Tag Archives: justice

Systemic Racism

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During the week in which Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and five officers in Dallas were killed, a friend of mine emailed me and wanted to discuss a phrase that I had used on social media quite a bit.  That phrase was “systemic racism.”  He wanted to know what was meant when people used it because it could be interpreted in lots of different ways.

Considering the kind of responses that we all saw on social media that week, the respect and kindness that was shown by my friend was a breath of fresh air!  So I spent an hour or so writing out how I define “systemic racism” and why I define it that way.  I’m no expert by any means, but this is an issue that I care a lot about.  So…

Here’s what I wrote (with a few minor edits and a few links included):

I think you picked the right place to start — “systemic racism.”  …  It’s not often that the term is defined carefully and even when it is, not many people listen.

Here’s the way I define it: Our system as a society in the United States is bent against people of color, especially black people.

It began before there was a United States with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and continued through Antebellum slavery.

After the Civil War when black folks were free, they had few places to go. This period, called Reconstruction, was a really trying time for most black people.

Many black people, if not most, ended up moving to northern cities looking for work or because they were forced out of the their homes in the south.  Since very few white people (both in the north and south) wanted to live with them, they were forced (sometimes by law) to move into downtown areas.  These areas were devoid of jobs that they could do.

Other groups already living in those areas (most notably immigrant groups), especially the Irish, Italians, and various Asians, have had an easier, but still quite difficult, go of it in our country.  And when black folks moved into the inner-cities, many of these other groups moved out (at least those who could afford to often did).

That left very little work for black folks and not many other people groups cared.

In the midst of this horrid situation, it’s natural enough that crime began to rise.  People needed money for food and shelter.  Eventually the criminal element began to organize, just like it did with the Irish, the Italians, and other groups before.  (Side note: for whatever reason, we call black organized crime “gangs” and that of other groups “the mob” or “the mafia.”)

Anyway, while this was going on almost no laws were made to assist, aid, or protect black people.  They were slaves and then they weren’t.  Black folks were set off on their own.  And when some of them weren’t succeeding, people (especially white people) said, “work harder.”  And many, many black foks did just that.  Or that tried to…but many couldn’t find work.  And even for those who found work, it was almost never a “good enough” job to help get them out of their predicament.

But no one really cared.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  A few people cared a lot…so much so that they worked tooth and nail to ensure that black people continued to have a hard time.

Many cities and counties passed laws limiting where black people could live, where they could be educated, whether or not they could vote, etc.  This is what we all call the Jim Crow era and these laws and policies are called Jim Crow laws.  Some people even hated black people enough to kill them for little or no reason.  Public lynchings were happening fairly often in the south and, for the most part, most of the murderers were never caught, tried, and brought to justice.  As if they needed another reason, but most black people at this time had no faith in the governments of the cities, counties, states, or even of the US.

Then, as you might expect, in the 1950s and 60s black civil rights advocates began to rise up, people like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, Rosa Parks, and others.  They were demanding that people look at the plight of their community.  They were demanding that they be treated with equality and justice.  They were demanding that the color of their children’s skin shouldn’t impact whether or not they had a shot at making it.

And what were they met with?  Death threats.  Church bombings.  Stricter laws in some places limiting their freedoms.  And more lynchings in some places.

What it took for America to begin to wake up to the overt racism of so many people was live video footage of police dogs being sent to attack black folks, including children and black folks being beaten unconscious by “peace” officers.  The public perception of the civil rights movement began to shift, but overt racism wouldn’t let go.  Civil rights leaders were assassinated, more acts of terror were leveled against the black community, and even white allies were assassinated too.

After the various Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Acts were passed, it became more or less a major social faux pas to exhibit any overt racism.  The KKK and other white supremacy groups eventually shrunk.  The use of the n-word decreased to some degree, at least in polite company.  Not serving black people in a business became a crime, etc.

For most white people, this is when they think that racism in America ended.

If only that were true.  If you ask individual persons of color, especially black folks, about their experience of race in the US, some will tell you horror stories of overt racism and virtually every single one will tell you stories of the results of implicit racism, what many people call “micro-aggressions.”

Implicit racism would include things like women clutching their bags when black men walk by, people touching black women’s hair, and people asking a Latino graduating from college if they are the first in their family to do so (a question almost no one would ask a white person).  Most people don’t mean anything nefarious by these micro-aggressions, but people of color notice them and many are hurt by them.

These hurts add up over time.  They make people of color feel white people view them as other, something different, and, to some, as less than fully human.

The problem is that people who represent authority are guilty of implicit racism too.  (So are people of color, of course, and so are people of color who are in positions of authority.)  What does this look like?

Well, when I worked at Best Buy as security personnel I was way more likely to watch a black teenager on the monitor, even though in all my time there we never caught a black person stealing anything.  (Side note: I caught employees and lots of white people stealing.)  But my first instinct was to watch the black teen.  And my implicit bias against black people isn’t just something that I have.  Many black people report being harassed while shopping.  It even happens to “well-dressed, respectful, and articulate” black folks.

Hiring managers, as famously reported by the Freakonomics people, are much more likely to favor applications that have “white sounding” names to those with “ethnic sounding” ones.  This implicit bias more or less goes away when the applicants are in front of the hiring manager, presumably because he or she is trying to be equitable when seeing a person of color face-to-face.

And, unfortunately, police are victims of implicit racism too.  Multiple studies have shown that people, all people, tend to prefer images of lighter-skinned people, while at the same time being more threatened by images of darker-skinned people.  This same implicit bias has been seen in numerous studies of police officers too, though they tend to do better than the general public.

Thus, for many police officers, black people, and especially black males, are implicitly more threatening, will be watched more closely, etc.  This can be seen in the evidence from the NYPD about how black people (as well as Latinos) are much more likely to be stopped and frisked and why “driving while black” is a reality, since black drivers will, generally speaking, be watched quite a bit more closely.

(Please note, implicit racism is not the fault of a given individual.  It’s human nature.  It’s part of our basic tribalism that says members of “our group” are better than members of “their group.”  And black cops are also likely to exhibit implicit racism against black people as white cops are.)

But a more important part of systemic racism today has less to do with implicit racism and more to do with the residue of our explicitly racist history as a country and some explicitly racist laws and policies.

What do I mean?  Well, as I mentioned earlier, after the Civil War many black people moved into inner-cities.  Those that didn’t, those who stayed in smaller towns, were more or less forced to move into neighborhoods that were comprised almost exclusively of other black people.  And these boundaries were often set into law or official housing policies.

Even liberal Pasadena, CA (where I once lived) in liberal Southern California has some of these policies in its past.

And, unsurprisingly, many black people still live in these very same neighborhoods today (unless they’ve been pushed into even “worse” neighborhoods thanks to gentrification, property prices rising, zoning policies, and imminent domain abuses, etc.).

And, unsurprisingly, these communities didn’t have the best services, the best stores, the best schools, etc.  And between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act, these communities were heavily policed by largely white police forces because of the realities of organized crime and because of overt racism (just go back and listen to some of the recordings of Bull Connor, the infamous sheriff in Alabama [like this one]…they’ll make your skin crawl!).

So folks in these communities started way behind the starting line in comparison to where others in the US started.  And black families who “made it” had such a harder and longer road to hoe, even than white families who began at similar levels of poverty due to explicit and implicit racism.

During the 70s things seemed to be getting a tiny bit better.  It was during this time that the rise of the black middle-class happened (which is basically gone today, by the way), thanks in part to government jobs, especially those at the post office, sanitation control, and the like.

Then the 1980s came with the “war on drugs.”  Some of the policies set in place during this time period by the federal government, as well as state and city governments, really harmed black communities.

How so?  Cocaine.

The rush of cocaine into the US during the late 1970s and 80s really hurt lots of people.  In fact, it seems that people of all ethnicities were using cocaine in more or less equal percentages.

But the laws surrounding cocaine disproportionately affected black people.  Crack cocaine was punished much more harshly than powder cocaine, though both are equally bad, equally addictive, and equally dangerous.  And black communities tended to use crack over powder.  Sentences for crack cocaine were much longer than those for powder.  Drug-free zones were set up in communities affected by crack cocaine, but not those for powder, which meant that a drug conviction in a drug-free zone was more harshly punished.

So when a black person was caught using cocaine, he would be sentenced to a much, much longer sentence than a white man, sometimes dozens of times longer, since he was likely to be using crack in a drug-free zone.  And since the police were more likely to heavily police black neighborhoods (due to the number of calls, population density, and implicit racism), black people were much more likely to be caught using and possessing cocaine.

It was so bad that black users of cocaine would go to jail for much longer sentences than even the white people who sold it or whomever trafficked it into the country!

And this war on drugs, which targeted black communities (intentionally or not, doesn’t really matter), really hurt these communities.  Many children in these communities had to grow up without fathers since so many black men were incarcerated on drug charges.

Some neighborhoods were hurt by the policies so badly that only a very few men ever made it out alive or without being incarcerated.  One of my mentors, who happens to be black, grew up in the neighborhood where my wife and I once served and he tells the sad story that of the 20 boys that grew up on his street, only four or five aren’t in prison or dead today.  His story is not uncommon in neighborhoods like his, one that is labeled a drug-free zone and has a large black population.

(Quick aside: many of the crack-specific sentencing laws and policies have been altered or overturned, but, in general, crack convictions still carry longer sentence than powder cocaine today.)

And with the massive influx of people (mostly people of color) being incarcerated for drug charges, jails began to fill up.  State and federal monies were used to build more.  Then these new jails filled up.  It got so overcrowded that many states gave many of their prisons over to private, for-profit companies who run them.  These companies make millions and millions of dollars incarcerating people.  They often get paid by the number of full jail cells they have.

In other words, these companies have a vested interest in keeping their beds full, so they do what any successful business would do, they lobby to keep laws and policies in place that keep their beds full and their profits growing.  And their money is in the pockets of politicians on the left and the right, thus ensuring that the industrial prison complex remains full of people, mostly on drug charges.

And a very disproportionate number of these people are people of color, thus furthering the problems of their communities since it means that parents (especially fathers) are literally taken out of the equation.

And all the while, white people use drugs at about the same rate as blacks (some studies indicate that white folks use more drugs) and yet white people are not arrested as often and when convicted serve shorter sentences and once in prison are more likely to receive parole.

And it’s not just drugs.  As the horrible Brock Turner (the swimmer at Stanford that was basically given a slap on the wrist for sexually assaulting a woman behind a dumpster) story reminds us, white folks are often given the benefit of the doubt and/or shorter sentences.  For example, a Vanderbilt football player, Cory Batey, committed a similar crime as Brock Turner, and he was sentenced to a much, much longer sentence — 15-25 years.

Then you take a look into the public schools which serve black students and see that they are much, much worse than those that serve white communities.  In fact, according to some recent research, a case can be made that our public schools are more segregated now than they were during the Jim Crow era.  And, unsurprisingly, the schools that serve black communities generally underperform.

And the list could go on and on.  Black graduates of college are less likely to land a job than white graduates.  Etc., etc., etc.

And, unfortunately, the data shows that a given black person is much more likely to die at the hand of the police than a given white person.  All of the factors above play into this sad statistic.

Just to be clear, in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases I don’t think that black people are more likely to die during a police interaction due to explicit racism.  There are really so few people who are jerks like that anymore.

But implicit racism and its effects are real.  And the residue of the explicitly racist policies and laws of the past and some of the current policies and laws that disproportionately impact black people are real too.

If we’re going to move forward as a nation, then we need to admit some things.  Here are a few of those things:

We need to admit that we live in a country in which our Declaration of Independence calls a group of people “savages” and the 13th Amendment of the Constitution repealed a compromise that argued that black people are 3/5ths as valued as other people.

We need to admit the horrors of the Jim Crow era and the violence committed against black people during their fight for civil rights.

We need to admit the impact of the war on drugs on black communities.

And we need to admit that doing nothing about the current plight of the black community will only make the resulting problems worse.

That’s systemic racism.

Systemic racism is not a fiction. Systemic racism is not an excuse. Systemic racism is real and its effects hurt black communities like the one where my wife and I served.

But you may be wondering, why talk about systemic racism on a blog about being missional, that is, following Jesus in the real world?  Well, the answer is pretty straightforward — the real world is messed up and unjust and Jesus calls us to care about matters like this.  He says “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice” (Matthew 5.6).

I know, you memorized “righteousness” as a kid.  So did I.  But “justice” is an equally valid translation of the Greek word that is found here and the context in which this word is found leans toward folks who are oppressed and thus longing for justice.

So I guess that’s really the question then…when we, as followers of Jesus in the real world, see a problem such as systemic racism, do we hunger and thirst for justice?  Or do we try to deny the evidence, invalidate the experiences of people of color, and effectively perpetuate the injustice through our silence and inaction?

What do you think about the way I defined and discussed systemic racism?

What do you think we can do about it?

What can you, as an individual, do about it?

Let me know in the comments below.

And be civil.  I will be monitoring these comments closely.  Anything that deem disrespectful, racist, or rude will be removed.

Goodness and Micah 6.8

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I love the quote from the picture above: “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”  This is one of those aphorisms that just sounds right when you read it, hear it, or say it.

But it begs some questions.  First, what is goodness?  Second, how can we be more good?  And lastly is demonstrating goodness in our lives truly a foolproof investment?

 

What Is Goodness?

Biblically speaking, goodness is one aspect of the fruit of the Spirit mentioned by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 5.  It’s often paired with kindness, probably because many people find that the two of them are difficult to differentiate.  The argument goes something like this: a kind person is good and a good person is kind.  True all the way around.  But that still doesn’t mean that the two concepts are the same.

As I’ve written about before, kindness is the ability to care for all people, whoever they may be.  But what is goodness?  Here’s my working definition: Goodness is demonstrated in our lives when we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.  Obviously within that definition kindness can and should be found.  But kindness is more about generally demonstrating compassion, while goodness is more about generally demonstrating righteousness and justice.

I come to this conclusion because of the way the Bible presents goodness.  When Jesus is called “good teacher” and is asked about what “good deed” must be done in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, Jesus gives some insight to this notion of goodness (Luke 18.18 and Matthew 19.16).  To both Jesus responds by saying that there is only one who is good — God himself.  Therefore, it is God and God alone who can define goodness.

But this is a major rub for us.  We want to define what is good.  We want to be able to say, “I’ve accomplished it…I’m good now!”  But our definitions of goodness will be faulty for any number of reasons, chiefly because we are selfish.  At the end of the day, we’ll define as good that which benefits us as individuals, family units, or communities.

But how does God define goodness?  You may have already gotten a hint of where I’m about to go. Perhaps the best place in all of the Bible to learn how God defines goodness is Micah 6.8:

 He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

So based on this passage it seems clear that goodness looks like acting justly (fighting for what’s right and against oppression), loving mercy (putting the interests of others before our own), and walking humbly with God (having a devoted and intimate relationship with God).

Thus goodness seems to have to do with right relationships with others, whether other humans or God.

This may not sound earth-shattering but it is. When many of us think about goodness with think about personal piety.  We think about things that we do and things that we don’t do…probably more the things we don’t do!

 

“…Or with Girls Who Do!”

There was a funny saying in Christians circles where I grew up.  I went like this: “I don’t drink, smoke, or chew and I don’t go with girls who do!”

And while this little rhyme is funny, it’s also quite sad.  Here’s why: it highlights a sobering reality…followers of Jesus tend to be more identified with the things we don’t do and the things we oppose than with the things we actually do and the things we wholeheartedly support.

A quick perusal of the news or Google results will confirm this.  Christians tend to get the most attention by abstaining from sex, alcohol (or at least drunkenness), gambling, etc. and from being anti-LBBTQ, -abortion, -premarital sex, etc.

Here’s an honest question in response: Wouldn’t it be better to be know by the things that we do and the things we support?  Wouldn’t we rather the world know that we care for the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the immigrant?  Wouldn’t we rather the world know that we support protecting the rights of the fragile and forgotten?

Wouldn’t we rather the world know about the goodness that we demonstrate through our actions rather than the personal piety we attempt to build up privately?

Obviously the answers to all of those rhetorical questions is “yes.”  It would be amazing if the world could begin to see us differently.

 

It’s Time for a PR Campaign

So we have a public relations problem and we need to work to solve it.  Why?  Not because it’s nice or politically correct.  No.

We need to launch a fully-fledged PR campaign because we want people to come to know Christ and his transformative power.

We need to launch a fully-fledged PR campaign because we long for our cities, towns, and villages to be made better thanks to the presence of those who claim Christ.

We need to launch a fully-fledged PR campaign because the Great Commission (Matthew 28.19-20) demands we do so.

But how?  One word: GOODNESS!

If we became the kind of people who were so deeply connected to the Spirit that his Micah-6.8 goodness oozed out of us everywhere we went, our reputation in the world would change for the better!

People would begin to see and experience the love of God through us, his ambassadors here on earth.

Friends, this is our duty.

Only one thing remains: Obedience.  Will we do it?!?

 

What do you think?  What does goodness mean and how can goodness change the world?  Let me know in the comments below!

Waiting for the Drop

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The Drop in Dubstep

Dub-what?  If you’ve not heard of dubstep, don’t worry.  It might not be for you.  Or it might.  Who knows?

But if you want to know what it is, well here’s the best way I can describe it: It’s a genre of electronic dance music which generally starts out slow but after a short while a large bass sound hits and the song’s aggressiveness increases.  Dubstep’s is chiefly characterized by its 140 or 70 beats per minute pace, its use of lots of “wub” and “wah” sounds, its sampling of vocal tracks (rapping or singing), and its “the drop” (that big bass sound at the beginning).

And it’s the drop that I want to talk about here.  Why you ask?  For one reason: the way some people dance to dubstep.  (Note: I rarely dance and never to dubstep, at least not to date.  All of my dubstep dance knowledge is due to So You Think You Can Dance? and YouTube.)

So when people dance to dubstep they typically do what is called “waiting for the drop.”  What this means is that the dancer does some light and slow moves prior to the drop.  But when the drop hits, well, things generally get crazy!  There’s lots of flailing, locking and popping, and general silliness!

Sometimes dubstep dance instructions are even given like this: 1. Wait for the drop; 2. Go nuts!

But what if the drop never came or took a long time to come?

Waiting for the Drop in Life

There’s something that I have done in my life from time to time that maybe you can relate with.  I wait for the drop.  What do I mean by that?  Well, let me unpack it a bit.

A lot of us who follow Jesus are convinced that at some point in our lives we’ll get some sort of a uber-clear directive from God (AKA “the drop”), after which we’ll get busy following Jesus for real.  So what do we do in the mean time?  Well, we try to be good by not doing things that we’re told are wrong.  We go about life like everyone else, working, dating, getting married, retiring, etc. (all good things!).  Sometimes we’re in a holding pattern until the drop comes.

But what if it doesn’t come?  What if we never get that uber-clear directive from God, that be-a-pastor, go-to-southeast-asia, lead-a-revolution-for-the-sake-of-the-kingdom directive?  Will we just continue doing what seems right to us, what we think pleases God?  Will we just simply continue to do what everyone in the culture around us is doing?

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve been guilty of this many times.  I’ve wanted to hear that call to a BIG obedience and missed out on all the things God might have for me day-to-day.  While waiting for the drop, life passes me by.

Can you relate?

The Drop Can Wait

Let me share with you something I’ve learned during my 25+ years of following Jesus — the drop can wait.  Can you or I control when God might want to call us to some sort of a BIG obedience?  No!?  But what we can control, with the help of the Holy Spirit, is what we do when we aren’t experiencing the drop.

And what does that look like?  How should we dance before (or after!) the drop hits?  Let’s turn to Scripture for some help…

“He has told you, mortals, what is good in His sight.
    What else does the Eternal ask of you
But to live justly and to love kindness
    and to walk with your True God in all humility?”

(Micah 6.8 in The Voice translation)

So while waiting for the drop (or the second, third, fourth, etc. drop), let’s do these three things that are good in God’s sight:

1. Live justly.

Translated literally, this phrases says something like this “diligently seek justice.”  But the way the The Voice puts it is great — “live justly.”  Justice is not just something that we pursue only when we feel some super-obvious call from God (“the drop”).  No!  It’s something we live, something we seek with all we are.

And the justice that we are to live out it not our personal version of justice, American justice, Democratic or Republican justice, ethnic justice, or any other sort of justice.  It’s God’s justice — defined by him and his Word and sought after in ways that he sees fit.

So what might God’s justice and the pursuit thereof look like?  There’s one best place to look — Jesus’ life!  Read through the Gospels.  See how Jesus sought God’s justice for people, especially people who had been written off, like sinners, tax collector, religious zealots, work-a-day people, etc.  Then imitate Jesus in your life.  Live Jesus’ human life in your human life.

2. Love kindness.

Things get more sticky with this second idea.  Why?  Because I can try to live justly in an unkind manner.  But we aren’t given that option in Micah 6.8.  We are told to also love kindness.  So while we’re waiting for the drop, not only should we live justly, but we should love kindness.

The word for “kindness” here is one you may recognize: hesed.  It is often translated as follows: “mercy,” “loving kindness,” “unfailing love,” and/or “loyalty.”  The ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, which is called the Septuagint, translates this word as eleos, which means “mercy” or “compassion.”  So the idea seems pretty clear — hesed is not a one-off kind of word.  It means to show mercy or compassion consistently.

And not just to show kindness to others…but to love it!  How many of us love showing kindness?  I don’t always!  But that’s our instruction.  We are to love having compassion on others.

And what does this look like?  Well, again, look at Jesus’ life and words.  He said “love your neighbor as yourself” and he did just that, giving away his time, his sleep, his comfort, and ultimately his life.

3. Walk with God in all humility.  

Sometimes the best way to understand something is to think of the opposite.  So, what would it look like to walk with God in all pride?  Perhaps you would walk with God only to get out of him what you think is best.  Maybe you would walk with God, pretending like you are an equal with him.  Perhaps you would walk with God in such a way to improve your reputation and not his.

So a good start with walking with God in all humility might be NOT doing those things!  Instead let’s follow God in order to serve him and his will in this world.  Let’s follow God while keeping in mind an honest appraisal of ourselves as sinners desperately in need of his grace and forgiveness.  And let’s follow God in such a way to make ourselves less and to increase his fame.

So while we are waiting for the drop we should walk with God humbly.  Walk.  That implies action, movement, and consistency.  Walking humbly with God is not a one-time decision.  It’s a lifestyle.

 

So let’s stop waiting for the drop.  Let’s start living for God now!  And when the drop comes, when he asks us to something specific and “big,” then we’ll be ready.

 

What do you think?  How should we live as we wait for the drop?  Let me know in the comments below.

Broken Systems

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America is full of broken systems.  And many of these broken systems hurt the people who are most vulnerable and most in need.  Perhaps the most obvious examples of our broken systems seem to have something to do with race (or at least correlate with race).  The examples that are pointed to most often in the past year or so have to do with how law enforcement officers interact with people of color, such as in the situations involving Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio.

I’ve written about some of these issues before (here, here, and here,)  So why write about them again?

Reader Responses

The primary reason that I wanted to write about this issue again has to do with how people have responded to my previous posts, especially my friends who are in law enforcement or who have loved ones who are.  By and large these folks have said that my thoughts on these issues are too one-sided.

And this criticism is fair.  I have spent most of my energies discussing things from the perspective of people who live in under-resourced neighborhoods and who are typically black and Latino.

So should the other side be explored too?  Of course.  So I want to do that here.  But I want to put this conversation in its proper context.

So here’s the truth.  Law enforcement officers have incredibly difficult jobs.  Every interaction that they have with the public has the potential to be a life-threatening situation.  It makes sense then that law enforcement officers may be on edge.  It makes sense that they are often thinking about self-defense and self-preservation.

Add to these the realities the fact that under-resourced areas are policed more heavily, due primarily to more calls being put in to police dispatchers.  To make things more complicated, these neighborhoods tend to be populated primarily with blacks and Latinos.

When we plug all these variables into the equation, the result is not surprising — Latinos and blacks are disproportionately more likely to be killed by police.

Therefore, it is wrong for people to assume that all police officers are racist.  Obviously there are some that are.  But it is unfair to lump all law enforcement officers into that category.

But the problem remains, people in America with black and brown skin are much more likely to be killed by police than others.

Here’s my contention: This reality is the result of broken systems in America and law enforcement officers are the ones who get the see the results of these broken systems most clearly.

Broken Systems Should Be the Focus

When someone dies at the hands of the police, we all should take note.  We should ask questions.  We should seek justice.  We should mourn with the families involved, no matter the culpability of the deceased.  And we should lament that this horrible thing happened in the first place.

But our national focus on individual cases is detrimental because it prevents us from paying attention to the larger issues, namely the broken systems.  I want to tease this out a bit more.

When my friends who are white get uber-focused on the details of a particular case, they miss opportunities to feel with people who are hurting because of the case.  And the focus on details also prevents white people from seeing the broken systems that helped create the scenarios that led to the police-involved deaths.  (Note: I’m not saying the details are unimportant.  But should the national dialogue be about them?  There are people who should be focused on those details.  More on that to come…)

And when my friends who are black and Latino get uber-focused on the details of a particular case, they miss opportunities to address the larger issues.  This is because allowing a particular case to stand in for the larger issues of the broken systems can lead to unhelpful and distracting conversations.  And what if the particular case doesn’t have clear or available evidence?  Or, worse, what if the particular case involves a justified use of force?  Then the chance to talk about the issues that led to the problems in the first place is much less likely.

So here’s my point: Let’s focus more on the issues that lead to certain communities being under-resourced.  Let’s focus on why it is that blacks and Latinos tend to live in these communities more often than whites.  Let’s focus more on the horrid schools in under-resourced areas.  Let’s focus on how these realities help cause many of us to view black and Latino people, especially males, with suspicion.

Let’s focus on the wider and endemic issues that lead up to the negative interactions with police.

Let’s focus on the broken systems.

Law Enforcement Has Some Brokeness Too

However, we also need to focus on the way that these larger broken systems impact law enforcement officers and agencies.

Because of the realities that we face as a nation, police departments and other law enforcement agencies need extensive training about how to police under-resourced areas in the wisest ways.  There are lots of agencies who are doing a great job in this capacity or who are beginning to, such as Seattle and many others.  Law enforcement officers are the ones who get to see the realities of all these broken systems.  Therefore, they need to be trained in how to deal with these realities in the best ways possible.

Another thing that has been talked about a lot lately is that law enforcement agencies need to alter their recruiting practices so that the policing force looks more like the community they are policing.  This not the solution but it certainly could help, especially if police officers can be recruited from the community where they will be policing.

Perhaps the most important area for growth would have to be in the way that excessive force by police is investigated.  Currently, it appears that most of these cases are investigated internally by the law enforcement agencies themselves or by local prosecutors.  Both of these scenarios are very problematic since they both are wrought with conflict of interest issues.  Police investigating police is obviously problematic, especially within the same agency, and since prosecutors rely on police for help with their cases, they may not be the best folks to judge the potential misconduct of police officers either.  And since data is hard to come by and the data we have seems to indicate that police officers are not likely to be indicted or even charged with a crime when a suspect is killed, it is clear that what we are currently doing isn’t working.  What is needed is an independent office to investigate cases of excessive force.  This may help us hold our police officers more accountable for their actions when necessary.

 

 

It’s time for some change.  Our broken systems need to be fixed and it’s our job as a society to do the fixing.  Let’s call for common sense solutions (like independent investigations of excessive force).

Another common sense change is to stop is labeling all police, or all white police, as racist.  That’s simply not true and it’s certainly not helpful in these discussions.

And, lastly, we need to focus more and more on the larger broken systems that lead to the scenarios like those involving Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice.

 

Thoughts?  What are some other common sense solutions that you can think of?  Share them below and keep it civil!