Law Enforcement and Racism

Much has been said over the years about how racism is endemic in the law enforcement world. As a former cop myself, I can tell you that probably 90% of the roughly one million police officers in this country have some extent of racial prejudice in them. This included myself.

Police spend the vast majority of their working days dealing with people whose lives are less than ideal. Many of the people we deal with have nothing, never had anything and probably never will have anything, except through crime. There is a myriad of causes:

• Public schools in minority areas receive far less funding than those in affluent areas (partly based on property tax evaluations)
• Lack of employment opportunities, especially meaningful employment
• Insufficient infrastructure in cities (for example, no public transportation, making it impossible to get to work without a car, which many urban dwellers cannot afford

Unfortunately, close to 95% of police officers are extremely conservative, and support TFG and his odious beliefs. And it isn't going to change until American society recognizes the extent of the rot in the police culture, and roots it out.

"Defunding" the police will solve nothing. What we need to do is INCREASE funding: more money for background checks, more money to attract appropriate recruits, more money for training and education, more money for Internal Affairs to get rid of the the trouble kids, more money to investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate the corrupt and venal cops.

If your police department has 100 officers, 95 of whom are crooked, you have a crooked police department. If your police department has 100 officers, and only five are crooked, but nobody does anything because: "thin blue line," you still have a crooked department.

"Blue lives matter"... so do black, brown, red, yellow, white, and purple with pink polka dots. But black America has been the target of so much hatred and violence that is it seems their lives DON'T matter. We can, ands MUST, change that mindset.