LA Sheriff’s Challenge To LeBron Rife With Tone Deafness, Arrogance, & Ultimately Ignorance…

People say American polic­ing is bro­ken and that it needs fix­ing. I dis­agree, American polic­ing is work­ing exact­ly the way it was designed to work, and it has worked since reconstruction.
Law enforce­ment in all of its forms was designed to be dis­crim­i­na­to­ry and puni­tive to Black people.
Whether it be fire codes, health codes, build­ing codes, even the length of some­one’s lawn grass, the poor­est peo­ple, (blacks), were intend­ed to be pun­ished the most.
When a cop pulls over a Black per­son under the pre­text of a tail-light out, it is not ran­dom. The dri­ver in many instances can scarce­ly afford the gas in the tank much less repair a bro­ken tail-light and the pow­ers that cre­ate those laws knows that.
It is just anoth­er strat­e­gy to fur­ther impov­er­ish the already poor Black com­mu­ni­ty and con­tin­ue the mass incar­cer­a­tion of the Black population.
Or as a Wisconsin Sheriff David Beth said, “They just need to dis­ap­pear.” speak­ing of Black offend­ers. “They need to be ware­housed for the remain­der of their lives and not be let out”, Beth went on.
Sheriff David Beth was ref­er­enc­ing a group of four black teens who had com­mit­ted the unfor­giv­able sin of shoplifting.
I won­der how many crimes David Beth com­mit­ted over the span of his mis­er­able life for which he should be ware­housed and nev­er see the light of day?

Does it seem that the worst kinds of humans are run­ning to fill those sher­iff jobs, remem­ber the looney toon self ‑hat­ing David Clarke from Milwaukee County? This self ‑hat­ing crud blamed Black peo­ple for what police are doing to them and insists there is no racism in America.
This detached from real­i­ty men­tal­i­ty, is what I call the Clarence Thomas syn­drome. Overcompensating, the ugly Black man who gets to mar­ry the white woman that the white men will not marry.(but I digress).

This brings me to anoth­er cop, this time the real­ly bril­liant Hispanic Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva who all but demand­ed that bas­ket­ball great Lebron Donate a large chunk of mon­ey to aid in find­ing the per­son who shot two of his deputies days ago.
In a radio call-in pro­gram in his state, the idi­ot­ic and tone-deaf Villanueva said the following.

“This chal­lenge is to LeBron James,” Villanueva said on 790 KABC Radio in Los Angeles. “I want you to match that and dou­ble that reward. Because I know you care about law enforce­ment. “You expressed a very, very inter­est­ing state­ment about your per­spec­tive on race rela­tions and on offi­cer-involved shoot­ings and the impact it has on the African American com­mu­ni­ty, and I appre­ci­ate that. But like­wise, we need to appre­ci­ate the respect for life goes across pro­fes­sions, across races, creeds. And I’d like to see LeBron James step up to the plate and dou­ble that.”
If this guy was­n’t such an idiot I would sep­a­rate his name and drop the last few let­ters. Villan_​(ueva_.However, he is clear­ly not smart enough to be a villain.
Villanueva has been crit­i­cized for rehir­ing fired deputy Caren Carl Mandoyan. Mandoyan, who had worked for Villanueva’s elec­tion cam­paign, had been dis­charged by McDonnell the for­mer Sheriff, after alle­ga­tions of domes­tic abuse and stalk­ing a woman he had met while work­ing at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station. The Los Angeles Times report­ed that Mandoyan was a mem­ber of a secret soci­ety of deputies known as the Reapers and had on his left ankle the group’s tat­too — an image of the “Grim Reaper” hold­ing a scythe and the name of his Sheriff’s sta­tion. A judge ordered that Mandoyan be stripped of his badge and his gun, [yet] he remains an employ­ee of the Sheriff’s Department. Villanueva also has been crit­i­cized for rehir­ing a homi­cide detec­tive who had been banned from coun­ty jails after imper­son­at­ing a deputy and deliv­er­ing con­tra­band to an inmate.
He is also been scru­ti­nized for the hir­ing of his son, Johannes Jared Villanueva, sev­en months after he took office. The L.A. Times has report­ed that Johannes Jared Villanueva “was the sub­ject of two bench war­rants for fail­ing to com­ply with a court-ordered treat­ment pro­gram tied to his 2009 con­vic­tion of a mis­de­meanor DUI .” He also has been accused of mak­ing an Instagram post that made light of the Holocaust.

Here is a guy whose offi­cers mur­dered a man whom they could eas­i­ly have tak­en into cus­tody just days before. He runs a depart­ment that has faced a moun­tain of accu­sa­tions that deputies are actu­al gang­land mem­bers who sport nazi sym­bol tat­toos, they are accused of com­mit­ting all kinds of crimes against the peo­ple they are sworn protect.
This is not tone-deaf­ness, its idio­cy in high places, but idio­cy in high places is now the norm…
Rather than use this inci­dent as a wake­up call to attend to the crit­i­cal issues as it relates to the claims lev­eled at his depart­ment he seeks to go right-wing polit­i­cal by attack­ing Lebron James who cor­rect­ly calls out filthy mur­der­ing cops who com­mit atroc­i­ties against cit­i­zens whom they are sworn to protect.
As a for­mer law enforce­ment offi­cer, I was always mind­ful that the actions of bad cops endan­ger the lives of all cops.
But we were real police offi­cers, not some moron who wins an elec­tion and slaps on a tin badge and believes he knows something.
When peo­ple can­not trust the laws to work for them they take the laws into their own hands. What’s worse is that this stu­pid Hispanic (white-in ‑wait­ing) believes that attack­ing a Black icon will serve his cause, so he decides to spew right-wing talk­ing points.
By doing so he revealed exact­ly where their heads are, fur­ther cement­ing the notion that many peo­ple hold that there are no good cops.
This is a Sheriff who ran his mouth on a radio pro­gram in July of this year, arguably slan­der­ing the Los Angeles County’s chief exec­u­tive offi­cer, his boss, and is get­ting sued for slan­der and defamation.

And, as was to be expect­ed the back­lash was swift, even though Lebron James has cor­rect­ly, not ele­vat­ed him by respond­ing to his igno­rant arro­gance, Vanessa Bryant, the wid­ow of Kobi Bryant was swift to respond.
“How can he talk about trust­ing the sys­tem?” one of the tweets Bryant repost­ed read. “His sheriff’s depart­ment couldn’t be trust­ed to secure Kobe Bryant’s heli­copter crash scene, his deputies took and shared graph­ic pho­tos of crash vic­tims”. Vanessa Bryant is also suing the very same department.
Albeit for me to give advice to Lebron James as to what his response should be, [if any], nev­er­the­less it does seem that Villanueva is seek­ing media atten­tion on behalf of the racist right, or at the very least seek­ing to heap ridicule on those who speak out against sys­temic racism and police violence.
As such a response from Lebron James will inex­orably raise the pro­file of this cop with no dis­cern­able ben­e­fit to James, or the caus­es he supports.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, he is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al websites.
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