Hillary Clinton granted Black Lives Matter several minutes of her time recently where she instructed its representatives to come up with a plan to accompany their rhetoric. She said awareness about inequality was not enough, they needed to figure out “what [they] want done about it.”
While activists associating with Black Lives Matter do not have any nationally recognized leadership, prominent individuals involved in the movement have developed an extensive platform called Campaign Zero addressing the problems they see with police killings, and other violence they see as being perpetrated by police in minority communities.
The tone of the campaign follows:
We can live in a world where the police don’t kill people by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability.
Included in the campaign are 10 specific proposals or areas of concern:
While some ideas seem fair (from End For-Profit Policing: seizing property of civilians (i.e. civil forfeiture) unless they are convicted of a crime and the state establishes by clear and convincing evidence that the property is subject to forfeiture), others ignore rules already in place (from Body Cams/Film the Police: Ban police officers from taking cell phones or other recording devices without a person’s consent or warrant and give people the right to sue police departments if they take or destroy these devices ), and many are counterproductive to peaceful communities. Under End Broken Window Policing, which has been credited with reduction in crime (citing the same Wikipedia article that Campaign Zero does), Campaign Zero wants to eliminate police action for or de-prioritize the following offenses:
Consumption of Alcohol on Streets
Marijuana Possession
Disorderly Conduct
Trespassing
Loitering
Disturbing the Peace (including Loud Music)
Spitting
Why would anyone want to live in a community where people have no recourse against those who invade their property, spit on their steps, smoke weed on the corner, get loud and raucous in front of their homes, and generally make for an unpleasant atmosphere? If these offenses are so low-level and unimportant, then why can’t people refrain from making nuisances out of themselves? The Broken Windows theory has been strongly correlated with improving neighborhoods and reducing crime. Cleaning up these small things would seem to be a useful pay off in reducing more violent offenses. Why don’t crime ridden communities welcome the help?
Campaign Zero further believes racial and ethnic profiling to be systemic and want to “prevent police from intervening in civilian lives for no reason other than the ‘suspicion’ of their blackness or other aspects of their identity.” They want to “ban stops for ‘furtive’ movements such as a reaching for waistband or acting nervous,” intentional profiling, and practices that have a disparate impact on minority groups. They also want to test for unconscious or implicit bias and use those findings in hiring, promotion, and assignment decisions (whether an officer should be assigned to a black community or not). To address these concerns, profiling is already implicitly or explicitly prohibited; furtive movements can be indicative of grabbing for a weapon so by prohibiting investigation they are actually saying the cops should waive their right to self-defense, and being punished for “unconscious bias” is simply offensive to everyone who consciously denounces racism in every form.
While the Campaign is quite extensive in its components, there is a lack of substantiated support for some claims, which leads one to believe numbers may be skewed in other areas. The wording of the claims is manipulated for effect. For example, under Community Representation, it is claimed that white men represent less than 1/3 of the population of the U.S., but make up 2/3 of U.S. police officers. Whites make up 77% of the population in the U.S. so having a police force of 66% white seems more or less representative of the population as a whole. Wasn’t that the goal?
A link was provided to substantiate this claim, but upon investigation the report used for support stated it this way: “In 2013, more than a quarter (27%) of full-time local police officers were members of a racial or ethnic minority.” That represented an increase of 150% since 1987 – but no mention of those gains in the Campaign. Further, the percentages of minority officers serving in larger populations (populations over 100,000 to 1,000,000 or more) –which also tend to be more diverse, exceeded the civilian minority population generally. For example, in a population of 1,000,000 or more, the percentage of white officers was 53%, black 17%, Hispanic 24.7%, other races 5%. Those percentages of minority officers would exceed the minority percentage of the rest of the population on the whole. So as far as having community representation on the police force, it is likely already there.
Most troubling though, is that absent from any of the detailed concerns and solutions, there is no call to communities themselves to step up and be law abiding citizens, or advocate for a cultural shift to lawfulness, rather than make heroes out of thugs and misogynistic rappers, or devalue education by saying a kid who strives to get good grades is “acting white.” President Obama himself acknowledges this psychological group think:
Sometimes African-Americans, in communities where I’ve worked, there’s been the notion of “acting white” — which sometimes is overstated . . . . But there’s an element of truth to it, where, OK, if boys are reading too much, then, well, why are you doing that? Or why are you speaking so properly?
This should not be interpreted as victim blaming, but the root cause of so many of these terrible outcomes with the police is the result of one thing – resisting arrest or excessive non-cooperation. If the police are harassing communities, there are procedures to remedy complaints. So many of the protocols Campaign Zero is calling for are already in place. What are the statistics on whether these protocols are used or not, whether they are successfully employed or not? Those numbers are not provided, but anecdotal incidents which are frequently based on lies (Hands Up, Don’t Shoot) are sensationalized to appear as an indictment on all of law enforcement, and white people generally. This biased campaigning leads to the conclusion that working towards mutually agreeable solutions to problems is not really the goal. Something more is desired: revenge, reparations, humiliation? It is this underlying agenda that seeks nothing less than prostrated submission that will always prevent reconciliation. Until Campaign Zero can come to terms with its own contribution to the unrest, there will be Zero healing, Zero progress, Zero change.
Uncle Kenny says: “Why don’t crime ridden communities welcome the help?”
Because the residents of those communities don’t want to be held to the different behavioral standards of the majority culture. They see themselves as the majority in their little enclaves. They want control and they feel empowered now to grasp it. What is difficult to understand about that?
On this issue some in the commentariat have the same willful blindness that they decry in others regarding incidents of Islamic terrorism. What could their motive possibly be? Please.
“End Broken Window Policing” Aside from its proven deterrence of larger crimes, why should blacks or anyone else be subjected to living in deteriorating communities? Vandalism and petty crime also drive investment away from communities. People build businesses in communities that are appreciating not depreciating.
Bring back broken window policing. Teach your children not to break windows.
2 Comments