AG Misses The Fact That Respect Is Earned Not Demanded…

My Pastor, the Reverend Dr. Jesse Voyd Bottoms con­sis­tent­ly preach­es a mes­sage which stress­es that the thing that you need the most from God, is the thing you should give the most.
Simply put, if you want love give love. If you want atten­tion give atten­tion to oth­ers who need it. If you want patience, demon­strate patience to those who need your under­stand­ing. And cer­tain­ly, if you need to be respect­ed, start by show­ing respect to oth­ers.
Obviously, that is a mes­sage the Attorney General of the United States, William Barr needs to hear and under­stand.
In seek­ing to become Donald Trump’s Roy Cohn, Bar has gone over and above the norms to try to gain favor with Trump. From with­hold­ing the Muller report, and cre­at­ing a disin­gen­u­ous sum­ma­ry, to dis­agree­ing with the Justice Department’s own Inspector General’s find­ing that there is no evi­dence that Ukraine had any­thing to do with the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tions and a raft of oth­er con­tro­ver­sial stances. Barr has demon­strat­ed that this is the seg­ment of his life he wants to be judged by.

In a scathing address to the Federalist Society and lat­er as he addressed the fra­ter­nal order of police, the Attorney General exco­ri­at­ed social jus­tice reform­ers, argu­ing “We must have zero tol­er­ance for resist­ing police”. This will save lives.” Barr sin­gled out pros­e­cu­tors, whom he crit­i­cized for being “social-jus­tice reform­ers” and soft on crime.
He berat­ed those he deemed, not suf­fi­cient­ly respect­ful of police, but the Attorney General nev­er once in either address, chal­lenge those with­in the ranks of police depart­ments who are bru­tal­iz­ing and mur­der­ing inno­cent unarmed cit­i­zens.
Despite the height­ened across the board­’s atten­tion being paid to unlaw­ful police killings and abus­es, [large­ly of African American cit­i­zens], Barr praised police brav­ery and sug­gest­ed that com­mu­ni­ties that demon­strate against police abus­es may see police ser­vices dimin­ished.
In oth­er words, the Attorney General of the United States is advo­cat­ing for the police to with­hold ser­vices to the Black com­mu­ni­ty, which pays the police, to pro­vide polic­ing ser­vices.
It is an offense to receive pay­ment to do a job and not do the job, and yes that is what the nation’s top law enforce­ment offi­cer is threatening. 

But threat­en­ing to with­hold police ser­vices may not be such a bad thing for the African-American com­mu­ni­ty. In fact, res­i­dents may be less afraid of los­ing their lives at the hands of out of con­trol racist cops who have no respect for nei­ther their dig­ni­ty nor their human­i­ty.
Vice News report­ed, that after Chicago Police cut down on bust­ing drug pos­ses­sion and pros­ti­tu­tion after an offi­cer was sen­tenced for killing black teen Laquan McDonald, Chicago actu­al­ly got safer.
The gall and temer­i­ty of the state police union after the sev­en-year sen­tence was hand­ed down to mur­der­er cop Jason Van Dyke, by ask­ing cit­i­zens of the city: “Are you ready to pay the price,” of police offi­cers not feel­ing com­fort­able doing their jobs. 
As far as the dis­cred­it­ed Police union is con­cerned, killing a black teen who was walk­ing away from Van Dyke, was [doing their job].
Not hav­ing its sons and fathers, uncles and broth­ers, cousins and hus­bands mur­dered by police, means the black com­mu­ni­ty may be bet­ter off with­out the kind of ser­vices the police have to offer.

In New York City, the dis­cred­it­ed, police unions encour­aged their mem­bers to defraud the pub­lic which pays their salaries and ben­e­fits, to embark on work slow­down, after Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who mur­dered Eric Garner was final­ly fired.
The result, crime went down. True to form the Chicago police depart­ment denied that they had been on a work slow­down after their actions blew up in their faces.
In fact, an analy­sis of crime data by VICE News showed a sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tion in police activ­i­ty fol­low­ing Van Dyke’s sen­tenc­ing on January 18.
(Arrests by Chicago police offi­cers dropped by near­ly 50% city­wide the evening after the sen­tence came down, and almost 25% in the two weeks fol­low­ing. At the same time, total crime as report­ed by police dropped to the low­est lev­el in at least two decades, a stat con­sis­tent with a polic­ing slow­down. Crime reports aris­ing through street stops, such as drug arrests and weapons vio­la­tions, fell the most pre­cip­i­tous­ly, as offi­cers con­tin­ued to respond to seri­ous inci­dents like shoot­ings). [vice news]

Communities need good police offi­cers, they need offi­cers who respect the cit­i­zens they serve. From time to time offi­cers will find them­selves deal­ing with unsa­vory char­ac­ters who will inex­orably cause them to be less than respect­ful and gen­tile, that is the nature of the job.
Nevertheless, the idea that a com­mu­ni­ty may have more unsa­vory char­ac­ters of a par­tic­u­lar type, does not give police a pass to be dis­re­spect­ful of entire com­mu­ni­ties.
Demanding respect is a sure­fire way to get resent­ment, hatred, and ridicule.
Demanding that an entire com­mu­ni­ty of 47 mil­lion demon­strate feal­ty and rev­er­ence to an organ of gov­ern­ment that has nev­er shown respect to them is sim­ply laughable. 

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
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