Police Oversight Doesn’t Kill Police

Onyx Contributor:  Johnny Silvercloud (@JohnnySilverclo)

Cut The Bull

I’ll start by saying this:  No one wants to see maniacs running amok killing cops.  No one wants cops to not exist; that’s categorically absurd.  No one wants cops to die.  What people do want is for police to be simply BETTER than what they currently are.  That means police policing police.  In fact, the more you think of it, the majority of protesters love police and simply want more cops.  They want police — who police the police, that is.  Looking at it that way, there’s really no room for anything remotely idiotic suggesting protesters against police brutality and the law impunity that follows is a call to end the police.

Police-Oversight Doesn’t Mean Cops Should Die

Suggesting protest of abusive cops equals calling for the murder of police is like saying that the little kid who wants daddy to STOP beating mommy really wants daddy to die.  That’s not how it works.  This is called “police oversight”, or “police reform”.  The connotation of death and destruction should not be in mind when the concepts of oversight and reform are the operating ideas in play.  In fact, if the police thinks ending racial profiling means “the end of the Force” that means we are in more trouble than we thought.  No one’s lives will end if you stopped racial profiling, and racism should NOT be that much of a part of your identity.  Thinking mere reform will kill police thus transforms the police into the mythical vampire which suffers death from the innocence of sunlight.  It makes no sense.  Step into the light, and you shall live a better man.

How Trust is Lost:  How to Lose a Community

Here are a couple of things the public see which deteriorates the credibility of police:

1. Law Immunity; police can murder someone and has crucial resources to cover their tracks and build lies to protect themselves from law.
2. Speaking of law, the prosecutor routinely joins the officer’s defense team.
3. No Concern for the public; makes no effort towards public trust.
4. Bleeding out wounded public, letting people die; giving no medical attention to those who are put down by police gunfire (even the military tends to enemy wounded on foreign land).
5. Cruel and Unusual interactions with people; excessive force being used is routine and normalized behaviors.
6. Non-Constitutional police procedures are routine and normalized behaviors.
7. No intent on actual problem solving; arrests matter, fixing problems don’t.
8. Operates as a political force who thinks it’s on equal terms with actual politicians who are elected officials. (Police Union statements and orders)
9. Demands respect rather than earning it; doesn’t respect their own civilian leadership (i.e., Mayor DeBlasio, President Obama, etc. {even the military has the discipline to respect leadership at all times})
10. Assumes police are immune to criticism (even though everyone, and everything is, such as Mayors, Presidents, Congressmen)
11. Attempts to silence athletes criticizing police even though police usually summons the irrational fear of the image of black athleticism as a reason to murder and postmortem slander civilian black males.
12. Politicizing policemen’s murders.
13. Mocking the dead who died by the will of policemen; singing songs about it looks a lot like slave driver’s songs dehumanizing blacks in Antebellum South.
14. Police assuming people “need to know how to interact” with police is minimizing police as a profession.  Unless police work is like fast food, people don’t automatically know everything about cops, in the same manner they don’t know everything about military, lawyers, or doctors.
15. Cops’ “blue code of silence” looks too much like the “stop snitching” campaign the gang members perpetuate and use.
16. Speaking of gangs, the “either your for us or against us” deal makes it hard for the public to differentiate the cops from the robbers.
17. No mention of NYPD Officer Omar Edwards and the story of his death; also marginalizing black police officers who have a lot to worry about.
18. Good cops = passive cops when bad cops do bad things.
19. Retaliation and reprisal are common actions upon police who speak up on the truth of police brutality.
20. Operates as a totalitarian force when you consider points 1, 2, 8, 9 and 10.

Criticism Doesn’t mean “Against” or “Hate”

Last year the air conditioning stopped working in my car.  Technically, it was broke.  But does mentioning a broken air conditioning means I’m anti-air conditioning?  What if you had a flat tire?  Does mentioning the tire is flat make you a hater of tires?  Much like with sexism and racism, there’s a severe logical error in America that contends that mentioning a problem means you ARE the problem.  We need to stop using such a lack of reasoning…before it’s too late.