If Feather say a nigga dead, then a nigga dead...

Some stuff I posted yesterday on The Root

Word, Dallas PD? Word?

Don’t get caught slippin’. That’s the lesson for anyone who wants to put forth any malarkey about a post-racial nation. If you haven’t heard by now, NFLer Ryan Moats and his wife were pulled over while rushing to the hospital to see her dying mother.

Before you fly off the handle, try to put yourself in the Dallas cop’s shoes: Person flying through a red light gives some excuse about a “dying” relative? How many times a day does he hear that?

There could be a plausible explanation for the officer’s actions. But then, that plausible explanation comes up against the video.

A woman comes out of her car in a hospital parking lot. Tired of trying to reason with the officer, she turns her back on an officer with a loaded gun while a relative ushers her inside. A black man gets out of the car and as he realizes the tension of the situation, tries his best to defuse it. But the police officer did not care to listen anyway.

While watching, I couldn’t help but think “Lord, please don’t let none of these people get shot.” Now I didn’t just walk out of the tobacco fields, but this is the sort of thing that’s befuddling, that makes me scared of the men and women who are supposed to serve and protect us. Isn’t one of their skills supposed to be the ability to assess a situation? What felon would pull into a hospital parking lot and then risk emerging from the car to explain that a relative inside was at death’s door?

Couldn’t an officer of the law deduce the veracity of the situation and proceed from there?

Note to law enforcement: Upon giving someone the benefit of the doubt, if you found out they lied, you can still arrest them. And we dare wonder why a “stop snitchin’” culture exists.

Police State of Emergency

Given my recent reaction to police (mis)conduct in the Ryan Moats incident, I found that I enjoyed Ross Douthat’s ‘Conservatives, Crime Policy and the Black Vote’ piece for THE ATLANTIC, particularly his thoughts on prison reform as an example of a shift in policy without a compromise of belief. He states:

My preferred approach to reform, for instance, would marry a reduced incarceration rate to a substantial increase in the police presence on America’s streets, which if implemented clumsily (as most policy shifts are) could mean fewer black men behind bars, but more tragedies…

Neither in this article nor his post on prison reform detail his thoughts on this increased police presence, so I can’t fully speak to their strengths and weaknesses, but I do wonder what Douthat would consider an un-clumsy implementation of a heightened police presence. Does a good plan–assuming of course his or any plan can be qualified thusly–enacted by inadequate personnel prove it to be clumsy?

Considering the current relationship between law enforcement and a good deal of the Black collective, it would seem that such a plan would require a police force dominated by ideal candidates: well-adjusted officers able to withstand the rigors of the job and receiving the support and resources necessary to maintain a level of professional excellence–a level often achieved only within the private sector, with sometimes horrifying consequences. How can such an ideal situation come to pass given the reality in which many public servants toil–a reality that involves thankless tasks coupled with the regard, or lack thereof, given to individuals in those positions? For Douthat’s reform to be even remotely possible, the perception of service would have to change drastically (an effort to which the president committed further this week). In many ways, teachers and police officers are the same boat, except their chances for physical injury vary by the day and only one can reasonably escape punishment for retaliation to injury. And it is those realities, dynamics and pressures that attract a particular kind of personality; some upright and others much less than that (often characterized by those dudes from high school whom you raise your eyebrows at when you hear they are police officers.)

In the America we live in, Douthat’s plan, however loosely described, gives me cause to pause; its margin for error is razor-thin. It would most likely suffer from varying degrees of clumsiness, which, Douthat admits, would spell danger for both protector and protected.

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