Because This is What We Want
WTF. Linden Cameron, 13, was shot repeatedly by police after his mother called 911 to ask for help with the autistic boy, his family says. If all you have is a gun, everyone is a victim.
When Golda Barton called 911, she wanted a crisis intervention team to help with her autistic son who was having a mental health crisis.
She got guys with guns.
When activists say 'defund the police', they are NOT saying 'eliminate the police'. That is the political 'interpretation' of those who want to use the violence these communities are suffering against them; using their pain to scare voters in shutting down any sort of reform. Often this is led by the police unions, scared they might lose their power over the population.
THIS is what is meant by defunding the police; take away those functions where police are not needed. Police are not medical experts, crisis or social workers, and have to stop expecting them to be. Helping an autistic child doesn't require someone with a gun. Yet, here we are again, another officer solving a metal health crisis by shooting or assaulting the person having the crisis. Problem solved.
I haven’t written anything here since my article about Jacob Blake. Really, the horror, the disgust I felt about that ‘incident’ left me bereft of any warm feelings toward humanity. Truth. Every day I wake up to more grotesque actions and celebrations or utter inhumanity. As iof this is somehow the new ‘normal’ in Trump’s America. Good lord.
It’s… insanity. I try to understand why the police feel the need to shoot, wound, and kill unarmed ‘others’, but I really can’t. I… just can’t.
It doesn't have to be this way… yet it is. The powers that be would rather a few kids, men, women die than allow a broken system to be fixed. They'd rather use any attempts to reform the small things, (say, like tracking overtime pay) against the reformers for fear they might try to reform the big things (police killing of unarmed people, of beatings and unjustified use of force). They live in fear of reformers, so they make sure it never happens. And we get Linden Cameron, we get David Prude, we get George Floyd, we get Breonna Taylor, and so many others, every damn day. '
This is the way we must want it, because this is what keeps happening.