qadhafi.  This is not Afghanistan under the Taliban.  We actually crossed oceans to go to war against three of those four examples!

Option three is to go the other route and just descend into sheer anarchy and ruin.  Do I even need to say that this is not an option?

The only other option is the fourth one.  Disband.  Dismantle.  Demilitarize.  Defund the police.

Disbanding and dismantling is not outlawing the police!  That orange-skinned coward has been systematically disbanding and dismantling oversight groups and investigators for the past three years, so he is certainly in no position to bitch about smaller governments doing it.

Certainly demilitarizing the police needs to happen.  What sort of small-town department needs a repurposed military mine-sweeper?  What sort of city needs a tank?

It means breaking down the law enforcement agencies and bringing them back to civil servants.  It means putting less money into the police and more into social programs.  It means addressing social problems with something other than body armor and semiautomatic weapons.

I personally find it insulting to hear about teachers having to do bake sales and pay money out of their own pockets for school supplies for their students while law enforcement ride around in military troop carriers and show off their seized-and-repurposed sports cars.  How many school supplies could just one seized Lamborghini buy?  Oh, but then the police wouldn’t look like badasses tooling around in that Lamborghini.

The county of Camden in New Jersey disbanded the police almost a decade ago.  Back then the area was regarded as one of the most violent in the country.  Camden threw out the whole department and started fresh.  Crime was cut almost in half.  Confidence was restored.  It is still a work in progress, but it is working there.

Look, I get it.  My father was a police officer and a state trooper in his lifetime.  I used to blindly support the police, mostly because of my past work with them and because of my father, but I can’t be that blind fool today.  There is something wrong with law enforcement today, whether it is because of racism, authoritarianism, or because of a bunker mentality that has cultivated an extremist combative view of society.  Whatever it is, it needs to end.  Period.  And if it takes firing every single officer and police administrator and starting from scratch like they did in Camden, then so be it.

I know there are plenty of good ol’ boys in the small Podunk communities across the country that will take issue with this.  They will look at these instances with their Podunk eyes and listen with their Podunk ears and think with their Podunk brains that this is all just a bunch of hooey.  Believe me, I have lived in these kinds of communities for most of my life, and I know that they’re also part of the problem.

Let’s get brutally honest here… something needs to be done, and quite frankly, the law enforcement community really have done this to themselves.  They’ve had the opportunity to fix things long before these recent protests started.  They could have purged those “few bad apples” all on their own before it led to a tragedy that they couldn’t sweep under.  If they did it after the Ferguson incident six years ago, then we wouldn’t be in this situation today.  If they did it after Eric Garner, then maybe George Floyd would be alive today.

But they didn’t.  They had every opportunity to do right and to be better and to learn from what happened six years ago, and they did not do it.  They did not learn one single goddamned thing from those incidents.  And now we have protests that literally are going around the world.  So what happens next is on them and their supporters.

We only have two real choices.  We can either make the changes that are needed and piss off a minority of closed-minded people who think that “might makes right”… or we can let the same people make the same mistakes and watch more people die and watch more protests and riots happen all over again.  We are seeing protest happen today in the middle of a global pandemic.  We are seeing acts of war being committed against our own people today.  Do we really want to know just far things will be the next time around if we don’t do something to change it?