divide and conquer

Around 2003 I was involved in the education program at the King County Jail on 5th Ave as an assistant teacher for GED and ESL classes through Americorps for over a year. The GED graduation numbers there had recently improved when the educators started planning on the inmates coming back to jail after they were released, because this allowed them to focus on getting them up to speed on one or two sections of the GED at a time. Most of the time, if an inmate didn't have a GED, if they were in jail, you could safely bet they would be back.

And what was the point of them getting a GED anyways if they weren't going to be able to get into college, because their crimes would have likely disqualified them from getting financial aid? Were they even guilty? Did it really matter if they were just going to plea bargain for time served anyways so they could get back to their families and jobs?

When the worlds supposed icon of freedom (USA) has the world's highest incarceration rate, you know there's a problem. When did slavery end in the USA? What do you call it when you lock someone up so they can't leave and the only employment options they have pay them far less than minimum wage? What do you call it when minorities are disproportionately represented in that "justice" system? Slavery, as in actual pre-civil-war race-oriented slavery.

How do people go to jail and/or prison? Who puts them there? Who keeps them there? I am not talking about who is responsible, I am talking about who literally does the hands on dirty work: the Police.

"Give me liberty or give me death" is a USA core morality. We believe it is OK to kill to gain or maintain our freedom. If a female was forcibly locked into a strangers basement and used as a sex slave, and she used lethal force to escape, we would elevate this female to the status of an exalted hero for her accomplishment.

Say what you want about rape culture in the USA, but there is clearly one place where rape is considered a virtue in the USA: prison. We often racistly declare that justice has been served with the following statement: "Well, he's got a big black room mate named Buba now." In other words getting prison-raped is part of the justice we assign to criminals. How is trying to put a man in prison different from trying to lock up a female in your rape dungeon?

2nd Amendment gun rights advocates constantly suggest we need armed militias to keep our government in check. If completely innocent blacks are being frequently killed or incarcerated by police, and an organized group of blacks retaliate with firearms against police, is this not the ultimate example of using firearms to keep our government in check?

In 2009 I was the Security Supervisor for Seattle City Hall. I worked with police to get video footage of an off duty security guard getting cut in half by an out of state party bus. In the dim light it looked like the bus cut a bag of red apples in half as the red parts rolled down the hill towards Seattle City Hall. An officer who had responded to the scene expressed to me that "when I first saw the uniform, I thought to myself 'oh no!' But then I looked down at the cloth badge, and realized it was only a security guard, and said to myself 'thank God!'"

He didn't blink. He didn't look at me and say to himself "oh wait, this guy is working for a private security agency." It was a simple and natural fact to this detective that police lives were far more valuable than the lives of security guards. A police officer hadn't been the victim here, sympathy for security officers was the farthest thing from this detective's mind. Other police in the room had not corrected him, but only nodded and sighed in relief as well. I knew at that time the SPD was heading towards dark places.

Word on the street is the culprit was discovered, but that no criminal charges were ever pressed. Would the result have been the same if that had been an off duty police officer instead? If security guards are not cop-like enough for cops to consider significant, can we really expect cops to highly value the lives of the average black person?

Most of the cops I have interacted with have been excellent people and problem solvers, and I was very glad they were there to help at that time. However most public health safety risks don't kill everyone every day. If a small-yet-significant daily risk persists, it becomes a dangerous health risk over the course of years and decades. I suspect these police shootings are more closely related to the violence in our society created by the proliferation of handguns, than it is to the issue of racism specifically.

If our police need to have guns, those guns should stay in the police cars, not be a standard part of the police uniform. They should not spend all this time in the academy training to draw light weight firepower. Instead they should have sniper riffles, assault riffles, and shot guns available for when they need firepower, but not bring that firepower with them into most situations. Instead of spending all that time in the academy learning to fast draw like a sheriff in an old western movie, they should instead master the art of the baton, and live by it:

Besides replacing the side arm with a baton keeping the assault riffle in the trunk, I would imitate the United Kingdom's policing style in other ways. In the UK deaths at the hands of the police are far less common, and the incarceration rate is much lower:

It takes special kinds of people to be cops. They have to be willing to risk their lives, serve the community, believe in obeying rules, have a high level of mental and physical competence, and be good problem solvers. What do you call it when those people are set apart from the rest of us, given a mandate to incarcerate, and teach them to use lethal force against us as a high priority as part of their training? Divide and conquer: