DEFUNDING THE POLICE WILL NOT END EVIL

There are racist cops.  There are bad cops. There are killer cops.  Some cops use their position of power to do evil.  There are also bad doctors, killer doctors, and doctors who inflict pain and suffering just because they can. Believe it or not, there are even evil Hollywood producers who will harm innocent starlets. We can safely say that there are all kinds of evil humans in all professions and colors, but surprisingly the good ones outnumber them.  How does one end evil?  Guess what?  Evil is pervasive and ever-present in the human condition, and can never be erased entirely. I wish that riots could effectively wipe out evil. But so far their track record has been dismal.  It has been a human weakness since Cain and Abel, but weakening the keepers of the law is just not a good idea. 

There are, however, things we can and should do to minimize evil.  To defund the Police is not one of them.  The Police are there to protect us from evil.  Defunding the Police will embolden the evildoers and those who want to do us harm, because they will now be less restrained to do so.  That does not mean we should not always seek to improve policing methods, including restructuring an entire city’s police department, which it appears Minneapolis is doing.

Once we find an evil cop, he must not be a cop anymore, something the medical profession does a lot better, in fact, almost too well.  The Medical Board has enormous powers to restrict and even take away a doctor’s license with quick, no-nonsense action. A single complaint from a patient who feels they were harmed or mistreated brings an immediate investigation, and if necessary temporary restriction until the board can determine the final outcome. A bad doctor does not remain a doctor for very long.  

Unfortunately, our civil service system does not allow a bad civil servant to be terminated as quickly. It simply does not happen all that easily.  Civil Service has stifling rules and regulations that prevent the cleaning up of bad people, be they cops, teachers, bureaucrats, or whatever.  If the bad cop gets a reprimand and punitive action is taken, he or she appeals it.  The system and courts reverse it, and you cannot get rid of that individual.  It is like tenure. They will remain on the force, and since they got away with it once they will do it again and again, each time more brazen until one day one of them will put their knee on a person’s neck, shutting off the blood flow to the brain and the air to the lungs for nine minutes.  The only reason we know about it is that someone had an iPhone that caught that crime, and it outraged people, which it should.  But the subsequent events are not as morally clear cut.  What about the two cops who were killed by the rioters (both black cops who were defending innocent lives)?  Seeing the lack of outrage sends mixed messages. Black rioters killing blacks cops does not bring a response and is barely mentioned by the media. I guess those lives, even though black, don’t matter all that much.  The political circumstances of these murderer’s acts do not fit into the playbook of this play.  Where is the outrage and the riots or punishment for those murders?   Those two cops did nothing wrong, unlike the poster boy of our current riots.

George Floyd is a violent criminal elevated to a hero and a martyr.  George has the rap sheet of a career criminal, including multiple jail terms for armed robbery, drug offenses, even an armed home invasion robbery where he threatened a black pregnant woman’s life by pointing his gun at her abdomen. And his current use of drugs, as demonstrated on the video and proven by both of his autopsies, certainly does not point to a new beginning to turn around his life. Additionally, he was trying to pass a counterfeit bill when he was choked to death by a bad cop. I have had experience doing combat with people on speed in my former life as an ER doc. They had superhuman strength. We will never know if that contributed to the deadly outcome. Regardless that still cannot be an excuse for murder. Mind you, he did not deserve death for being high on Fentanyl and Speed, nor passing a counterfeit bill. But the angry mob didn’t do their due diligence and managed to pick a violent criminal somehow and made him a hero and a martyr.  They could have found a better candidate. His death was unfortunate, and even criminal, but nevertheless a double-edged sword.  Even Shakespeare could not have come up with a more tragic scenario.

In a recent study, 2,870 black victims were murdered by 2,570 black criminals, where of 3,499 white victims most of them were killed by whites. Do those black or white lives matter?  It is much more likely that a black person will be killed by a black murder than by a white person.  Defunding the Police would inflate those numbers just as all the discarding of social distancing effectively doubled the LA Coronavirus cases in the last week. Apparently, the need to make a violent criminal a martyred hero trumps the need to contain a lethal virus. The virus is not at all racist, and black and white lives will be snuffed out by whatever means. Does anybody care? 

Our Mayor Eric Garcetti is seriously out of touch with criminal behavior. His plan of taking part of the police budget to fund community centers in black neighborhoods will help some young black persons to play the guitar or become better rappers, but will not do a whole lot to keep them from joining the Crips or Bloods to do what they do best.

A weakened police presence will further the desire for the population, whether black, white, pink, or purple, to protect itself.  We already have more guns, than people in the US. Do we really want the “Wild West” and the Vigilantes to make a comeback? With less police presence, few cops will be out on the streets, including fewer black cops. Get ready to defend yourself, and I assure you that automatic (and I don’t mean semi-automatic) weapons, legal or not, will be in many households! Be careful of what you wish for because you may just get it!