Defund The Police Is Sound Principle!

As Americans of all col­ors final­ly begin to wake up to the real and present dan­ger posed by killer cops, we are see­ing man­i­fest­ed in real-time what we have stat­ed for years, that the police are only one part of the prob­lem.
The pros­e­cu­tors, med­ical exam­in­ers, pathol­o­gists, judges, prison author­i­ties, and elect­ed offi­cials are built into the sys­tem, many of whom are ded­i­cat­ed to the cause of white suprema­cy in America.
Defunding the police will not solve racism in the jus­tice sys­tem but it would be a mean­ing full start.
Why do you think that so many of your tax dol­lars are used to give them what they want while your kids can­not get an edu­ca­tion, they are cut­ting food stamps and WIC, your kid’s schools are ver­i­ta­ble pris­ons, and you can­not afford ‑afford­able hous­ing and your net worth are.….
Well, I’ll let the (joint eco­nom­ic committee0 tell it.….
A 2019 study found that over 97% of respon­dents vast­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed the huge gap between the medi­an wealth held by Black fam­i­lies ($17,000) and White fam­i­lies ($171,000) — a ratio of 10 to one. Respondents esti­mat­ed the gap to be 80 per­cent­age points small­er than the actu­al divide.
Oh well.….

Approximately 70 % of America’s cops are white males, despite the small inroads that African-Americans have made in var­i­ous areas of American life since the civ­il rights fights of the ear­ly 1960“s.
A great deal of those (white men) police large urban cen­ters like Los Angels, New York, Houston, Boston, Philadelphia, etc., in which huge chunks of the pop­u­la­tion are black.
By that met­ric, the (AA) com­mu­ni­ty is forced to heav­i­ly sub­si­dize with their tax dol­lars American polic­ing, from which they have large­ly only derived neg­a­tive returns.
On that basis alone, the calls to defund the police and return the monies stolen to pay white cops to black com­mu­ni­ties are total­ly and com­pre­hen­sive­ly legit­i­mate.
Whenever these argu­ments come up, police groups and their white sup­port­ers point to the killings in the black com­mu­ni­ty as a rea­son that the police should not be defund­ed based on those num­bers.
The real­i­ty is that if poor black peo­ple’s tax dol­lars are being used to fund these huge armies of white cops to kill our peo­ple and those black-on-black crimes are still hap­pen­ing, tell me exact­ly why again should the black com­mu­ni­ty keep pay­ing for those cops?

The fact of the mat­ter is that as a for­mer law enforce­ment offi­cer … albeit from a dif­fer­ent coun­try, I know all too well that many of the crimes com­mit­ted in the black com­mu­ni­ty are part and par­cel of hun­dreds of years of mea­sures tak­en by the American gov­ern­ment against the AA com­mu­ni­ty, both overt­ly and covert­ly.
The ter­ror vis­it­ed upon African-Americans far exceeds the bat­ter­ing and mur­der they suf­fer at the hands of police but are built into covert plant­i­ng of dan­ger­ous drugs and lethal ill­ness­es in the AA com­mu­ni­ty designed both to elim­i­nate that minor­i­ty group and, at times to use the com­mu­ni­ty as guinea pigs for dan­ger­ous exper­i­ments.
This may sound hyper­bol­ic, but they are not; these are all prov­able, well-known facts.
The idea that speak­ing out about police sys­temic and con­tin­ued vio­lence against Black peo­ple should be viewed through the same lens as black-on-black vio­lence is [an unwit­ting acknowl­edg­ment] that the police are crim­i­nals as well.
Black crim­i­nals who com­mit crimes against Black peo­ple or any­one else are gen­er­al­ly held account­able for their crimes. In fact, the pris­ons are filled with them, so much so that count­less inno­cents are pop­u­lat­ing America’s pris­ons for crimes they nev­er com­mit­ted.
Literally every day, we read the hor­ror sto­ries of inno­cent black men and women who have been in prison, some­times for decades, on charges trumped up by racist, cor­rupt cops.
The next time that the (cop-apologists)[sic] counter your legit­i­mate dis­cus­sion on police crim­i­nal­i­ty (idi­ot­ic blacks as well) with the black-on-black non­sense tell them where to go.

The entire sys­tem was designed to bru­tal­ize and mur­der African-Americans, their police enact­ed from slave patrols. I have seen up close the bla­tant crim­i­nal­iz­ing of inno­cent peo­ple by police with agen­das, agen­das that do not care whether an inno­cent per­son­’s life will be ruined by a false arrest; they do it any­way.
Even so, there are judges and politi­cians that do every­thing in their pow­er to keep the pub­lic infor­ma­tion about police aggres­sion in their per­son­nel records.



(Root​.com) report­ed the fol­low­ing.
In the weeks fol­low­ing the first Black Lives Matter upris­ings, crim­i­nal jus­tice reform advo­cates scored sev­er­al major leg­isla­tive wins. In New York state, one of these was the repeal of Civil Rights Law 50‑A, which shield­ed the mis­con­duct records of law enforce­ment from the pub­lic. Last week, how­ev­er, a fed­er­al judge paused the release of those dis­ci­pli­nary records due to a police union law­suit filed against New York City. Under the rul­ing, the police depart­ment and the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a watch­dog group that over­sees the NYPD, are barred from shar­ing the records until at least Aug. 18, reports ABC News.

Not list­ed as a defen­dant — and there­fore exempt from the rul­ing — is ProPublica, a non­prof­it news orga­ni­za­tion with a focus on jus­tice and inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. The pub­li­ca­tion announced Sunday it would be pub­lish­ing thou­sands of dis­ci­pli­nary records obtained by the CCRB before last week’s rul­ing. “We are mak­ing this infor­ma­tion pub­lic and, with it, pro­vid­ing an unprece­dent­ed pic­ture of civil­ians’ com­plaints of abuse by NYPD offi­cers as well as the lim­its of the cur­rent sys­tem that is sup­posed to hold offi­cers account­able,” Deputy Managing Editor Eric Umansky wrote in a post unveil­ing the com­plaints, which were com­piled in a search­able data­base. As Umansky not­ed, the data­base lists only active-duty NYPD offi­cers who have had at least one alle­ga­tion against them sub­stan­ti­at­ed by the CCRB. In total, there are 4,000 offi­cers rep­re­sent­ed out of the department’s 36,000-strong work­force. This means 11 per­cent of all NYPD offi­cers have had a cred­i­ble com­plaint of mis­con­duct lodged against them. According to ProPublica, 34 offi­cers have as many as 40 or more alle­ga­tions of mis­con­duct against them.

The release of the records is meant to enlight­en the pub­lic about the scope and sever­i­ty of mis­con­duct alle­ga­tions against the NYPD, the nation’s largest police force. But the pub­li­ca­tion also aims to shed light on the review process. The CCRB has lim­it­ed inves­tiga­tive pow­ers, which means it can­not con­firm a sub­stan­tial amount of the thou­sands of com­plaints it receives every year. Part of this hinges on coöper­a­tion from the NYPD itself, notes ProPublica. While the NYPD has a legal duty to coöper­ate with the over­sight board’s inves­ti­ga­tions, includ­ing hand­ing over evi­dence such as body­cam footage, the depart­ment often doesn’t do this. The data­base also includes civil­ian com­plaints of mis­con­duct that the Board found did hap­pen but didn’t vio­late the NYPD’s rules.
“We under­stand the argu­ments against releas­ing this data. But we believe the pub­lic good it could do out­weighs the poten­tial harm,” said ProPublica Editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg. “The data­base gives the peo­ple of New York City a glimpse at how alle­ga­tions involv­ing police mis­con­duct have been han­dled and allows jour­nal­ists and ordi­nary cit­i­zens alike to look more deeply at the records of par­tic­u­lar officers.”

Time and time, we see evi­dence of police mis­con­duct go with­out the pub­lic get­ting redress. Time and again, we see acts of egre­gious police mis­con­duct and crimes, and they inves­ti­gate them­selves, and the pub­lic is none the wis­er at the out­come of their [sup­posed] inves­ti­ga­tions.
Even when they com­mit crimes that are so egre­gious, depart­ments allow them to resign so that they can go to anoth­er depart­ment that wel­comes them with open arms.
Charles Ramsey, an African-American for­mer Philadelphia police com­mis­sion­er, spoke to the issue of vio­lent police encoun­ters with the pub­lic and agreed that the sheer num­ber of depart­ments in the coun­try might be a con­trib­u­tor to the problem.

Ramsey, who was a co-chair of a pres­i­den­tial polic­ing task force, teased out the con­nec­tions between law enforce­ment and race with Meet the Press host Chuck Todd on July 10, 2016. Todd said major urban police depart­ments have been tak­ing steps to ease racial ten­sions and asked Ramsey if the small­er depart­ments had the same kind of resources. Ramsey paint­ed a pic­ture that went well beyond core fund­ing.
“There are approx­i­mate­ly 18,000 depart­ments in the United States,” Ramsey said. “I would try to cut the num­ber in half in the next ten years or so because you’re always going to have these kinds of issues as long as you have this many depart­ments with dif­fer­ent poli­cies, pro­ce­dures, train­ing, and the like.” The num­bers back Ramsey up on the num­ber of depart­ments. The final report from the task force he led said there are 17,985 U.S. police agen­cies. (According to Politifact)

Defunding the police would mean, in actu­al terms, cut­ting many of the police forces out and ensur­ing that the oth­ers do their jobs as pro­fes­sion­al offi­cers of the law, not steroid-pumped, doped-up tat­toed wannabe Rambos.
It would mean using the resources saved from the mas­sive mil­i­ta­rized police buildup to offer skills train­ing to young men and women in under­served com­mu­ni­ties, black and white.
It would mean pro­vid­ing jobs for them at the end of their train­ing peri­od, a pol­i­cy ensur­ing that the gang-relat­ed vio­lence would begin to dis­ap­pear.
Of course, as long as there are for-prof­it pris­ons that need black bod­ies to fill them, this kind of robo­cop buildup will con­tin­ue.
Despite what some politi­cians mum­ble under their breath about work­ing to change this destruc­tive tra­jec­to­ry, not much will change. It will con­tin­ue until it reach­es a cat­a­clysmic end.
They are not there just yet.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.