Podcast Episode 072220

Ramifications of defunding the police.

Hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Alaskan Outlaw. I hope you all are getting through the pandemic and find yourself healthy. Today I want to address a huge topic that is all over the press these days following the recent police brutality that has occurred. While I will not stand for that type of behavior, I would like to suggest we all come together and figure out where this came from here in these United States. The history of policing has a very long history, and it has been forged by the challenges faced by officers every day. From the early days of being left out of society, to the gang fights, drug wars, and human trafficking that happen today, we (as Americans) have forged our police departments into what they have become. Many out there are quick to point the finger at all local police agencies and can immediately cite thousands of cases of this type of behavior all the way back to those early days of policing America. So, let us start there. Let us look at the history of policing society.

 

History of police departments

The encyclopedia Britannica provides an excellent history of the police officer profession as a whole, I’ve paraphrased a lot of it, however, you are more than welcome to research it yourself here. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/The-history-of-policing-in-the-West).

It would be easy to think that the police officer is a figure who has existed since the beginning of civilization. That is what President John F. Kennedy said on the dedication of the week of May 15 as “National Police Week,” in which he noted that law-enforcement officers had been protecting Americans since the nation’s birth. He was not wrong. However, let us consider his statement in a broader, more international perspective. So, we all understand it as a deliberate undertaking to enforce common standards within a community, and to protect it from internal predators, policing is much older than the creation of a specialized armed force devoted to such a task. The activity of policing preceded the creation of the police as a distinct body for thousands of years. The derivation of the word police from the Greek polis, meaning “city,” reflects the fact that protopolice were essentially creatures of the city, to the limited extent that they existed as a distinct body. Based on information from the Encyclopedia Britannica, an inclusive survey of 51 ancient societies on all continents has shown that interpersonal mediation was the first means to settle disputes; the creation of something akin to the police force was restricted to less than half of the sample. Thus, mediation is the most ancient and most universal form of conflict solving. Second, there was a crucial distinction between the people who were legally endowed with policing responsibility and the people who carried out policing duties. The police authorities generally belonged to the social elite, but the men they hired came from very diverse backgrounds, as policing was considered a lowly occupation. Finally, the police performed a very wide array of tasks, ranging from garbage disposal to firefighting, that had little direct relation to crime control and prevention.

Before I get into the history of “policing”, we need to distinguish (for our discussion here) the differences between policing and occupying. Throughout history, armed invaders swept into a city, then used its military forces to maintain order and application of the new rules and laws. This type of engagement is very different than establishing a peace-time police force. While most of the history discussed here have some form of military participation, the idea of policing as a civilian topic is a little different.

So, the first policing organization was created in Egypt in about 3000 bce. The empire then was divided into 42 administrative jurisdictions; for each jurisdiction, the pharaoh appointed an official who was responsible for justice and security. He was assisted by a chief of police, who bore the title sab heri seker, or “chief of the hitters” (a body of men responsible for tax collecting, among other duties). This was followed by the city-states of ancient Greece; policing duties were assigned to magistrates. Ten astynomoi were responsible for municipal upkeep and cleanliness in the city of Athens and the port of Piraeus; 10 agoranomoi kept order in the marketplace, and 10 other metronomoi ensured that honest measuring standards were respected and the “Eleven” dealt with courts, prisons, and, more generally, criminal justice. In order to perform their duties, the magistrates depended in part on the military, which viewed itself as primarily responsible for the external security of the state. Hence, the magistrates had to rely to an even greater extent on a corps of 300 Scythian slaves purchased by the city after the Greco-Persian Wars. Lightly armed, the Scythian slaves were charged with maintaining peace and order in various public places and in public gatherings. Only occasionally did they assist the Eleven in their criminal justice duties

The practice of recruiting police operatives from the lower classes—slaves, freedmen, and citizens of low birth, some with a criminal past—persisted in ancient Rome. During the republic, the Romans were reluctant to engage in the prevention, detection, and prosecution of everyday criminality, which was largely considered to be a matter of civil tort to be resolved between private citizens. The extent to which murder itself was prosecuted is not even clear. One of the earliest forms of organized policing was created by the emperor Augustus. In 7 bce Augustus divided the city of Rome into 14 regiones (wards), each consisting of vici (precincts) overseen by vicomagistri, who were responsible for fire protection and other administrative and religious duties. In 6 ce, after a particularly bad fire, Augustus expanded the city’s fire brigade into a corps of vigiles (firefighters and watchmen), consisting of seven squads, or cohorts, of 1,000 freedmen each. Each cohort was responsible for the fire and, especially at night, police protection in two regiones. As a further measure to impose order on the often violent streets of Rome—a city of nearly one million people—Augustus created three cohorts of police, which were part of the army of the state and were placed under the command of the urban prefect. Those cohorts could, in turn, call upon the emperor’s own bodyguard (the Praetorian Guard) for assistance. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century ce, the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire retained some of the older Roman institutions—e.g., a koiaistor (a Hellenized equivalent of the Roman quaestor) was the main policing authority, with the specific responsibility of overseeing the large population of foreigners that resided in the capital. Outside the Byzantine Empire, however, the urban basis for the existence of policing organizations had almost disappeared. What order that existed was enforced either by the military, often consisting of little more than armed bands, or by the community itself. Indeed, the legal codifications produced during the early Middle Ages, such as the Salic Law, show that nearly all offenses were considered forms of civil tort to be resolved informally between the parties involved. The conflict-solving mechanisms established in England during that period offer a good example of how policing was done before modern police developed.

The earliest policing system in England, which predates the Norman Conquest in 1066, was community-based and implied collective responsibility. The Saxon frankpledge required all adult males to be responsible for the good conduct of each other and to band together for their community’s protection. To formalize that obligation, they were grouped into tithings headed by a tithingman. Each tithing, in turn, was grouped into a hundred, which was headed by a hundredman who served as both administrator and judge. Each hundred was grouped into a shire, which was supervised by a shire-reeve. The role of shire-reeve eventually developed into the modern office of the county sheriff in England and mirrored in the United States many years later. So, during these evolutionary times, when crimes were observed, citizens were expected to raise an alarm, or hue and cry, to gather the members of the tithing and to pursue and capture the criminal. All citizens were obliged to pursue wrongdoers; those who refused were subject to punishment. If there were no witnesses to the crime, efforts to identify the criminal after the fact were the responsibility of the victim alone; no governmental agency existed for the investigation and solution of crimes. This is a community-based system that worked.

The English constable was originally a post in the royal court; by the late 13th century, however, it had evolved into a local office of individual manors and parishes, subordinate to the sheriff or mayor. Under Henry VIII these “gentlemen” did not receive a stipend. The Statute of Winchester of 1285 codified the system of social obligation. It provided that: (1) it was everyone’s duty to maintain the king’s peace, and any citizen could arrest an offender; (2) unpaid, part-time constables operating at various levels of governance had a special duty to do so, and in towns, they would be assisted by their inferior officers, the watchmen; (3) if the offender was not caught “red-handed,” a hue and cry would have to be raised; (4) everyone was obliged to keep arms and to follow the cry when required, and (5) constables had among their varying responsibilities a duty to present the offender at court tests. The Justice of the Peace Act of 1361 began the process of centralizing the administration of justice in England. It established the office of justice of the peace, the responsibilities of which encompassed police, judicial, and administrative duties. The period of the Justice of the Peace Act marked the end of the law enforcement system based upon obligatory service to the community by all individuals. Until the 19th century, except for a brief period during the rule of Oliver Cromwell (1653–58), public order and safety in England remained mainly the responsibility of local justices-of-the-peace, constables, and the watch and ward. Constables and watchmen were supported by citizens, posses (such as the posse comitatus), and, when riots occurred, the military or the yeomanry (a cavalry force largely composed of landowners).

From the early 16th to the early 19th century, some groups of merchants, traders, church members, insurers, and others employed private individuals to protect their property and their persons. Protection thus became a commodity, available to anyone who had sufficient resources. In addition, victims of theft who could not recover their property offered rewards for its return, often resorting to hiring “thieftakers.” These precursors to modern bounty hunters were private citizens who, for a fee or a reward, attempted to identify wrongdoers and to return stolen property to its rightful owners. When communities began paying private citizens for the capture and conviction of thieves, a standard set of fees was established, and a “stipendiary” police system evolved. Sources of fees in this system included public reward programs, insurance companies, commercial houses, prosecuting associations, and subscriptions. Any citizen, not only constables and justices, could earn such fees and rewards by becoming a thieftaker or “common informer.” Although the system of social obligation remained in place for more than 800 years and was transplanted to several of England’s colonial possessions (Australia, Canada, and the United States), it had serious weaknesses that were amplified by industrialization and urbanization. So, we see that during these times, the idea of mercenary security forces began to flow down through the social-economic classes, although in many locations the security forces were already pretty far down the classes.

The stipendiary system was supported by a legal system that decreed draconian punishments for crimes that would be considered petty by contemporary standards; capital punishment and serious mutilation were prescribed for almost every conceivable offense. Such harsh punishments were handed out for two reasons—to deter wrongdoers and, failing that, to provide criminals with the opportunity to repent through punishment and save their souls. Because it had become degraded, persons of high social status were no longer willing to perform their duties. (Writing in 1714, Daniel Defoe spoke of the “imposition” of the office of constable as “an unsupportable hardship,” taking so much of a man’s time that it compelled him to neglect his own affairs, too often leading to his ruin.) Although this did not create serious problems in small towns and agrarian areas, only the poor, the aged, and the infirm were willing to be constables in such cities as London, Boston, and New York City.

Shifting back across the pond, so to speak. Through a series of edicts proclaimed between 1536 and 1544, King Francis I instituted the first systematic measures to police France. The military police roamed the countryside—they were not allowed to stay in one place for more than two days in a row—to catch military and, eventually, civilian offenders and to use their sentencing power to inflict punishment, for which there was no appeal. These special forces were not at first united in a single organization, but they came to be known collectively as the maréchaussée, as they were assigned to the various army marshals. Thus, it was in Paris in 1666 that King Louis XIV created the first modern and efficient system of policing. Nicolas de la Mare provided a comprehensive definition in his Traité de la police (1722; “A Treatise on the Police”). Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which states that the word police is borrowed from the French and means “the regulation and government of a city or country, so far as regards the inhabitants.”

Policing as a form of governance was most fully developed in 18th-century Germany—particularly in the kingdom of Prussia, where it was known as Policeywissenschaft (the science of government). The Dublin Police Act (1786) created a professional uniformed and armed centralized police force in Dublin (then the second-largest city in the British Isles) consisting of 40 horse police and 400 constables. By 1812, when Robert Peel, the founder of modern professional policing in England, was appointed chief secretary for Ireland, Dublin was considered relatively free of crime. The Metropolitan Police Act (1829) established the London Metropolitan Police Department, an organization that would become a model for future police departments in Great Britain, the British Commonwealth, and the United States.

Among the first public police forces established in colonial North America were the watchmen organized in Boston in 1631 and in New Amsterdam (later New York City) in 1647. Meanwhile, in the frontier regions of the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there arose a novel form of the Saxon tradition of frankpledge: the vigilante. Formation of the “regulators” or committees of vigilantes.

The United States government got partially involved in law enforcement with its para-military group formed by the Judiciary Act of 1789, the United States Marshals Service. The early years of the Marshals service witness another group of “regulators” or individuals tasked with bringing national outlaws to justice. This was a very different mission than the one they provide today. The first actual police department in the United Sates was established in New York City in 1844 (it was officially organized in 1845). Other cities soon followed suit: New Orleans and Cincinnati (Ohio) in 1852; Boston and Philadelphia in 1854; Chicago and Milwaukee (Wis.) in 1855; and Baltimore (Md.) and Newark (N.J.) in 1857. These early departments used the London Metropolitan Police model under a quasi-military command structure as the model for their creation. Because these police departments were originally conceived to retain close relationships with their communities, yet needing to be agents of reform, there arose contention within society about their role. Sound familiar?

Detectives were established in the U.S. with New York City in 1857, and Chicago in 1861. Throughout these early years, many of these groups suffered through large scandals, leading to their dismantling, then reconstruction years later. At this stage of the evolution, there were no shared overarching law enforcement principals in the U.S. thereby allowing for a more “localized” form of policing. This led to the myth of the “tough street cop” who had been given the latitude to enforce the law the way he/she saw fit. This also led to a huge disparity in the application of justice for criminal behavior especially between jurisdictions (I’ll explain that here in a minute).

The response to interjurisdictional (meaning the crime moved between one group and another) crime was to enact private law enforcement by big business at the time. This is also the time of companies like “The Coal and Iron Police of Pennsylvania” and “Pinkerton National Detective Agency”. However, these organizations were created primarily for antilabor vigilantism and strike breaking.

Finally, an over-arching national police force.

In 1865 the U.S. federal government created a police force called the United States Secret Service for the need to prevent counterfeiting. It wasn’t until 1901 that they assumed the role of protecting the executive branch of the government, however, prior to their permanent assignment for the President, they had been called upon to do that task periodically. Following the creation of the Secret Service, the Federal government formed the Department of Justice (DOJ) on July 1st, 1870 which was responsible for the enforcement of federal law throughout the country, although only typically enforced federal laws which did little or nothing for the individual cities and towns throughout the country. In 1908 The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was created initially as the Bureau of Investigation. By 1920 the Department of the Treasury created the first sizable federal police force initially charged with enforcing the prohibition.

During the early 20th century, some states began to create their own police forces as other states (i.e. Texas and Massachusetts) had done on a smaller scale before then. In 1905 Pennsylvania established the first modern state police department formed with the purpose of fighting rural crime. This was followed by others like New York (1917), Michigan, Colorado, and West Virginia (1919). Just to point out, in the big timeline, World War One had just finished at this time.

In 1938, the United States entered into an agreement with the Interpol, which is the International Police. While primarily a European organization, once the United States joined, the law enforcement community had an internationally overarching organization to help manage crime.

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was established on July 1st, 1973 by a reorganization plan signed on July 28th of the same year, by (then) President Richard Nixon. Which would indicate that many organizations are constantly being “re-tooled” for the new mission at hand. As departments constantly wrestle with the new crime types being engaged in.

As you can now understand, the evolution of the police officer has been taking place for about 5000 years, however, I submit that the idea of “policing versus protecting” is a more modern mentality. Many policing departments in the southern U.S. were created as slave policing agencies and have always been at the mercy of the prevailing political parties. This defined mission has taken its toll on the credibility of individual agencies; however, I would also like to add other factors later when we are speaking about “enemies of the state”.

As I mentioned earlier let’s talk about Jurisdiction, or levels of law enforcement.

Let’s talk about the levels of law enforcement which typically boils down to the word, jurisdiction. Municipal officers have jurisdiction within the defined city limits. County sheriffs typically cover outside the municipality but within the county borders. State officers cover everything else and typically are involved when crime spreads across county lines. Finally, we have the Federal officers who police crime that spans multiple states or enters the country. Now, I know several Military Police officers (MPs) who have informed me that the only jurisdiction they have is on a military installation, or during an active operation. Although they are active-duty military (federal) they have a much smaller jurisdiction. Now, I am not sure you can see the inefficiencies, however, there is a multitude of communication issues that have occurred between each of these levels. I have known many officers who get assigned to “task forces” with another level of jurisdiction to help foster better communications and thereby better legal standards. In most situations, state officers can backup county and municipal officers, and county officers can backup municipal officers by jurisdiction. Technically, jurisdiction is mandated by the level of officer down (in population size). So, a State trooper here in Alaska has jurisdiction throughout the state except for the military bases, whereas US Marshals include the military bases because they are at the federal level.

Let us also be very clear of the differences between law enforcement and laws, and law prosecution. They are very different, and many modern police departments focus on crime prevention as much crime management. We will talk more about this in a little bit.

Now. let us talk about what I call the Enemies of the State.

In the introduction, I introduced the idea that we (as Americans) have created this entity called a police force. While we may not have forced the officers to scale up their operational readiness, we did not do anything to eliminate the need for it. Within the streets of every city and town across this nation, the battle for our community’s safety is waged. It is fought sometimes offensively using detectives, but more often than not, it is fought defensively using officers, desperately clinging to the idea of seeing their families again and at the same time attempting to maintain the safety of their community. They are constantly engaged in a battle against the enemies of society, or as I like to call them, enemies of the state. So, who are these enemies of the state? Why do police officers require military-grade equipment? We’ll talk about a few of the big ones here, but the list is very extensive.

The first up in our shortlist of enemies of the police departments around the world is the organized crime families (mafia). These families are all about making money, and not concerned with doing whatever it takes to do that. We can trace the law enforcement battle with this group all the way back to the 1920s where men like Bugsy Malone, and Al Capone, ruled the neighborhoods of the eastern US. If you were on the good side of the family, life was good. But, if you fell out of favor, or were not, chances were pretty good that your spouse was collecting your life insurance money. Constantly changing their criminal enterprises in hopes of staying ahead of law enforcement, the policing agency detectives are always looking for illegal operations.

While some view these individuals as folk heroes, they couldn’t be further from the truth. While many romanticize their rise to fame, what is not share here is that these families are fleecing Americans, using tactics like protection rackets for and against small businesses, bribery of government officials, or labor contracts using their labor forces instead of the general populace, thereby leading to the mass unemployment of Americans. The level of violence engaged in by these organizations, are the reason that law enforcement fight diligently to end their reign of terror. The reality of these battles was the escalation of weaponry brought to bear against the local officers. Due to the financial and political pull of these families, they were able to secure military-grade weapons (in many cases before law enforcement can secure something comparable), ensuring that they could always outgun whoever came at them, including law enforcement. This arming of family members meant the only way law enforcement could stop them was to get better weapons for themselves. This cycle continued for decades as both: criminals, and police officers, scaled up their arsenals, in one of the original arms races.

DEATHS AND DEATH RATE CAUSED DURING 1920s GANG WARS

Some hard evidence about the gang wars of the late 20s & early 30s. Primarily I’m going to produce some basic numbers from the career of Al Capone who was a significant figure in Chicago from 1925 – 1931 before being sent to prison for tax evasion. Taking 1926 as my sample dataset, Capone’s family murdered about 396 people at a rate of 12 per 100,000 people in Chicago, which at the time the population (based on Census data) was about 3.3 million people. During the 1926 calendar year, about 70% of all homicides were committed by guns (.45 caliber Tommy light machine gun or a Sawed-Off Shotgun were the weapons of choice, and both long-guns) with another 10 – 15% taken out with explosive devices (this was primarily in Chicago as none of the other large cities reported a notable value of bombings). This short period was referred to as the Chicago “Beer Wars”. If we contrast that against 2016 data, we find that 90% of all homicides are committed using a firearm (with 9mm & .44 caliber handguns leading the preferred weapons list). In 2016, the murder rate was up substantially to 28 per 100,000 people, killing about 750 people of the 2.7 million residents of Chicago.

Next up, many would say is just a branch of the organized crime families that have splintered off, and they are the Drug Lords (cartels). Primarily based and armed by the local governments of central and South America, their level of violence is far and above what US law enforcement has ever faced outside of actual combat. If we talk about why the police have military-grade weaponry, this would be the reason. Billions of US dollars are at stake in one of the largest infestations of American soil. The challenging part about the drug war is that everyone in the distribution channel has a chance to make large sums of money, and therefore refuse to provide any assistance to law enforcement, as well as ensuring that they too invest in high-powered hardware. This makes it increasingly difficult for law enforcement to crack the “rings” of drug dealers. In much the same way law enforcement dealt with organized crime in the early 20th century, it attempts to exhaust all its resources investigating before pulling out the stops with equal violence. Although only mildly successful, officers diligently try to keep the drug dealers away from our children, and many of them will pay the ultimate price in that quest.

The next contestant on low-life challenges that law enforcement faces every day is the human trafficking groups who turn this country’s children into prostitutes or slaves for pedophiles and drug cartels around the globe. This group of scum is typically combatted by the investigative side of law enforcement finally arriving at search and seizure, then arrest. This group creates hundreds of thousands of man-hours of investigative time from every level of law enforcement as they fervently attempt to hide in the shadows of modern-day life. However, I can say that every officer stays awake at night thinking of ways to find these clowns before someone gets hurt. The human trafficking statistics are blurred with the prostitution and pedophile rings which are protected by either drug lords or organized crime groups.

SOME STATISTICS FOR HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN THE US

Let’s look at some numbers on this. Approximately 50000 people are identified as being trafficked in and out of the US every year in a $150 billion a year industry. Of those 51.6% are for the sex trade, with 71% being women/girls, and 29% being men/boys. Of which the Center for Combating Human Trafficking (https://combatinghumantrafficking.com) feels that they’ve identified only .04% of all trafficked humans. Some very disturbing data surfaced as you dig down into the numbers, and the ones that grabbed my attention were that a substantial percentage of those trafficked had once been in foster care (having been a foster parent prior), and that the average age teens enter the sex trade… 12 – 14 years old. These traffickers rely on the many avenues available on the social media platform to do their recruiting. This is the type of filth that plagues our country, keeping good cops awake at night trying to combat this stuff.

Throughout history you will probably feel the struggle between policing and protecting. The attempt to obtain some level of balance between these two worlds, this is most of what has led to the individual departments having to scale up their operation. Whether it be private citizens protecting a pharaoh, or seafaring sailors protecting their cargo, the growth of the private security industry has always laid at the fringe of police work. As I mentioned in the history section most police departments were formed from groups of night watchmen. The concept of paying another individual to watch over property and/or people is as old as humans, maybe even older if you consider our ancestors surrounding and fighting to the death to keep the alpha male safe. There is security. As the history of police officers demonstrates, the need for individual protection has always been a priority to some, and those who can afford it, have always had it made available. In some cases we find where local security officers (for a particular company) were called their police, however, the function was to protect the company’s interests, not the community’s.

Last week I brought up some basic concepts of personal security. We talked about keeping yourself safe.as discussed throughout the show, the need to protect the self and property would become the difference between those with, and those without. Without the safety of someone answering the call to 911, our societal structures would come unhinged. Let’s discuss what might happen if we “defunded” the police.

Ramifications of defunding the police

I’ve only listed a few of the large list of crime types that have forced the metamorphosis of our local police departments. I encourage us to further research the types of crime, and the level of potential violence within our cities that these officers face, before deciding to reduce staffing which is what defunding will do. Let us talk about what defunding police would look like.

One of the first departments to see an impact of reduced funding would be patrol, only because I have already seen this action first-hand in many locations, particularly those who are experiencing budgetary challenges. This would mean that there would not be officers patrolling our neighborhoods, therefore we would see opportunistic crimes jump. Even though these patrols don’t witness an actual crime being committed, they are typically the first to arrive at a scene and may be able to apprehend the criminal blocks away because they were closer. The next function that would see reductions would be the training department. Yea remember that cultural sensitivity training we thought the cops needed, yea that is gone. So is the enhanced training in the use of deadly force. These are the “real world” impacts of defunding the police. Some places may see substations closed, so individual officers have larger areas to cover. Do not get me wrong, there are many within every department who could shave corners here and there off the administration budget to absorb a lot of the reduction in funding, but ultimately this could make a bad situation, worse. From the citizen side of the equation, there would be more private citizen shootings as homeowners attempted to protect their property, knowing that they don’t have the backup of the police department responding to their emergency. The streets would be unsafe again, just like the Wild West. The lynchpin to the whole system being broken is the battle being fought between the legislature and the court system. As an example, the legislature gets pressured into passing a law for a city. Police officers are forced to enforce it and arrest a citizen for breaking this law. Police officers hand the citizen over to the district attorney’s office who prosecutes him/her for the crime committed. Now, there are two distinct broken outcomes from this point. Problem 1, the citizen proposes and gets a “deal” where he/she gets off lightly and is back out on the street to perform the same or different crime (knowing they got away with it). Ok, so Problem 2, is where the judge knows that the prisons are over-capacity so he assigns a lighter sentence or assigns the now-convicted criminal to another facility (such as a “halfway house” because he/she isn’t a violent offender) that cannot handle this type of criminal. In addition, a good defense attorney (speaking on behalf of the accused) makes an emotionally manipulating defense of his/her client to receive a lighter sentence. All of these situations is what has broken the justice system.

All of the scenarios outlined here demonstrate how the justice system is broken. So, I would offer that if anything needs funding reduced its the defense attorneys. The police are stuck between two huge forces contradicting themselves, while the criminals are convinced that they will never have to pay for the crime they committed against the community because they can get away with it. Now, in most respects, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) has reduced the level of escaping to another jurisdiction, however, reduced not eliminated. The national (and sometimes international) use of a national system fosters cooperation between jurisdictions, and locations, hopefully, able to locate and manage a suspect of justice.

So, let us talk about some real numbers. Our first set comes from the Expanded Homicide Data Table #3 of the FBI datasets which for 2016 reported 6676 violent crimes, of which crimes by ethnicity were broken down as:

2854 were white on white crime                    533 were black on white crime

2570 were black on black crime                     243 were white on black crime

123 were other

The idea that the data is broken down by ethnicity is rather disturbing, however, it does paint a contrasting picture to the one offered by mainstream media.

Statista.com reported the Police Shooting Fatalities for 2018, again, broken down by ethnicity as:

399 white citizens shot

209 black citizens shot

148 hispanic citizens shot

Honestly, going back to the Eastern US (Chicago specifically) for a second, we learned that the worst year to date for murder rates was 1994. During that year, there was 33 killed per 100,000 residents. That same year we saw the signing into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (H.R.3355, Pub.L. 103-322) by (then) President Bill Clinton which was passed on September 13, 1994. This act brought the first semi-automatic weapons ban to the US and created a registry for sex offenders. The gun ban expired out, however, other facets are still in use today.

Possible solutions

First – Stabilize the court system by establishing minimum and maximum sentences per crime type. Guilty -> Pay. We need to stop making everything so manipulatable, laws and punishments for crimes against those laws should be clear and non-negotiable. If someone commits a crime, there is a very simple chart that your average lay-person can read and know the punishment.

Second – Establish community involvement. We have seen throughout the earlier days of law enforcement (or policing) that community involvement worked for thousands of years without professional officers on duty. Look at creating laws about this community policing, and educate every citizen how to enforce the law, maybe drawing a line back to these earlier days might help us move forward.

We the people must take responsibility for the tolerated actions within our individual communities. We need to work as a society in setting an expectation of law enforcement, beginning at officers => through the court system => through the jail system => full circle back into society. Unfortunately, this issue has had such a polarizing effect on people of all socioeconomic classes, the mob mentality has taken hold of America. As a society, we all need to stop it. We witnessed during the protest and occupation of a downtown Seattle neighborhood, the same people calling for defunding the police had several murders (violent crimes) within their group. What part of that narrative is not working? I am always interested in groups who claim one thing, then do something totally opposite. Groups like ANTIFA or BLM, despite their creation theories, are sparking the wrong reasons with society. These groups are spewing hate for hate’s sake, nothing constructive can come from any of their narratives.

We need society to reign back in law creation and interpretation. By creating laws that lay-persons can understand and assist in enforcing. Ultimately our societies (each community) have handed off their policing responsibilities to an over-worked, over-tasked, and understaffed local police department. It is so much easier to “blame” those officers for not getting everything done the right way than to accept some of that responsibility ourselves. To police our own neighborhoods and make them safe again. However, we must also task ourselves with the willingness to help those who have had a form of mental condition arise and get them the help they need. While its easier to sit back and point fingers, the road to recovery needs to be fixed, in the right way so that all men & women are created equal.

Listen to the podcast on Spreaker.com [HERE]

Tags:

Comments are closed

X