‘Defund The Police!’ Most Don’t Mean It. But Enough Do. -The iPINIONS Journal

“Defund the Police!” has become the battle cry of George Floyd anti-racism protesters. Listening to them chant it, however, you’d be forgiven for recoiling in consternation and despair, bordering on fear.

Never mind that they often come across like a mob of stonemasons, each with only one hand, hell-bent on building another Tower of Babel … one brick at a time. Oh, and this while they’re still hurling bricks at the police and through the windows of every other building in sight.

Yet, despite the amorphous demand and roving vandalism, their battle cry still reverberates with undeniable common sense. Here is how even the right-leaning Fortune reported as much in its edition on June 8:

The idea is that American communities have come to rely on their more than 18,000 police agencies to do much more than police. They’re fighting terrorism abroad, performing homeless services, working with children in schools, responding to calls for mental health crises, performing social work and welfare checks, mediating domestic disputes, and responding to drug overdoses. Often, they’re not trained to perform these tasks.

Those who call for police defunding say they would rather have some duties handled by nonviolent specialists trained in social work, education, or drug counseling.

For example, there is simply no reason a drunk guy, passed out in his car at a Wendy’s drive-thru, should trigger a call to the police – who then show up looking like Robocops … and proceed to act accordingly.

Rather, all such calls would go to unarmed social workers who, instead of trying to lock him up, would seek only to get him home safely (or to a nearby relative or shelter to sleep it off). No arrest. No jail. No record. Period!

Of course, the same would apply to the confederacy of “Karens” who have been making news lately. I’m referring to the clueless white women who have been calling the police to stop black men from doing perfectly legal and ordinary things – from bird watching in New York City to stenciling a Black Lives Matter sign on the wall of his own home in San Francisco. Both Emmet Till and his “Karen” must be rolling over in their graves …

As my title indicates, some in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement insist “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” This was the defiant title to an op-ed by Mariame Kaba in yesterday’s edition of The New York Times.

Writing on behalf of her BLM fringe (and there are many), she waxed utopian about cooperation and mutual aid among people. Frankly, her “manifesto” read like that of a born-again Christian writing about her religion without showing any knowledge of or deference to Jesus Christ, let alone all the disciples, popes, crusaders, pastors, and ministers who championed it before her.

For Christ’s sake, she only had to google “Heaven on Earth: the Brook Farm Community” to see why this kind of transcendentalism stands even less chance of success today than when it was tried and found so woefully wanton in the early 19^th century.

Still, I appreciate the frustrations that inform this battle cry. The following juxtaposition speaks volumes in this regard:

For nearly 20 years now, US military police have spent more time and resources trying to win the hearts and minds of people in cities like Kabul and Baghdad than US civilian police have in cities like Baltimore and Chicago.

But don’t get me started on the concomitant way the militarization of civilian police forces has perverted policing across the United States during this period.

When US police flooded the streets around the country to confront protesters two weeks ago, for many it appeared like the army had deployed, with camouflage uniforms and combat gear, heavily armored anti-mine vehicles, and high-powered assault weapons.

That’s not by accident. For years the US Defense Department has been handing its surplus equipment over for free to police departments — and the departments, large and small, have revelled in it.

(Agence France-Presse, June 13, 2020)

Thank God cooler heads are prevailing. Because Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Majority Democratic Whip James Clyburn are leading the chorus of those cautioning against blowing this opportunity to reform the police with misguided demands to defund it. In fact, with all due respect to Kaba, the vast majority of those chanting “defund the police” agree with Biden and Clyburn.

Again, they want to restructure the police and reform their mission to focus exclusively on violent crimes. And even then, they are calling for comprehensive police retraining. This would include a host of de-escalating measures like banning chokeholds, banning no-knock warrants, stripping qualified immunity (to make it easier to sue and fire police for misconduct), and mandating body cameras.

The aim is to ensure the police handle even limited policing situations consistent more with their mandate to protect and serve than with some perverse challenge to patrol and dominate.

Nonetheless, President Trump is trying fiendishly to convince the American people that all Democrats have taken a secret oath to “abolish the police.” I trust you know enough by now to know that you can’t believe a word he says or tweets.

But the sad fact is that this SOB has one-third of them convinced that Democrats are trying to “take away your guns.” This, even though the guns they possess and continue to buy make it self-evident that Trump is just playing them for fools.

That said, I have been championing the cause of police restructuring and reform since 1992. That’s when those of us of a certain age saw that infamous video of white cops looking like feasting hyaenas as they beat the crap out of Rodney King. It triggered riots the likes of which America had not seen since the darkest days of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s.

But I did not delineate my take in this forum until the killing of Michael Brown became a cause celebre in 2014. Foremost, I was troubled that most activists seemed more interested in chanting the names of martyred black men than in saving their lives.

Here is how I finally vented my dismay in “Re Stephon Clark and Alton Sterling — Police Killing Blacks (Sometimes) Justified,” March 27, 2018:

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I have nothing but contempt for lawyers and activists who rush in to make dubious martyrs of them. This, instead of admonishing other black men to do the right things to avoid ending up like them. Nobody wanted Clark dead. But I’m sure none of the (black) people whose cars he vandalized and burglarized considers him a martyr for any worthy cause.

Not to mention that, for those lawyers and activists, justice is more about getting their cut from civil settlements than getting any cop thrown in jail. And that’s not me just being my cynical self:

Al Sharpton is all about the Benjamins, a daughter of police chokehold victim Eric Garner claims in a bombshell videotape.

(New York Post, February 24, 2015)

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Except that I’m getting ahead of myself. Because, before angering black activists with that visceral, though unassailable observation, I was on record reprimanding them for failing to teach black men the ABCs of dealing with police brutality.

Given the killing of George Floyd, it’s probably most edifying to start with my Golden Rule:

My ‘golden rule’ is that black men would survive 99 percent of these encounters if they just obey police commands. Unfortunately, far too many choose instead to resist arrest — pursuant to some misguided (black) badge of courage. When a policeman is placing you under arrest (no matter how unwarranted you might think that is), it should not take him (and others) wrestling you to the ground to get handcuffs on you.

Mind you, I readily concede that, in one percent of these encounters, obeying commands will not guarantee survival. The viral video of the killing of Philando Castile demonstrated this … in black and white. But this is the exception, not the rule. Which is why it’s plainly foolhardy to resist arrest because obeying commands only offers a 99 percent chance of survival.

(“Three White Cops Kill Two Black Men…,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 3, 2017)

Sadly, fatefully, George Floyd was among that one percent of black men who, no matter how respectfully they comply during these encounters, will still end up dead. Such is the endemic virus of racism in America.

Still, that exception leaves the rule. More to the point, based on that rule, I’ve been like a biblical John the Baptist preaching about what black men should do to guarantee they have a 99 percent chance of surviving their encounters with the police.

I formulated my message in “Killing of Michael Brown: as much about Resisting Arrest as Police Brutality (only against Black Men?),” August 12, 2014. Here in part is what I preached in that commentary:

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Not every fatal shooting by the police of an unarmed man is a case of police brutality. We’ve all seen far too many incidents of people resisting arrest – even wresting away a policeman’s gun and killing him – just because they feared being questioned or arrested … even for something as simple as petty theft. …

Those rules, which form the acronym ‘Dodge’ (as in bullets), are:

Do not run.
Obey commands. (Wait for the police to explain why you’re being stopped before politely posing any objections, concerns, or questions you may have.)
Do not resist being frisked or handcuffed. [This is where Rayshard Brooks ‘snapped.’]
Get the encounter on video. (Wait for the police to approach and make clear that you’d like to reach for your phone; i.e., avoid any sudden move that might make some trigger-happy cop’s day.)
End the encounter civilly. (Not only might this spare another black man a racial-profiling stop (e.g., for DWB), it might make that cop less trigger happy during his next encounter with the next black man.)

There would be fewer of these fatal encounters between black men and white cops if more (unemployed) black men became cops to police their own communities. I mean, am I the only one who was struck by the contrast between the black men looting and the predominantly white cops trying to restore law and order in this predominantly black community…?

In fact, this suburb of St. Louis, Ferguson, is almost 70 percent black, yet it’s being served by a police force that’s over 95 percent white. Perhaps, instead of leading St. Louis blacks in hackneyed chants of “No justice, no peace,” Reverend Al Sharpton should turn and shout at them “Stop looting! Start policing!”

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This is why I always find breaking news about the police killing of yet another unarmed black man so distressing. And, when I learn that the victim was resisting arrest, my distress invariably turns to anger.

Sure enough, I was feeling nothing but anger on Saturday in reaction to this:

An Atlanta police officer was fired early Sunday following the fatal shooting of a black man, which triggered unrest and new waves of protests in the city. Rayshard Brooks, 27, was fatally shot [twice in the back] by police at a Wendy’s drive-thru after officials said he resisted arrest and stole an officer’s Taser.

Protesters on Saturday set fire to the Wendy’s restaurant where Brooks was killed and shut down an interstate highway in both directions. At least 36 people were arrested, police said.

(CBS News, June 14, 2020)

Meanwhile, it does Brooks and his loved ones no good to have activists speechifying and exhorting protesters to march in his name. And, by the way, I’m not sure how much less contempt I have for the celebrities who make such a show of paying for presidential-style funerals in these cases.

Surely Brooks and others like him would have been better off if these activists and celebrities had spent the years since Michael Brown’s death admonishing black men against the deadly hazards of resisting arrest.

That said, I can just imagine the minds of white folks being utterly baffled by the way this encounter unraveled so abruptly. After all, the video shows Brooks being respectful and reasonable beyond measure for what seemed like forever. Hell, he even pleaded with the police to let him leave his car in the parking lot and walk to a relative’s home nearby.

No doubt that would have been the outcome of a “defunded police” response. Better still, responding social workers would have driven him there.

Instead, when the police attempted to handcuff and make another black felon of him, Brooks snapped. Granted, you probably have to be a black man to appreciate what triggers in the mind at that prospect. Far too many of us have had that experience. Obviously, we don’t all snap. But, trust me, we all understand why he did.

This is not the forum to explain. Suffice it to know that the psychosocial dynamics at play during the 8:46 minutes that white cop had his knee on George Floyd’s neck have informed every black man’s encounter with law-enforcement authorities for over 400 years.

In any event, think what you will of the battle cry “Defund the Police!” We can all agree that something is fundamentally wrong with policing in America when a drunk man has enough sense to plead with the police to do what is clearly in the best interest of public safety, and they still end up killing him.