Police and Force: New Guidelines In Order
When I was young, police were feared by most everyone. Well, at least certain ones. If the police said stop you did so because they for sure would shoot you if you ran or drove away. It was well known that after you didn’t run away, how you were treated often depended on what side of town you lived. Back in these long ago times in (the 50’s), many think there was a lot of racial hatred. Even though maybe 20% of those who lived in my town were black, I don’t recall much thought was given to getting along because there was not that much interaction, unless they were teammates on a high school sport team, and then the interaction was minimal. We all just assumed the police would keep blacks in their place. There was little basis for hostile feelings, these kids from the wrong side of town (white or black) would not show up in college placement courses, or compete much in any lucrative job market. It would be rare for a black to be on the police force. There was one young black who lived sort of in my neighborhood and I don’t recall any bad feelings about him, in fact I don’t recall any meaningful conversations with him—he was just there on the school bus. In sandlot sport games I don’t think he was ever invited to participate. It was just tradition, I guess, not to mix people up too much. I reckon blacks had strong feelings back then, and suppose rightly so, but they kept their feelings to themselves for the most part. When they finally started to act up in the 50’s and 60’s most of us not black just sort of shrugged and felt, “if they don’t like it here they can leave”.
Today we even have a black President, so times have really changed in career opportunities for varied groups. Naturally, with these changes, come more racial feelings on both sides now, not just from the black side. For varied reasons, violence is becoming more common place, and the practices of some police officers are now under scrutiny as cell phones generate videos of police/citizen interactions. Thus, new regulations need be put in place to protect the police, and certain groups of citizens, as well as all citizens. These are the rules I sense would help the situation. As usual some tweaking may be needed on some of these.
1. If the police say ‘stop’ and you do, then if they physically treat you badly the officer or officers who behaved badly should be fired and imprisoned for a period of time.
2. If the police say ‘stop’ and a suspect makes a run for it, on foot or in a car, and police have to pursue the suspect to catch him, then the penalty is maximum sentence for the crime committed. If found not guilty then they just pay a substantial fine or even a jail sentence for having run from the police.
3. Since carrying a weapon in public is now legal in many states via brain damaged politicians and their supporters, police are in a bind. The old adage of, if they have a weapon the police can shoot the suspect doesn’t work. A person can’t logically be punished because they are legally carrying a gun. So I guess the new rule would be that a suspect is to immediately put his/her hands up into the air where police can see them until they investigate to see if the suspect is carrying a weapon. If a suspect doesn’t do this, any suspect, for any kind of stop, then the old rule applies, if a gun is spotted then the police can justify fearing for their lives.
4. Stats need to be kept on police arrests and judicial sentencing. If there is a pattern of being harsher for the same crime in the case of certain groups, then a new chain of command within the police department is in order, and should be ordered by the courts.
5. All people living in economically stressed communities—urban, suburban, or rural, have higher chronic levels of stress hormones in their blood and are consequently more prone to all kinds of criminal behavior. It is not genetic. Blacks tend to congregate in poorer communities so of course black crime is higher. There are good black citizens and poor black citizens, so police cannot differentiate by just viewing someone. Justice and fairness dictates that profiling must stop. For more serious crimes, when stopping anyone who might be a suspect, everyone a possible suspect has to be stopped. Only when a police supervisor radios to stop all whites, or blacks, or hispanics, or asians, can race be used to stop people.
Resisting police cannot be tolerated, but the punishment should not be meted out physically by police once the person is in custody and disarmed. Most of these brutal beatings, for whatever motivation, take place once the suspect is no longer a physical threat.
All police should be required to be suited with body cams. Once an officer has a decent cam shot or even a license plate number, then a chase of the suspect for minor crimes should not take place. In most cases they can locate the perpetrator within days and the maximum sentence then be automatic. Running from the police should be an automatic crime with stiff penalty.
Officers should always speak in non hostile terms to a suspect, and if the suspect doesn’t speak in non hostile terms to the police, then again, a judge should then make the sentencing more severe, and if the suspect is found not guilty there should be a hefty fine for the language they used toward the police at the time of arrest.
For acts of terrorism it is a whole another matter. These individuals are almost by definition emotionally unstable or mentally disturbed. It could be genetic, or a long history of chronic elevated stress levels throughout their formative years or even several years of adult chronic stress. Chronic elevated stress hormones create havoc in most our our body systems, but especially in the brain, and more so in the formative years than later on. Eerily, many acts of terrorism are usually planned without any real escape plans. Go for the record, shoot as many as possible, then kill yourself or let the police shoot you. That seems often the plan. The police do a good job tracking down those terrorists who manage to temporarily escape.
Shaping police departments up to get rid of the small number treating certain groups of people poorly is the easiest challenge. Removing chronic stress from millions of citizens trapped in fast paced hopeless environments is a far more difficult task, and the right corrective measures take more than a decade for good results. Damage done to brains and other organ systems from chronic stress is not always fully correctable. Psychological defenses available to resist elevated stress hormone levels will vary from person to person. We are faced with complicated physiological derangements not just in America, but globally. When so much of human activities become global in nature, control over these activities is lost by individual countries and individual citizens. If all these stresses creating chronic stress in so many lives are not alleviated, than societies, as some already are doing, will continue to implode. America is not exempt, and implosion in a highly civilized society would proceed rapidly as so many activities within a civilized society are inter-connected. We are now in a very volatile time.
