Police in America

In all honesty, I would be afraid to write this in a public forum, but no one reads my blog so it is OK.

Police have been in the news a great deal for the last year or more. There is little doubt that part of the phenomenon is a media issue. Once the media begins to focus on something, they bring forward everything they possibly can find. That is good, in one respect. Certain things need mainline focus. But it also has it’s dark side. It gives the impression that something is increasing in frequency when it is actually just the reporting that is increasing in frequency.

For all of that, there is clearly a problem with police conduct. It is by no means all police officers or even the majority of them. But it is also clearly, at the very least, a small number of police officers who are violent and lethal in the way they handle situations. That would probably not be a problem if these officers were dealt with fairly within the normal confines of our justice system. But that does not happen. In all the instances of officer-involved-shootings this last year, no one has been prosecuted. Frankly, the “justice system” is aligned with the police authority and will not prosecute, no matter what. And, worse yet, the police community simply draws together into what appears to be a massive gang and defends the offending officer. The word ‘gang’ is shocking, I suppose, but that is what police authority looks like. It is a very tight community that is ready to protect anyone of their won, no matter what; and members of that community seem to feel that they can do anything and any amount of violence against those (of the other gangs) they label as “bad guys”. 

“The officer felt threatened” — really? a tazered man writhing on the ground and on his face, shot in the back twice by a policeman?

There is nothing that ordinary citizens can do about this situation since the justice system is unwilling to do anything. I presume that 90% or more of police officers are not at fault here, in the sense that they would not engage in this behavior, but they are at fault in the sense that they do nothing about the gang mentality of police authority itself. Only the 90% of good officers can really do anything to stop this.