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"He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die."
Author, poet, and social critic James Baldwin on the police
London, November 4, 1971
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Some years ago, my then 13-year-old son went to a classmate's birthday party and was supposed to come home by 10 pm. He had promised that he'd get a ride with a friend's mom. 10:15, and he wasn't home. I am the type of mother that if my children are one minute late, I start worrying. I called him and he said the mom had left and he was still at the party. "Get your butt home," I ordered him. "Do you want me to come get you?" "No," he said, "I'll get a ride with John's (not his real name) mom.
Another half an hour went by, and then an hour, and now I am really furious ... and worried. It was around 12:00 pm when the doorbell rang. My heart threatened to jump out of my chest ... my son had a key. I opened the door and he was standing there with a cop. "What's happening?" I asked nervously. Even at thirteen my son was as tall as the burly cop. "Now, now," said the officer, "Let's go inside and talk about this." I ignored him and addressed my son, "What did you do?" He refused to look me in the eye and muttered something that I didn't understand.
"Let's go inside, Mrs. X," the cop insisted. We went inside. The officer took command of the situation, "Before we do anything, I want you to relax," he said. "Take a couple deep breaths. Your son may or may not have done something stupid tonight..." It turned out that my son and his older classmate took a cab and when it got to a block from the friend's home, he jumped out and ran without paying. The driver suspecting that my son was in on this, promptly locked the doors and drove to the precinct.
"You did what?" I exploded, as I lunged at him. "Now now, calm down," the cop said as he placed himself in front of my son - shielding him with his body - as he took me by the shoulders. At various times throughout our talk, the officer would actually push my son back behind him and it was almost comical to see him peering at me nervously from behind his protector. But this is the key part of the evening: said the officer with the beautiful turquoise eyes (as best as I can remember), "He is a boy and boys do stupid stuff. I swear it's in their DNA. I have two boys at home and they are the reason I have no hair (he was bald). Let me tell you, they have done worse. Much worse." He gave my son a good talking to, he gave me his card and had me promise to call him if I ever needed to talk, and he complimented me on the fact that my son was only concerned that I was going to be hurt and disappointed, and then he took his leave.
My son said that when the angry cab driver made his complaint, the protective cop was actually defending him (my son). The cop told the cab driver that my son had not run; that he had stayed in the cab and so could not be accused of doing anything wrong. And then he said, "Come on son, I'll take you home."
He was white (I expect that he still is).
That type of policing cannot be enacted in law; I know that. You are either that kind of person or you aren't, but the pendulum should not be swinging from one extreme to the other. There should be a livable medium.
I was blessed that evening. We live in Connecticut and not in Ferguson, Missouri.
My cop went over and beyond the call of duty.
Darren Wilson did not even come close to doing the bare minimum of what is required of cop. Darren Wilson, like Zimmerman, when asked what he could have done differently, could not think of a single thing.
Let's help him:
- He could have seen the kids walking down the street as fellow human beings.
- He could have said something like, "Guys, c'mon. What's wrong with the sidewalk?"
- He could have gotten out of his vehicle before engaging them. That way, he would not have needed to grab Michael Brown through the window.
- Had he gotten out of his vehicle, it would have made it harder for MB to grab for his gun (his lie).
- He could have been armed with his baton and Taser.
- He could have viewed the gun as a last resort, rather than the first option.
- When Michael Brown took off running, the then 26 year-old should have been able to run after him and tackle him if necessary.
- There was absolutely no justifiable reason for him to have shot the kid once, much less debate whether to murder him and then do just that.
- He should have filed a report immediately after he got back to the station.
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If cops cannot be bothered to act within the laws that they are sworn to upheld, then we need to help them stay on the straight and narrow. Enter the Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act.
The Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act gives ordinary citizens the power to become a tiny, one-man or one-woman justice department.
The law would allow any aggrieved citizen to file suit against an entire police department in federal court in front of a federal judge if that police department is racist, discriminatory, violent, or abusive. If a judge finds that the police department is racist, discriminatory, violent, or abusive, then the entire department gets placed on a year-long, very strict, double-secret probation. We borrowed from the Voting Rights Act of 1964 some of the provisions, to make it more onerous on the police departments, to give them civilian monitors, to require that the police officers wear body cameras, and many other restrictions that make police departments consider not being so violent, and not being so discriminatory.
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We have only just begun to fight for this law. In our next phase, we will be targeting sympathetic congresspeople and politely nag them until they decide to act on our proposed law. A letter will be going out tomorrow to Representative Conyers and a few select other members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the ACLU and Hilary Shelton of the NAACP, quoting the President's Task Force and the DOJ's Report on Ferguson.
Will you join the fight?
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About Support the Dream Defenders
Members of the Daily Kos group Support the Dream Defenders invigorate three ongoing projects:
1. We coalesced to support the Dream Defenders in Florida and their mission, our first project and the origin of our name. The Dream Defenders defend the Dream of Martin Luther King Jr. by "develop(ing) the next generation of radical leaders to realize and exercise our independent collective power; building alternative systems and organizing to disrupt the structures that oppress our communities." Please donate here.
2. Our Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act, crowd-sourced at Daily Kos in the fall of 2014. This bill quickly gained the support of the NAACP and the ACLU. The NAACP forwarded our bill to members of Congress, and we distributed it to members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other progressive members of Congress. President Obama signed into a law a small piece of our bill in December 2014. Our state version of the MBOPRA is currently in committee in the Kansas legislature.
3. Our Freedom of Information Act project. Nineteen Republican governors chose to kill poor people by not expanding Medicaid. Ebola has killed about 9000 people in total; Republican governors kill 17,000 people PER YEAR by refusing federal support for Medicaid, a story ignored by traditional media. Our project forces those governors to out themselves, clapping them in a Catch 22. We will publicize our results through letters to the editor and via press releases. We no longer need volunteers to file FOIA requests, since we have already mailed all such requests.
More information about STTDs here.
This is a community diary.
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