Sunday, June 21, 2020

We Need To Talk About The Job We Are Asking Our Police To Do

There are people that make fantastic police officers, there are other people that should never be allowed to own a pocket knife, let alone a license to kill. We have also designed a policing social system that can shield and promote bad officers while penalizing and firing good ones. We, the people own this system, we have the right to redesign it and fix it when it breaks.
From the article:
"One night, after a grueling shift, two white DPD officers pulled me over. I was still in uniform, badge affixed to my chest and a #2 pin on my collar, indicating that I worked in the 2nd Precinct. I identified myself as a fellow officer, thinking they would see me as an equal. Instead, one pointed his gun at me and said, “Tonight you’re going to die, n-----,” before discharging his weapon. I dove back into my vehicle and miraculously managed to escape. I realized then that not even our shared uniform could save me from their racism. And I wondered that if they were willing to shoot and kill a black police officer, what were they willing to do to black civilians? As a supervisor a few years later, I stopped a group of officers from beating three black teens. I was finally in a position to hold them accountable for their excessive use of force. But my precinct commander yelled at me for attempting to "ruin the lives of those good officers." I witnessed this kind of complicity repeatedly. When other officers reported abuse, as they should, they were ostracized, transferred to lesser assignments and treated so poorly that many quit." - Isaiah McKinnon is a retired chief of the Detroit Police Department, retired associate professor of education at University of Detroit Mercy and former deputy mayor of Detroit. Here is the article from USA today

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