Recipe for tragedy: armed and ignorant
I really feel horrible today. Two more senseless murders perpetrated by the very people paid to protect us. I wanted to believe it was just an American problem, but after the murder of a young man in Toronto by one of the city's 'finest' (bizarrely convicted of attempted murder even though the victim died) it became painfully obvious the problem is common to the US and Canada.
While this kind of tragedy could happen to anybody, it is much more likely to happen if you are identified as belonging to a minority, particularly if your skin is dark.
While calls of racism mount - calls that are hard to discount given statistics and anecdotal evidence - I don't think it's the only factor at play. In fact, I'd say that racism is only one of four main factors contributing to these terribly unfortunate deaths.
Another of the factors is fear. Police officers are obviously deathly afraid of being killed on the job. During routine traffic stops they often have their guns drawn and are prepared to shoot.
Do they have cause for this fear? Statistics show that in 2014 police officers ranked fifteenth on the list of dangerous jobs. Being a logger is more than nine times as dangerous as a job in law enforcement. That said, police murdered on the job, fifty-one in the US during 2015, put them in number two spot after taxi drivers for this category (BTW taxi drivers are more than twice as likely to be murdered on the job than police).
Another main factor causing unwarranted police killings directly relates to the attitude displayed by most North American police. They bark orders, they yell profanities, they bully and escalate confrontations. Is this in their training? My experience in other places - particularly England, Holland and France - is that police only escalate tensions when they need to. Even police officers in the sleepy little city I live in tend to play the bully role without so much as a please or thank you. Where does this 'us' vs 'them' attitude emerge? Why do they end up feeling they have to protect their fellow officers before the people whose taxes pay their salaries and they have sworn to 'serve and protect'?
The final factor is too obvious to point out but cannot be ignored, and that is the fact that there are too many handguns in our midst. The only reason for handguns is to shoot other people. They should be banned outright. Police should have weapons available in the trunk (rifles and shotguns) that immediately begin a process of logging once they are taken from their holding cradles. Long guns are more effective as weapons, are much easier to track (perhaps even equipped with cameras) and would not contribute to the 'gunslinger' stereotype so prevalent in many police officers of the day.
So here is the formula - armed, confrontational, state-sanctioned bullies, in fear for their own lives, shoot people who ignore or fail to obey their orders. Throw in a good measure of ignorance (because racism is ignorance) and you have disaster.
The answer - a complete rethinking and renovation of how we police. The chances of that happening? Zero.
Sadly, we await the next tragedy.
While this kind of tragedy could happen to anybody, it is much more likely to happen if you are identified as belonging to a minority, particularly if your skin is dark.
While calls of racism mount - calls that are hard to discount given statistics and anecdotal evidence - I don't think it's the only factor at play. In fact, I'd say that racism is only one of four main factors contributing to these terribly unfortunate deaths.
Another of the factors is fear. Police officers are obviously deathly afraid of being killed on the job. During routine traffic stops they often have their guns drawn and are prepared to shoot.
Do they have cause for this fear? Statistics show that in 2014 police officers ranked fifteenth on the list of dangerous jobs. Being a logger is more than nine times as dangerous as a job in law enforcement. That said, police murdered on the job, fifty-one in the US during 2015, put them in number two spot after taxi drivers for this category (BTW taxi drivers are more than twice as likely to be murdered on the job than police).
Another main factor causing unwarranted police killings directly relates to the attitude displayed by most North American police. They bark orders, they yell profanities, they bully and escalate confrontations. Is this in their training? My experience in other places - particularly England, Holland and France - is that police only escalate tensions when they need to. Even police officers in the sleepy little city I live in tend to play the bully role without so much as a please or thank you. Where does this 'us' vs 'them' attitude emerge? Why do they end up feeling they have to protect their fellow officers before the people whose taxes pay their salaries and they have sworn to 'serve and protect'?
The final factor is too obvious to point out but cannot be ignored, and that is the fact that there are too many handguns in our midst. The only reason for handguns is to shoot other people. They should be banned outright. Police should have weapons available in the trunk (rifles and shotguns) that immediately begin a process of logging once they are taken from their holding cradles. Long guns are more effective as weapons, are much easier to track (perhaps even equipped with cameras) and would not contribute to the 'gunslinger' stereotype so prevalent in many police officers of the day.
So here is the formula - armed, confrontational, state-sanctioned bullies, in fear for their own lives, shoot people who ignore or fail to obey their orders. Throw in a good measure of ignorance (because racism is ignorance) and you have disaster.
The answer - a complete rethinking and renovation of how we police. The chances of that happening? Zero.
Sadly, we await the next tragedy.
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