Considerations

•         Police Violence
•        Stopping Putin

        Before joining the ongoing national debate about "police reform" you deserve to know my "bona fides" or "where I'm coming from" when I say the issue is training and education. Learning is the reform that is needed.

        I was a college freshman and newly minted police beat reporter for a commercial radio station in my midwestern state university small industrial city. The first murder I covered was in Muncie. A poor soul was spotted by his wife in a country bar in the company of another woman. Mrs. went home, fetched his fishing knife and returned to nearly decapitate her cheating man. 

        The police beat seasons a young reporter.

  

        I asked to ride with the cops on Saturday night as they patrolled the south side dives and the downtown bar district. It seemed that for sport as much as for public safety a couple of officers liked to round up the drunks and haul them to city lock-up. Woe to the resistant inebriate! They became billy club target practice and were handled like tossed bags of garbage. Some of them were guilty of nothing but being out cold, dead drunk. They could not hear the order to get up. 

        Sometimes they got hosed down, and sometimes they were deserving, being covered in their own bodily output. 

        I'm embarrassed to say I didn't question the excessive force until a light went off during a sociology course. That led to questions, a couple of news stories, disconcerted cops, changed relationships and a new view of my work and that of the cops.

         Over forty years I worked with a lot of cops. Some were friends. Some scared me with their ideas about their work and their power. Some were genius investigators, some were politicians, some were real heroes and some were dirt bags. As the years passed and cities became gang ridden, and more guns hit the street, cops adopted a kind of siege or survival mentality. It's easy to forget that first they are just people with their own families and lives and hopes and fears.

        If I needed a particular kind of information I'd drop into a cop bar. Off duty, amongst their own was a great place to see the men and women for the humans they are, good and not so.

        I trusted my life to cops on several occasions. We had armed protection when we broadcast from violent a neighborhood where a drug gang had taken over. We hired off duty officers to be "crew" when we confronted armed and angry Ku Klux Klan members on their job site. We accompanied police on raids, and had to take cover from gun fire. I spent tense hours with SWAT members deployed in a dramatic hostage incident. 

        I understand the pressure they work under. But I've also watched as police departments that once touted Protect and Serve got militarized by hand me down Homeland Security or military weapons, outfits and vehicles. It has been the rise of the warrior cop.

        A crystalizing moment occurred when I began reporting on police training. With the help of an FBI agent and friend, I spent time at the National Law Enforcement Training Academy watching how they "upgraded" the quality of local police. 

        I've interviewed psychologists, educational designers, chiefs, administrators  elected office holders, judges and cops.

        US citizens are 60 times more likely to be killed by police than British citizens.  The American cop gets on average 600 hours of training while Finland trains cops for 5,500 hours. German cops get 4,500 hours, Australia 4000 hours, England 2,500 and Canadian cops are trained for twice as long as US cops.

     In the US cops are required to get less training than plumbers and cosmetologists. 

        When I followed a new class of FBI agents through 16 weeks of intensive training and psychological rigor I was convinced that states and cities needed to rethink how they recruit and train police officers. 

        Mental health and fitness, cultural and human relations, better crisis management and decision making are as important as weapons better suited for a battle field. 

        US police academies stress firearms training, as much as 3 times more than on training how to deescalate a situation. Some nations require academic degrees. 

        In addition to better psychological evaluation of job candidates we need to give cops better care. Police officers are five times more likely to kill themselves than to be killed in the line of duty.

        There is no excuse for the police violence we all have witnessed. It is police murder. But a government that does not pay more, or require more and better training and care and be willing to assign the resources needed is an accomplice to police violence. So too are the politicians who are willing to lament and complain in the media, but have not the courage to vote for additional funding, or better gun control. 

        In this way, police violence is systemic. 

        I am a realist, but I also pray for peace. In a few years people and governments will wonder why this generation of ours did not or could not stop Vladimir Putin. It is a nasty legacy for us, since we saw in our own century how a mad man bent on dominance was the evil factor who was responsible for the war that claimed 75 to 80 million people.

       Putin's war is purely his messianic complex at work. The world watches daily war crimes and atrocities. We have rallied opposition, we have assembled weapons, but the UN and all the alliances on the planet have not done what needs to be done, remove Putin.

       With Putin gone, it is an entirely new equation and it will then be a matter of standing down, disengaging and starting all of the repair and healing that needs to occur.

        Time and time again history tells us a timely removal of a delusional tyrant saves lives and prevents suffering and the work of destructive power. 

        Wishing you strength and endurance. 

        See you down the trail.

...we will not look away...

   Bob Dylan's recent and rare interview with historian Douglas Brinkley covers sensitive history and sacred ground and does so at this time when the history we are creating shakes us to the core. 
    The rebellion against racism is global. The outcry about killer police and the culture of inadequate training and profiling is also world wide. It seems people of reason are fed up with the enabling of racist attitude. Non-Black people are the majority of this universal movement. This may be one of those "inflection points in the arc of history."

     "...If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust,

      Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust..."

      Dylan wrote the lyrics to the Death of Emmett Till in 1963, 8 years after the bright eyed 14 year old Chicago youth was savaged into a grotesque corpse in the Mississippi delta.

      "...For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!"

     Years later a white woman admitted she lied about the incident that sent her husband and his half brother into a rage where they grabbed the youth from his uncle's home, beat and mutilated him, shot him in the head and put him in the Tallahatchie River. 

     An all white jury acquitted Roy Bryant and J.W. Millam. A year later the men admitted they killed Till.

    "...This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man

  That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost robbed Ku Klux Klan."

    Till's family wanted an open casket. The gruesome truth helped launch what we call the Civil Rights Movement.

    Dylan's song came in the midst of the push for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed segregation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited discrimination in elections. 

     

     We know those rights did not come without bloodshed, police violence, massive marches and demonstrations. 
     The extension of those freedoms were born of courage and faith.

      And, it seems, we are back to the start, though now everything is accelerated. The 21st century struggle against racism and repression is world wide. 

      People around the globe are demanding better training and less violence from their cops. 

       Too many men and women, black and white are killed by police without cause and for crimes that are minor, not serious and would never carry a death sentence. 

       Whites do not walk out of their homes with the daily fear that accompanies Blacks; will this be a day when a police encounter ends my life?  Being white in America offers a safety. Being Black in America brings jeopardy. Still, all these years later!

       Things must change and the momentum has filled our screens, dominated government attention, and provoked something new and powerful. 

     This has happened more rapidly than any political movement I've witnessed. But the grievances are centuries in the making.

      Something seems different. There is a kind of spiritual momentum. Justice and equality seem to be getting breath, bringing a multitude of races and ethnicities together and into the streets and halls of government with a common purpose.

   

     But racism does not die and it's congress of dunces do not go easily into the night, here or anywhere in the world.

     Ignorance is a powerful strain in humankind. While some refuse to see and understand, resisting all the while proclaiming they are not racist, others conspire to keep a knee on the neck of equality. We need only look at what Georgia did in their recent primary, suppressing black votes, as they did earlier in electing a racist governor denying hundreds of thousands of votes to a Black woman, the likely winner.
     The Republican strategy of voter suppression is in full overdrive, now trying to eliminate vote by mail, even in the midst of the pandemic. There continues a deliberate attempt to deprive people of the right, because of the color of their skin.

     It is dead wrong, but not surprising as the two most powerful racists in the US are the President and his partner Mitch McConnell.

    People of conscience should note, some of the harshest critics of the racist Trump and McConnell are Republicans, former Republicans now. They are a bit like the Germans who fled as the world watched the rise of a fascist regime.
Those who stay loyal to this President will be marked by history as ignominious fools.

        It is not unreasonable to see the murder of George Floyd as being a galvanizing moment, one death too many. In that way his murder by a dead eyed, trouble making cop captured on video is like the horrible casket photo of Emmett Till. We can not look away from that kind of evil. We can't deny the hatred, the racism, the stupidity, that still exists.
      Those of us who thought the legislative acts of the 1960's fixed the problem, were naive and racist in our way, because we refused to see the truth. 
     Racism is a human stain, it is ours to eliminate. It does not happen with one election, or a congressional action, or better testing of the psychological fitness of cops. 
     My dad used to say, equality cannot be legislated, but discrimination can be outlawed. Real equality is the work of the heart. 

       "...but if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all that we could give,
        We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.
           from The Death of Emmett Till-  Bob Dylan

beautiful diversion

Jacaranda trees are in bloom on the California central coast

     Take care, stay well.

      See you down the trail.

A VIEW FOR MYSTICS-ROOT CAUSES AND TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO SEE

CATHEDRAL LAND

   Red rock country near Sedona Arizona-

   Nature induces spirituality, contemplation, meditation and awe.

ROOT CAUSES

    A fraternity brother, now a retired psychologist said it well the other night; "If I was a young black man, no sense of future, poor education, unemployed and grew up watching police violence on other black people, I'd be angry too."

    Violence and looting will only make things worse, but cities, especially police departments, need to see the root causes. An economic underclass breeds discontent. Put police brutality and insensitivity into the mix and you have an explosive trigger. Baltimore police have paid out some six million dollars in settlement claims in the last few years because of inappropriate conduct. Unemployment among minority youth in Baltimore is stratospheric compared to other cities.

     There are many guilty parties in this kind of hellish problem and no one should get a pass on personal responsibility but it's foolish to expect a standard of behavior from people who have not been trained, educated and given an opportunity to grow up in a non hostile, non threatening world where the definition of civility means something. You can't do it if you don't know it. How to fix that is complicated, touchy and will require commitment from people and government. This much is sure, inappropriate police conduct and lack of understanding will only make it worse.

    

WOMAN IN GOLD

    This is one of the better films you can see. Excellent theatrical performance in the interpretation of an ugly, grinding piece of history.

    Helen Mirren, who again is astounding in her acting, portrays a Jewish woman Maria Altman, trying to reclaim a painting that was stolen from her family by the Nazis and which remained in the clutches of an arrogant Austrian government that at the time acquiesced to the Germans and since refused to admit guilt and theft.

    The entire cast is superb.  I'm a real fan of Daniel Bruhl who lights it up, even in his small role.  Two brief but wonderful character roles come from Jonathan Pryce as Chief Justice Rehnquist and Elizabeth McGovern as Judge Florence Cooper. Ryan Reynolds is a believable Randol Schoenberg. Charles Dance evokes a gut response to his character's arrogance and shortsightedness. He's so good at evil. Tatiana Maslany is hypnotic as a young Marian Altman, looking like Mirren. But Mirren's performance alone is a reason to watch, though the storyline, the quest for justice and the historical foundation are too important not to see and ponder.

     A line from Schoenberg about the "two Austrias" is not so vaguely reminiscent of the type of divides that exist in America on matters of race, sex, gender and economic class.

   See you down the trail.