Nothing but nothing can happen nowadays without being turned into a hot-button political issue. The brutal senseless murder of two policemen in New York has turned out to be no exception. A priori who in their right mind can support such a travesty or deliberately incite such an event? Nevertheless all those, who thought there was nothing amiss in the investigative process of the police officers in the deaths of unarmed African Americans in Ferguson and Staten Island, accused all those, who had maintained that the proceedings were rigged against the black victims, of incitement to murder and pointed a finger at them saying, “Gotcha”. It seems that everyone has gone mad in this polarized society and no- one is looking at the real culprits - the easy access to guns for even the deranged and the devastating lack of psychiatric institutional facilities.
MURDER IS MURDER NOT A TOP LEVEL CONSPIRACY TO KILL THE POLICE
Now as Jay H. Ell blogged last week nothing but nothing is what it is anymore it is always something else - even coldblooded murder. Murder of these two police officers by a demented individual is turned into a political assassination that had been spurred on by half of America in revenge for the deaths of unarmed black youths at the hands of the police. The leaders of this massacre, are the POTUS, of course, his Attorney General and the Mayor of New York. Not that any of them really inflamed the mob, as supposedly represented by this unhinged criminal, but in case you have forgotten the message that these highly placed instigators sent was code for murder.
The accusations were cheerlead by the usual suspects. Fox News blogged, “The New York murders come after weeks of protests aimed at the officers and encouraged by the President. The man who killed the officers seemed, (Jay H. Ell’s emphasis), to be encouraged by the movement. Another complicating factor, two of President Obama’s Advisors on Law Enforcement, Bill De Blasio and Al Sharpton have spent weeks denouncing police misconduct”. (Jay H. Ell's emphasis and who has searched everywhere for a list of Obama’s list of Law Enforcement Advisors and cannot find any let alone the aforementioned two in prominent positions. In addition he searched high and dry and in vain for the statements where Obama’s “law advisors” had denounced police misconduct for weeks on end).
Then one has former Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, screaming from the rooftops that Obama, Holder and De Blasio are guilty of hate speech and anti cop propaganda without stating any specifics as to what they said or whether that falls within that treasonous rubric. Giuliani trotted out the usual smears and cant. He maintained that Obama had launched anti police propaganda.“The real problem is black on black crime” he glibly frothed, forgetting that white murders, are also mainly “white on white crime”. But respect for the facts is mattering less and less in today’s milieu. Perhaps Giuliani is thinking of another run for President?
RACIAL TENSION AT A FEVER PITCH
The upshot of all of this is the raising of racial tension in the community to a level, according to NYPD Commissioner Bratton, not seen since the seventies. (In a CNN poll decidedly more African Americans than Whites thought the police were prejudiced against them and in a Rasmussen poll only thirty percent of Americans thought race relations were good or excellent down from forty - two percent a year ago. With regard to how the Rasmussen respondents saw the current state of race relations, roughly a third saw them improving with equal numbers believing they were remaining the same or worsening. Again a downward trend in relation to previous years’ statistics).
Commissioner Bratton maintained that De Blasio had since the beginning of the year supported the Police Department and allocated an additional $400 million for training and equipment. He thought all this heaping of blame on the NY Mayor was unfair and regretted that the issue had now become partisan. The rift has deepened between the Mayor, who, ironically, has been more supportive and empathetic to the City’s employees than any of his predecessors, and the City’s Law Enforcement Agency. There has been tension between the Mayor and his Police Department ever since his campaign where he successfully championed for the termination of the racial profiling “stop and frisk” policy of the NYPD.
Conflict is thus crescendoing, fanned by political lunatics from both sides. As a result of an investigation by the Daily Beast, the latter unearthed the fact that a small group, The New York Chapter of The Travyon Martin Organizing Committee have as their objective to ratchet up the anger against the police. Slogans such as “No Good Cops in a Racist System" and chants calling for police to be killed by this tiny irresponsible non representative minority are enough to wreak havoc in peaceful protests. In fairness to the protestors against the system no high profile figures or groups have attempted to rationalize or defend the murders. This is stark contrast to several high profile figures, who have laid the blame for this tragedy on Obama, Holder and, in particular, Mayor De Blasio.
There is little doubt that misperceptions abound and anger has been manifest in many arenas. These include the sports fields where for the first time African American athletes have demonstrated in numbers and police organizations, many who feel aggrieved and misunderstood at being smeared as murderers themselves, have responded angrily, en masse, at the protestors.
WHERE TO START IN THE HEALING PROCESS?
One does not know where to start righting the ship but playing loose with facts and then more than implying that Obama and his fellow travelers are agitating for the murder of policemen in this current climate is irresponsible at kindest. Or trying to change the narrative of this debate by saying that we have civil war on our hands where the police are under attack from the protestors is a gross distortion of reality.
Firstly, let us make it quite clear that Obama, Holder, Sharpton and De. Blasio, like every sane American including members of the Brown family condemned the murders. De Blasio stated that out of respect for the slain policemen’s families the protests for police reform should be postponed till after their funerals. Secondly, to equate murders to protests attempting to rectify centuries old prejudice is despicable. Thirdly, it was acknowledged that there was a problem by the majority of the population when the Grand Jury announced that there was no probable cause in the Garner choking death. (Blog: Staten Island - Ferguson On Steroids).
To spell it out - more African Americans are arrested and jailed for similar crimes than their white counterparts. Harvard Law Professor, Charles Ogletree, Head of the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice, as reported in the online Newsmax, maintained that whether we like it or not race is a factor in policing. He pointed to the statistics that showed far more blacks and browns died at the hands of the police than any other demographic. There is distrust and fear of police in black communities and the belief that excessive force is used in the arrest of blacks including gun fire. The Ferguson and Staten Island deaths resulted in widespread anger and the failure to prosecute the police in what appeared to be kangaroo court hearings designed to exonerate them, seemed to bring the issue to a head. (Blogs: Staten Island - Ferguson On Steroids and Ferguson - To Bad To Be True). It was hoped that the tragedies would bring fruitful discussion between the police force, whom were acknowledged to play a crucial role in the community and the communities they serve.
VOICE OF SANITY - Kareem Abdul - Jabbar.
Perhaps the sanest voice in this whole sordid mess was that of Kareem Abdul - Jabbar, the basketball legend that is up there with Michael Jordan. He now is a celebrated author, filmmaker and educationalist. In a Time article he shared that both his father and grandfather were police officers, and maintained that, “The way to honor those who defend us with their lives is not to curtail liberty but to exercise it fully in pursuit of a just and peaceful society”. Condemning the brutal murders that he believed should inspire nationwide mourning, he could speak firsthand as to what a difficult and dangerous profession the police force was. “We need to value and celebrate the many officers dedicated to protecting the public and nourishing our justice system. It is a job that most of don’t have the courage to do”.
Abdul - Jabbar then went on to argue that the deaths were in no way related to the nation wide protests against systemic abuses of the justice system symbolized by the recent deaths of Eric Garner, Akai Gurley or Michael Brown. He continued that the cynical attempt to lump the murders with the thousands of peaceful protestors was like focussing on a few looters in an attempt to delegitimize the protestors. He condemned the behavior of certain police unions such as the Sergeants Benevolent Association who tweeted that there was blood on Mayor De Blasio’s hands. Former Governor Pataki’s criticism was the false whine born of Party Politics and he feared that these tragic murders have become a bargaining chip in the ongoing partisan battle.
“The marches are not anti police as portrayed by some of the media the police are not under attack, institutionalized racism is” was just one of the additional points Abdul - Jabbar emphasized. He likened the removal of bad apples in the police institution to the removal of sexually abusive priests in the Catholic Church which was no more an attack on Catholicism than the desire for an equitable system of justice system was an attack on the police force. He concluded by articulating, “This is the season and the time when we should be resolved to continue seeking justice together and not let those with blind biases, distract diminish or divide us”.
GUNS, THE MENTALLY ILL AND THE POLICE SHOOTING.
One of the factors that should be addressed in this cauldron of discord is how this unhinged known felon, who had a rap sheet a mile long and had threatened murder in the social media was able to have a gun. There are thirty thousand gun deaths a year in the USA and there is still no meaningful attempt to control who has a weapon. The gun lobby and the NRA has not even had to publicly condemn the murders and bleat that people kill not guns. Fat chance this individual would have had without a gun. It seems as if the gun debate is dead. Thirty police deaths in 2013 and 46 in 2014 were due to intentional gun homicides. There is no racial breakdown of the cops shot or the alleged perpetrators or the circumstances surrounding the shootings. This figure makes up a large slice of police mortality in the line of duty.
Another neglected issue is the woefully few facilities that are available for the care of the mentally ill. There are a limited number of psychiatric beds and even those that are suicidal or homicidal languish in emergency rooms for days at a time till placement is found. The number of mentally ill in prison at the moment is legion. The Non Profit Quarterly reported that the prisons and goals have become repositories for the mentally ill. There are twenty mentally ill incarcerated to every one that is treated in an institution.
These two factors - guns and mental illness played a far greater role in the shooting of the NYPD police officers than anything else and ironically no-one knows this better than the police. Ask them how much of their time is spent with the mentally handicapped since the Reagan Administration closed the psychiatric institutions in the facile belief that the psychotics could be managed in the community? They are arresting the mentally challenged for vagrancy as they make up a large percentage of the homeless, petty theft and crimes such as shoplifting on the one end of the scale and then have to deal with the homicidal and suicidal mentally unstable on the other. It is the police that are at the interface of this ever-growing under treated slice of society not only interacting with them in the community but forever supervising their transfer to the overworked Emergency Rooms. Often they are filling out endless petitions for their institutionalization as it is they who have witnessed their dangerous behavior. Jay H. Ell has seen the police in this role fulfilling this tedious and dangerous mission for society with patience, empathy and resignation.
If anything the police as a group should be campaigning for the control of guns and treatment of the mentally ill. They more than anyone else are in the frontline of their management and as sadly epitomized by the New York shooting incident, their destructive homicidal tendencies. They too would have a far easier task if the gun laws were seriously tightened and they were given the resources to regulate these.
So let sanity return to this debate. There are really no simplistic solutions to this complex problem and for once can well meaning citizens sit around a table and get to the root causes of these societal challenges in all its dimensions and then act on the solutions? This instead of political finger pointing. As Professor Ogletree of Harvard’s Institute of Race and Justice, whose policeman sister was murdered, reminded, “The reality is that we have to respect how difficult it is for these officers”.
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