Policing in pairs? We’ve got a ways to go before we reach enlightenment

The order went out to Chicago Police Department officers Sunday morning in the wake of an attack on officers in Baton Rouge, La., that left at least three cops dead and others wounded.

CPD showing their support, while watching their backs

They’re not to be going out on patrol all by their lonesome. They’re also to be in full uniform, to ensure that it is fully clear to the public who exactly the police are. Similar orders have been given to police officers in New York and Boston, to name just a couple of cities.

NOW SOME PEOPLE might think that makes the cops all the more of targets. It probably does. Although I suspect that to the kind of people inclined to want to attack officers, they’re going to know in advance exactly who they’re looking for.

If anything, this might reduce the chance of a non officer being mistaken by someone who thinks of themselves as some sort of revolutionary fighting for the rights of the people against an oppressive force.

Which is what I’m sure is the kind of cheap rhetoric we’re ultimately going to hear if any of the gunmen who attacked the officers in Louisiana Sunday morning are taken alive.

You know, the men dressed in black. And no, I don’t mean the late singer Johnny Cash!

FOR IT SEEMS that one of the gunmen was killed by cops right away, while the other two remained at large for much of the day – with the public in Baton Rouge being advised to look out for anyone black-clad. Not that any further description was given.

For it seems the people who might actually know something didn’t see nothin’, or at least that’s what they claimed when they talked to cops.

Honestly, I don’t know what to think of these latest attacks on Sunday – other than to say we shouldn’t be surprised by anything that happens these days. We have a national mood of mistrust concerning our attitude toward law enforcement personnel.

 

TRUMP: Too eager to mix it up in dispute?

Some of us are determined to view them as the problem, while others are quite eager to use this as an excuse to go after people whom they never trusted and have long wished they could fight back against.

IN SHORT, I’M saying I expect this kind of nonsense to continue on, and not just in Baton Rouge, where local residents remain miffed at the shooting death by police of a black man that got captured on video.

This is not a problem limited to any one city or part of the country. It is why I have refused to get as worked up as some people have over the officer now on trial in Chicago for the shooting death in 2014 of Laquan McDonald.

It’s bigger than any one incident, and it is not going to be solved with cheap rhetoric.

Which is what I think of Donald Trump, who couldn’t wait to rush out with a statement eagerly meant to support the police – claiming he expects that law and order attitudes will prevail. Eager to take sides, and I’m sure his followers will repeatedly parrot the same lines throughout the Republican National Convention being held this week in Cleveland.

PERHAPS HE THINKS we’ll rise up and start shooting people who aren’t sufficiently deferential to the police. Or maybe he’ll settle for an angry mob engaging in fisticuffs against someone who looks just a tad suspicious – from their life’s perspective.

It is a serious issue, this one of mistrust that some of us have with the police – which is really more about our racial tensions and hostilities flaring up!

As much as I wish we could be responsible and rise to a higher level, I won’t be the least bit surprised if our society continues to delve down in the muck for awhile longer.

It’s the kind of situation where I expect there’s going to be many more rounds of stupidity and ignorance that we’ll have to be ashamed of before we can finally attain a level of enlightenment in the future.

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Does Nice mean Dallas is history?

I was driving my niece, Meira, to a place she had to go to Friday morning and had the car radio going when I heard the story of the funeral services being held for the Baton Rouge, La., man who was gunned down by police recently.

 

Not exactly the image of Nice we're envisioning on Friday

There was the time about a week ago that this WAS the focal point of public debate. But with another such incident in Minneapolis, followed by the shooting of police officers in Dallas, and now that truck going out of control and managing to kill seven dozen people in Nice, France, it makes me wonder if all of this is now reduced to ancient history.

OR AT LEAST “ancient” by the standards of people who rely on snippets of information off of Facebook postings to get their view of the world.

It makes me wonder how soon will people be complaining about how we’ve forgotten about what happened in Texas just last week because we’re now more obsessed with France – an incident so profound that Republican presidential dreamer Donald Trump felt compelled to downplay his vice presidential announcement.

As though anything involving Mike Pence of Indiana could upstage what happened in France this week.

In that incident, someone drove a truck into a crowd that was gathered for Bastile Day. Not the first use of a truck to wreck havoc – let’s not forget in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh used a truck full of explosive material to take down the federal government building in Oklahoma City, Okla.

FOR THOSE WHOSE sense of history or foreign affairs is less than informed, Thursday was the French holiday the equivalent of our own Independence Day. It celebrates the day in 1789 when revolutionaries seized control over the Bastile (the castle used as a prison by French royalty).

I’ll admit that my first reaction to learning of the incident Thursday night was to think to myself how thankful we should be that we didn’t experience something similar in this country 10 days ago.

Just think how much mileage it would have got in terms of public attention if the celebration of U.S. independence had been tainted with a violent outburst somewhere?

We’d probably be going on and on about the “arrogance” of some foreigner to try to taint our celebrations. Which ought to be the same reaction we feel to what happened in France.

FOR IT WAS an attack on Western society, similar to how the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 in New York and suburban Washington were larger than just those cities or even this country.

But we shouldn’t let this drown out our own problem in this country when it comes to race relations – a problem that seriously undermines our society’s ability to claim any sense of moral superiority over the rest of the world.

I don’t doubt that those foreign interests that plot out such attacks probably view our own racial hang-ups that were at the heart of disputes in Dallas, Baton Rouge or many other U.S. cities (including Chicago) as evidence of our own moral decay and all the more reason why their viewpoint is preferable.

Which ought to be all the more reason we try to work in this country to resolve our own problems. We don’t need to be giving the alleged terrorist element any reason for them to think they have the high ground in this global debate.

THE SAD PART is that our normal reaction causes this limited attention dispute. Nice will invariably take away some of the amount of brain matter we can devote to Dallas, or the happenings elsewhere.

Just as the next incident will invariably make us remember that something happened in some French city, although we’ll probably have a hard time remembering exactly which other – other than it wasn’t Paris!

There was one plus, however, to the happenings of Thursday as they spilled over into Friday – they wound up detracting from Trump’s attempts to maximize the level of public attention he’d get from his V-P announcement.

Which itself was meant to undermine all the failed efforts that were made by certain Republicans to undermine the Trump nomination come the GOP presidential convention come next week in Cleveland.

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We can’t even decide what exactly it is we’re angry about these days

There are those people in our society who are all angered and upset about the fact that several police officers in Dallas, Texas, were killed by an angered sniper – one who apparently was military trained in the ways of killing people efficiently.

Equating all three incidents is not a common sentiment, which is what makes this suburban Homewood church's viewpoint unique. Photograph by Gregory Tejeda

But I suspect they’re less angered about the actual deaths of those five officers (and shootings of several other people who happened to be nearby at the time of the incident last week), than they are in the fact that all of America isn’t united in outrage with them at the thought that someone would think that police ARE the problem.

FOR THERE ARE others amongst us who think the outrage of last week were a pair of incidents in Baton Rouge, La., and Minneapolis, Minn., in which video snippets showed people being shot to death BY the police.

Killer cops who have to be reigned in before they wreck more havoc upon us all – a thought that those people inclined to think of all cops as the mythical Officer Friendly want to believe is absolutely absurd. If not downright subversive!

The point being we have a major schism in our society. We can’t even agree what the problem is we face. Which means many of us are determined to think of at least one of these three incidents as being something in which someone got what they deserved.

This certainly isn’t the mood of the nation as it was in the weeks following Sept. 11, 2001 when the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in suburban D.C., created a mood of so-called unity.

EVERYBODY THOUGHT WE were all on the “same side.” Even though that, too, was a myth.

For what I recall was that the ideological right wing of our nation – the ones who were always eager to think of those Ay-rabs as some sort of degenerate force on our planet – were using those events of 15 years ago to claim they were right.

Others who didn’t comprehend what was taking place were scared into submission; into thinking that they had to just “shut up!” and go along with what was being spewed by the ideologically-minded.

Nothing like that is even close to occurring in this instance.

THOSE AMONGST US whose distrust of law enforcement has been intensified by recent incidents occurring across the nation (the 2014 shooting death of Laquan McDonald in Chicago is far from unique) are not going to be intimidated into just “shutting up!” and accepting current police conduct as the status quo.

Protests have arisen in cities across the nation, including several demonstrations that occurred this weekend in and around the Taste of Chicago event in Grant Park.

Not that there were any outbursts of violence in Chicago as a result. In fact, people I know who were in the downtown area during the weekend said all the noise from more celebratory events and their accompanying crowds made it easy to ignore the presence of protesters at all.

But I’m also sure that those people inclined to want to think that protesting of any sort is a subversive activity (yes, they do exist, and they usually proclaim themselves to be the biggest patriots of all within our society) notice the activity and use it to be themselves all the more worked up about these radicals out to undermine our nation. Those who approve of the off-duty Minneapolis P.D. types who walked off the job when Minnesota Lynx players (that's women's professional basketball) expressed their support for the protest movement.

WE HAVE A split amongst us, and I’m not quite sure how it will all play out before it ends. I have no doubt our presidential election cycle will be the ultimate viewpoint of which way it leans.

For Republican Donald Trump is going out of his way to proclaim himself the candidate of choice for those people who want to view their cops as heroic and want to think “subversion!’ whenever they see the “Black Lives Matter” phrase. While Democrat Hillary Clinton has tried showing some sympathy for those individuals – only to be dumped on by Trump who claims she’s showing just how reckless and irresponsible she is by taking the wrong side.

Except that poll after poll shows a majority of the nation siding with her, even though Trump remains convinced his outspoken backers will turn out in force on Election Day to give him a political victory.

Which could make this a key issue in determining whether we move forward in our society, or backward in thinking our police exist to protect only certain segments among us.

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