The Most Obvious Fact

July 15, 2016

We might not be at a crossroads, but we’ve certainly turned down an ugly side street. Perceived wrongdoing met with more wrongdoing; violence met with more violence.

It doesn’t help.

It doesn’t help when protesters throw bricks, bottles and Molotov cocktails at police. And chant infantile crap like "Death to pigs!"

It doesn’t help when that tiny minority of officers who lethally misbehave are not held accountable by departments or juries.

It doesn’t help when a presidential candidate gleefully rants about torturing people, killing family members of terrorists, or carpet-bombing entire countries. Or re-posts Tweets from white supremacy groups. Or tells us he’d like to punch a protester or will pay the legal defenses of anyone who does punch a protester.

It doesn’t help that there are social media sites that incite violence and encourage murder, whether from a white power, black power or jihad power source. Nor does it help that that same social media is filled with angry, insulting and threatening comments.

It doesn’t help that, after the massacre in Orlando, ministers in at least five states, purporting to be Christian men of God, decried the killings not because they occurred but because not enough gay people were killed.

It doesn’t help when a New York City union official insists any act of police violence, including lethal acts, is always justifiable.

It doesn’t help that yet another hateful, unhinged individual easily accessed all the weaponry he wanted, including online purchases.

It doesn’t help to threaten police officers or their families. Ever.

It doesn’t help to play with the statistics to prove a point. The raw numbers are more instructive. According to The Washington Post, 990 people were shot and killed by police officers in 2015. Of those, 494 were white, 258 black, and 172 Latino. (The remainder were classified as "other.")

The bigger problem here is not police shootings, which are actually amazingly rare given the millions of interactions between police and civilians every year; it’s a criminal justice system statistically skewed away from fairness.

According to the Department of Justice, minorities are arrested more often than whites for similar offenses, are more likely than whites to be denied bail for similar offenses, are less likely than whites to receive favorable plea bargains for similar offenses, are more likely that whites to be charged with a crime carrying mandatory sentencing for similar offenses, and are more likely to receive longer sentences than whites for similar offenses.

The lack of outraged voices is deafening. A criminal justice system that doesn’t work for some of us doesn’t work for any of us. Yet too many of us can’t even have a conversation about this without hurling insults, or much worse, at each other.

Some locations have started that dialog and moved beyond just talking. That’s why the barbarism in Dallas was especially ironic. Despite a history of violent crime well above national averages and a blizzard of violent police-minority confrontations in the past, the city of Dallas actually has taken real steps to improve police relations with minority communities.

It has an African-American chief of police, David Brown, with a unique perspective on police shootings of all kinds: His own son murdered a police officer and a civilian, and was subsequently shot to death by other responding officers. The chief is, tragically, empathetic to every side of the issue, having lived them all.

Chief Brown has instituted community policing policies that have reduced by half the number of violent interactions between police and minorities (though crime in Dallas has slightly increased this year). Letting officers get to know the people and neighborhoods they serve, and letting the people they serve get to know them, makes monumental common sense.

That Dallas had figured it out was obvious by the tone of the protest march prior to the start of the murderous attacks – people protesting peacefully as police officers protected their route, often taking photos, including selfies, with the marchers and their signs.

This is helpful: police officers respectfully protecting marchers, and marchers respectfully and non-violently conducting their protest. It was an example, or was until the mayhem broke out, of the best of both sides.

It is entirely possible to strongly question, and protest, the actions of individual officers while still maintaining respect for the other 99 percent. The protester’s point can be well made without a riot breaking out, which, in fact, erases the initial message altogether.

And it’s possible for police officers, the overwhelming majority of whom will never draw their weapons in their entire careers, to respect and protect the rights of those protesting, even when the protest is directed at them. Exactly as was happening in Dallas.

Unfortunately, the current debate is so out of control we can’t even agree on the most obvious fact: lives matter. All of them.