What they did to Tyre Nichols was terrible. The footage is so painful to watch because it’s just a beating, it’s just five men using their feet, fists, and batons to murder another man who isn’t fighting back. And the men doing it are police, and it’s so much worse because they’re police. They don’t just have weapons and superior numbers, they also have
Thank you for this compassionate, measured view of a seemingly intractable problem. Your insights and suggestions are, in my mind, right on. I'll probably sound old when I say this, but... there was a time when police officers WERE part of the community, back before the militarization of so many forces. Officers knew the neighborhoods they patrolled, on foot, and they gained the trust of those area's inhabitants.
Now we've got specialized, armed-to-the-teeth individuals who have no personal connection to the neighborhoods, riding around in cars with the windows rolled up. "Scorpion?" Really?? What do we expect?
Jan 31, 2023·edited Jan 31, 2023Liked by Seth Jordan
Well said. And important to say. 'Community policing' reframed as the community policing ITSELF. We can feel galling contempt when someone we see as lower than us is not being deferential to our superior self-anointed status. It's available to all of us to act on - even as parents and teachers it is possible to misappropriate our power under the cover of 'discipline' when we feel a child is being insubordinate. I believe that our sense that we have the right to don a 'uniform and gun' attitude to enforce uniformity on others is the shadow side of our appropriate sense of self and human worth. I can find it in myself and believe its a shared but potentially transformable flaw of human (inhuman?) nature.. Your suggestions are a start,. Thank you.
Thank you for this compassionate, measured view of a seemingly intractable problem. Your insights and suggestions are, in my mind, right on. I'll probably sound old when I say this, but... there was a time when police officers WERE part of the community, back before the militarization of so many forces. Officers knew the neighborhoods they patrolled, on foot, and they gained the trust of those area's inhabitants.
Now we've got specialized, armed-to-the-teeth individuals who have no personal connection to the neighborhoods, riding around in cars with the windows rolled up. "Scorpion?" Really?? What do we expect?
Well said. And important to say. 'Community policing' reframed as the community policing ITSELF. We can feel galling contempt when someone we see as lower than us is not being deferential to our superior self-anointed status. It's available to all of us to act on - even as parents and teachers it is possible to misappropriate our power under the cover of 'discipline' when we feel a child is being insubordinate. I believe that our sense that we have the right to don a 'uniform and gun' attitude to enforce uniformity on others is the shadow side of our appropriate sense of self and human worth. I can find it in myself and believe its a shared but potentially transformable flaw of human (inhuman?) nature.. Your suggestions are a start,. Thank you.