Minneapolis Crime and Punishment
"This year has seen the lowest crime numbers in our Country's recorded history, and now the Radical Left Democrats want to Defund and Abandon our Police."
"Sorry, I want LAW & ORDER!".
U.S. President Donald Trump
"Our commitment is to end policing as we know it and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe."
"[We need] to listen, especially to our black leaders, to our communities of color, for whom policing is not working and to really let the solutions lie in our community,"
"The idea of having no police department is certainly not in the short term,"
"Yes. We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety."
Lisa Bender, president, Minneapolis City Council
The death-by-kneehold of George Floyd has galvanized everyone who watched the short and shocking video of a Minneapolis police officer incapacitating the 46-year-old Black resident of the city, suspected of passing a fraudulent American bill at a nearby store where a 911 call to police was made. Counterfeit bills would not have been a stranger to a man who managed to amass a number of serious criminal charges in the past. He had been arrested, was sitting in the police car, and suddenly was outside the car, being held down forcefully, handcuffed and helpless. Resisting arrest. Penalty: death.
The shocking video of a man pinned down, begging for air, repeatedly asking to breathe, then dying had the effect of outraging and bringing together all walks of society in condemning the raw brutality on show, guaranteeing that mass protests would result. Even so, no one might have prophesied that the event would spur people all over the United States to march in protest of what was construed as police brutality against yet another Black American, much less that the global community would be inspired to protest, but they did, resoundingly.
And then, in stepped the anarchists, the antifas, the Black supremacists, the rude rabble, gangs and malcontents to take advantage of the popular uproar of disgust and dismay, to turn the protests into
raids on businesses, a threatening presence of rabidly raging thugs given cover for invasions, destruction of private and public property, mass looting, desecration of monuments, thrashings and murder. Amid demands that police everywhere be penalized for massive overreach by some among them.
Cities with Black mayors, cities with Black police chiefs, reacted in concert with the protests, but not uniformly; some were aghast at the outcome demanding popularly that organized (and sometimes militarized) police forces be defunded and dismissed, and alternate methods of controlling crime at the municipal level be instituted. The Black criminal class, Black youth who remain a dire threat in society with their gangs, guns, drug trafficking, shoot-ups haven't offered to degang themselves, to surrender their firearms, to refrain from trafficking.
The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, remains unimpressed by his Council's call to defund the police in Minneapolis; too much of a realist likely, able to restrain an impulse to radical change for a more thoughtful, workable solution to the enormous problem of some rogue personalities in blue smearing the public faith in police to uphold law and order. Racism certainly does exist. On the other hand, the sheer ubiquity of Black crime focuses attention on its source. And while it's a shock to see Black men pursued and dying at the hands of white men and police, Black society has an obligation to itself to examine the source; rampant crime levels.
So his decision that he would not support defunding his police force and dismissing it in favour of another, unspecified type of social control mechanism, gained Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey rejection by protesters booing him for his refusal to dismiss the city's police force. Leading a spokesman for the mayor to state that he remains "unwavering
in his commitment to working with Chief (Medaria) Arradondo toward deep
structural reforms and uprooting systemic racism."
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"We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. And when we're done, we're not simply gonna glue it back together."
"We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response."Nine members of the 13-member city council voted to dismantle their police department, to replace it with a community-led alternative. Immediate action has been demanded by the thousands of citizens who took to the streets, shouting "defund the police", and so the city council has decided in its wisdom and against better judgement, to do just that, though what a community-led alternative might look like is a matter of speculative theory. Would the police academy train them, would they be volunteers, would they be an organized, salaried group? Wouldn't they end up being yet another police force?
Jeremiah Ellison, Minneapolis city councilman for Ward 5
And how high-minded would they remain in their purpose and function once they are fully engaged and face off with the criminal minds who view society as a mass of humanity ripe for criminal exploitation? How long before the sheer weight of the responsibility of their positions and the mind-numbing exposure to ghastly crimes of murder and mayhem overwhelms their moral equilibrium? But the Minneapolis City Council president proclaims their vote as a need to throw in the towel on the policing status quo.
It is not sufficient to winnow out those police officers whose capacity for self-restraint has been corrupted by exposure and experience. The charges levied against the four police officers involved in the death of George Floyd will lead to trials. Two of the men charged are racial minorities. How likely is it that they would be biased against Blacks in their own community? The altercation with a man resisting arrest likely had little to do with his being Black; reflecting instead his sheer size, physical strength, the drug fentanyl coursing through his bloodstream.
The issue is one of symbolism, a perception based on the reality of human nature where people of different appearance, backgrounds, culture, history, resent and dislike and distrust one another. It is called racism, although there is only one human race, but countless issues between ethnic, religious, ideological, cultural and geographic groups of humanity.
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| Minneapolis City Council member Alondra Cano speaks during a meeting at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis on Sunday. The focus of the meeting was the defunding of the Minneapolis Police Department. (Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via AP) |
Labels: Black Lives, Minneapolis, Police, Protests, Violence
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, June 10, 2020
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