As the summer of 2020 begins to take shape, more. and more people are walking around wearing masks. And as the COVID-19 virus continues to demonstrate why it should be taken seriously in many so-called red states, *states that are run by Republicans,* as in Texas, Florida, Arizona et al, authorities are reporting a rapid spike in CODID-19 cases. Some pundits have argued that dogmatic political posturing has resulted in some people refusing to wear a simple mask, and that ‑that may be responsible for the spikes being recorded in those Republican-run states.
At the risk of losing steam in all of the COVID upticks, is the urgently needed issue of policing revamping and overall.
As more private companies, NGO’s and other entities begin to add their names to the Black Lives Matter cause, or rather begin to disentangle from the moorings of the sinking white supremacy titanic, and even as some of the veneers of systemic racism are peeled away, it is becoming clearer by the day, just how entrenched and institutionalized racism is, to the American construct.
Across the globe as well, people who have never set foot in America, but who now benefit from the bridging of the digital divide, are able to get a glimpse of what African-Americans have complained about for over four hundred years.
As such, they too are shining a light on America and demanding change.
The louder the calls and the more companies take action to correct this systemic problem, the louder the howls of pushback becomes from the *white-wing* media, as it tries to counter the truth of what people are seeing with their own eyes.
Not exactly the people the right-wing cares about.
The next time you hear them talk about policing as if it cannot be done without brutality and murder, understand that they don’t care about those being abused.
Years ago I knew literally all of the officers on the force in my city. As a small business owner and a former cop, I made it my duty to foster good relations with the officers in my city.
For their part, the majority of the officers at the time were good people just doing a job.
There were foot ‑patrol officers, bicycle patrols, and of course officers in their cruisers as well as the detectives.
Officers could be counted on to stop and say hello while they walked up and down or rode by on their bicycles or drove by in their cruisers.
And then it all started to dry up.….…. so I asked one cop, a really good friend of mine. “Hey what happened to all of the bicycle and foot patrols”?
He told me bluntly, “Mike, the chief stopped all of that, he wants us to come out and write tickets and lock up people”.
Let that sink in for a minute, for the next time you hear that there are no quotas, or that the police are there to serve the community.
They are not. They are there to crack skulls, bring in revenue, and to make arrests.
The for-profit prisons demand that cops make arrests.
Regardless of what police executives say in public, even if they do not outright tell cops to crack skulls and drag people to jail, the response by their superiors when it comes to their evaluations makes it clear what is expected of them.
District Attorneys and judges at all levels are an integral part of the culture of oppression of people of color.
The cases prosecuted by prosecutors and the disparity in the sentences handed down for the very same offenses between black and white offenders, tell the entire story.
Mike Beckles is a former police Detective corporal, businessman, freelance writer,
he is a black achiever honoree, and publisher of the blog chatt-a-box.com.
He’s also a contributor to several websites.
You may subscribe to his blogs free of charge, or subscribe to his Youtube channel @chatt-a-box, for the latest podcast all free to you of course.