A00045 - Police on Trial and a Trial Solution
This has been a sad week. Ukraine; Uvalde, Texas; and Tulsa, Oklahoma, have all contributed to my feeling sad. But this sadness has been compounded by my reading the PBS Newshour footnote to its reporting on the Tulsa mass shooting wherein it is noted that every 13 hours a person is killed in Oklahoma by gunfire and by the PBS Frontline program "Police on Trial" which highlights the continuing police problems in Minneapolis which indicates that the policing problem has not been resolved. Instead the policing situation in Minneapolis may now be worse.
Watching the examples of excessive force being utilized in Minneapolis was very upsetting. However, the most heinous example of excessive force may have been this:
Once upon a time, I worked for a City where the police use of force resulted in the deaths of a number of black men. These deaths led to a consent decree which created a Police Commission which received and reviewed complaints of excessive force filed against the police. It also led to a personal commitment by an assistant city attorney to handle the defense requests for internal complaints against police officers. For twenty years, the assistant city attorney monitored the complaints brought to his attention and, when an individual police officer appeared to be generating an unusual number of complaints, the assistant city attorney alerted the city attorney and the internal affairs investigator of his concerns.
The existence of the Police Commission, and the efforts of the assistant city attorney, appear to have helped decrease the levels of police use of excessive force in the city where I worked. But that was long ago. These days the most that the former assistant city attorney can do is to pray that Minneapolis and Baltimore and Ferguson and Chicago and New York and so many other cities can find their own way to more responsive ... and responsible policing.
Peace,
Everett Jenkins
Fairfield, California
June 3, 2022
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