Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Media Ignores Solutions For Both Police And Black Lives Matter

The police didn't protect Philando Castile or Alton Sterling; they killed them for trivial reasons, or perhaps as a result of their own paranoia and bigotry.

It is hard to imagine that the protesters believe that they're there to protect them more than they are to keep them under control.

Repeating the claim that the police are here to protect us over and over again won't convince those that are being targeted as suspects, often without reason over and over again that it's true.

To protect and to Serve sounds like a great slogan and it would be if the police protected everyone equally and was accountable to the public not just those with the most political clout.

The Black Lives Matter movement didn't train Micah Xavier Johnson to go on a killing spree. The military may have partially done so though; and he isn't the only one trained by the military or police academies, by far, to go on shooting sprees against the people they're supposedly protecting. Within the past few months a Homeland Security Officer and former FBI agent, both with military experience as well went on shooting sprees and the Orlando shooter was a security guard who had previously worked at a courthouse providing private security for the government. The reason for all the protests that have been going on is because citizens activists have been documenting an enormous number of shootings especially minorities and often veterans by police under questionable circumstances and I went into many of them myself and the reasons why this is such a problem in A Brief History of Cops Convicted of Murder and Teach a soldier to kill and he just might. These reviews of the causes of violence also included research that is rarely presented in the traditional media, although it is available in the academic world; and it stands up to scrutiny much better than the research that is presented in the media, which is mostly propaganda appealing to peoples emotions.

One of the biggest causes for violence is early child abuse bullying which escalates to more violence later in life including domestic violence or hazing in various organizations including the military or police academy. In the previous posts about the subject I cited an article by David Couper, former police chief of Madison Wisconsin, which has low murder rates due to progressive policing and other local activities including education. He explained how hazing and bullying in the police academy taught police to respond with necessary violence; and he also demonstrated that some of the people concerned about he problem and trying to fix it are police.

This also goes for veterans who are also impacted by veteran violence when they go out of control and one of those veterans, Ashton Woods, was also leading the peaceful Black Lives Matter in Dallas. Woods said the repeated shootings by police are pushing some unstable people over the edge. "That does something to the human psyche. I don't care what color or ethnicity you are," he said. Black Lives Matter condemns Dallas shootings, plans protests 07/08/2016

Woods also said a couple days after this article that he had seen Micah Johnson around Dallas although he didn't know him personally and he wasn't involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. Just a few hours before the shooting incident Harry Houck was in a shouting match on Erin Burnett (July 7) where he denied any fault by the police and continued a pattern by many of the most extreme police officers claiming there isn't any problem with the police worth protesting against. Van Jones responded by scolding Houck for being “so rude and interruptive that you’re actually making my point… no matter how respectful we are, this is the way it goes down.”

I have no idea whether or not Micah Johnson saw this but this is just one of many rants by police like Patrick Lynch, Frank Borelli, or their other defenders like Rudy Giuliani who're in total denial of any problem with the police at all. People that live in minority communities will always know much better. It is much easier for those with political power to remain in denial than for those that are being oppressed with little or no educational or economic opportunities.

If Micah Johnson was outraged by the police shootings and saw that little or nothing was going to be done to solve the problem these denials are much more likely to send him over the edge than the protests by Black Lives Matter. If anything the protests might have given him hope that here might be an alternative way to change things, which rational people know that there is. Of course after the shooting in Dallas instead of changing his rhetoric those in denial like Harry Houck and others blamed Black Lives Matter for protesting the problem instead of police for over acting in many of these shooting incidents.

The media gives these police apologists much more air time and, although they give some air time to more rational people like Van Jones many of the best researchers hardly get any air time at all and when the Black Lives Matter representatives that might have a good point to make they only get a small amount of air time at best, while shouting matches like the one on Erin Burnett that make good entertainment but lousy education are routine.

Another black Lives Matter representative made a great point with the little time they gave her when she said that forty percent of her local city budget went to police; unfortunately they didn't give her time to elaborate on that. If they wanted to understand what leads up to violent crime they could do much more to explain how lack of educational or economic opportunity and income inequality contribute to crime. By using too much money for police, which waits till the last minute before addressing crime, there is less money for education housing, child care and many other things that prevent violence from escalating so that police often never have to be called at all.

When productive solutions like this happens it never makes the news!

Unfortunately the response to this in the media is more money for police but little or no discussion about other preventative methods.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown started to make a good point when he said they were asking too much of their police when he said they asked them to deal with mental health and many other problems instead of providing counseling; and he added to this by saying that if some of the Black Lives Matter protesters wanted to help they could apply for a job. Hopefully some of those jobs would be in education or child care not just the police.

Since they have all this propaganda about the police protecting us, another concern that should be is whether or not they're protecting us from epidemic levels of white collar crime that cause the poverty and income inequality among other things that might indirectly contribute to problems in abandoned inner cities, including violence.

When the multinational corporations ship jobs overseas to suppress wages and eliminate economic opportunity are they protecting poor people from fraud?

When these same corporations send advertising budgets through the roof paying people that deceive the public lots of money while cutting manufacturing expenses to the bone are the police protecting the poor from them?

When they consolidate to a small number of corporations so they don't have a real free enterprise system competing with each other are the police protecting the poor from epidemic corporate fraud?

When those that control large corporations profit by polluting poor neighbors, often leading to many diseases that kill them, are the police protecting the poor from negligent mass homicide?

When insurance companies lobby the government to ensure that a reasonably affordable health care system isn't implemented do the police protect the poor from fraud? when the same insurance companies buy enormous amount of advertising from the media and the media coincidentally chooses not to explain the benefits of Single Payer to the public are the police are the police protecting the poor from fraud?

When the media rig elections by only providing coverage to candidates that support corporate interests are the police protecting the public from epidemic manipulation of the so-called democratic process? Are they protecting the public from voter suppression?

Of course not this isn't their jurisdiction, nor is it what they're trained to do; or is it?

When large segments of the public finally learn about these epidemic levels of fraud and start protesting the government does nothing then they call in the police, not to protect the poor, but to relegate them to "free speech zones" or some other method to ensure that they can't get their point across to the public.

Following orders designed to protect the rich and powerful and enforce the rules and laws they create are as important if not more important to the police as protecting the public although this isn't what the good police officers intended at all.

Saying they're protecting us over and over again doesn't change the fact that it isn't always true! Even though good police officers never intended to aid and abet in epidemic levels of fraud negligent mass murder and voter suppression, by blindly obeying orders to suppress protests when the political establishment and the media refuse to do their job that is what they unintentionally wind up doing. It may take time to think this through but the result is the same for those that are being oppressed, not protected.

What the media and the political establishment fail to mention is that the most effective way to protect both the police and the majority of the public is to find the root causes of crime and prevent them. There is plenty of research which I have covered in past articles to show how this is done and the most important efforts don't even involve police. It involves maintaining a good educational system and economic system that enables everyone to have reasonable opportunities without driving one segment of society into desperation while enriching the elites without any accountability.

What is almost completely buried in this discussion is any mention about how the greatest threat to both the police and the majority of the public have come when neither the government or the private sector address many of the basic functions of society and corruption is at epidemic levels, whether that corruption is in the police on in the corporate sector. Some of the highest death rates for police officers, especially by murder on the job took place in the twenties and the sixties and seventies when there was much more police corruption. A lot of this was partly retaliation from police brutality.

The all time low, per capita, of police deaths in the line of duty was in 2013; even if you just counted the total deaths without comparison to population this was the low for at least five or six decades as well.

In order to make it seem like a :"war on police" they've been comparing recent shootings to 2013 saying it is a dramatic rise without mentioning it was the all time low. This is obviously misleading propaganda that can be easily exposed and when they first did it in 2014 it was exposed at the grassroots level quickly while the traditional media repeated their propaganda over and over again. They're doing the same thing now but since it was exposed they're not quite as extreme.

Retaliation for police brutality is much lower than it was in the past and if they want it to get any lower the way to reduce it even further is to reduce the police brutality and restore other educational and economic opportunities that many of these protesters are trying to speak out for.

The good police didn't sign on to defend a corrupt political system; and if they understood that that is what they were doing they would favor this reform as much as the protesters.

Edit: Another shooting of police by a former veteran took place in Baton Rouge. Barack Obama didn't address any of the root causes or acknowledge that the military provided training for another shooter. Instead he called him a "coward," which now seems to be standard operating procedure. His methods are foolish and counter-productive but, not cowardly, he went up against overwhelming odds on a virtual suicide mission. He wasn't nearly as much of a coward as Barack Obama is by refusing to stand up to corporate interests that are profiting off of many of the root causes of violence and controlling the media so that they don't educate the public about them preventing more violence.