Listen to the Audio and/or Subscribe to the Podcast
Full Transcript:
As they were breaking Jim out of jail, Tom Sawyer tells Huck Finn that “Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”
The number of videos gone viral, depicting police violence upon non-white citizens within the United States, has raised awareness of persistent failures to reform a cop-culture tracing its roots to deep within that of the slave patrols. As police unions continue to make excuses for oft repeated instances of brutality within their ranks, corrupt politicians game the system to insure that a black man or woman never amounts to more than three-fifths of a person in a vote tally.
The number of departments that have successfully policed themselves appears to be exceedingly rare. While this may be exacerbated by the fact that news organizations have, for so long, operated in accordance with the doctrine “if it bleeds it leads,” It is also due to the fact that getting to the real numbers has been obstructed by those who have resisted any efforts to bring greater transparency through the creation of a national database. That proposed database would profile officers who have been the subject of abuse complaints.
State and local governments have also been unable to curtail the power of those police unions that champion the cause of repeat offenders while blocking any meaningful reform. Clearly, the chants of “defund the police” are stupid, although the idea of subordinating police departments to public health and safety agencies may eventually prove viable. Hiring only the best of the former police officers into a new 21st Century agency could address all of the persistent problems. Simply sunsetting the old outmoded departments, after the new agency is up and running, could make such a transition seamless.
Defunding those police unions that have retarded evolution makes more sense than haphazardly defunding an organization chartered to protect and serve. As the new public safety officers join generic public employee unions, the stranglehold police unions have exerted to retard any effort towards real reform would be diminished. The clean break would also serve to dispel the notion, that some officers hold, concerning their arbitrarily assumed license to punish.
Nowhere, within the federal and state constitutions, or within the charters and oaths of such sworn services, is a police officer granted a license to be punitive. And yet, many in the force have demonstrated an abysmal ignorance with respect to their limited role within the criminal justice system. Any public servant that does not understand this most basic principle is unfit to hold such a position of honor and trust. This is true for law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges.
While the Census Bureau reports that only 13.4% of the total US population is black, the Bureau of Prisons reports that 38.5% of the prison population is black. While no government agency is reporting the extent to which the law is selectively enforced, it is most certainly a part of that public benefits package now commonly known as white privilege.
In 1911, Nels Dickmann Anderson wrote a poem titled “The Thin Blue Line”. In the poem, the phrase is used to refer to the United States Army and the fact that US Army soldiers wore blue uniforms from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century. It also alluded to the Thin Red Line of the British Army in which the Scottish Highlanders stood their ground against a Russian cavalry charge in 1854.
New York police commissioner Richard Enright adopted the phrase in 1922. Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker used it in speeches throughout the 1950s. He referred to the “thin blue line” in efforts to bolster the image of the department saying the LAPD, was the barrier between law and order or social and civil anarchy.
By the early 1970s, the term had been embraced by police departments across the United States. According to a 2018 law review article, by 1978 “thin blue line” and more specifically the “blue wall of silence” also referred to an unwritten code of silence used to cover up instances of police misconduct. On April 20th in 2021, that wall of silence was breached as a jury delivered its verdict in the murder of George Floyd. Former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on one manslaughter and two murder counts.
The Minneapolis Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division listed a total of eighteen prior abuse complaints against Chauvin. Sixteen of those were listed simply as “Closed with No Discipline while two were Closed with Discipline including a Letter of Reprimand. It should always be remembered that the original police report, released after George Floyd’s murder, read: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) had a complicated relationship with religion. And yet, he managed to cut through all the crap with the words of Huck Finn as the character said: “You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.”