America’s Insurgency Campaign

When murder clearance rates were first documented in the early 1960's, about 90% of murders were solved. According to the latest FBI figures, just over 60% of murders were solved in 2007. Over that time period, the annual number of murders reported in the U.S. have increased from 4,566 to 14,811. - Shorstein & Lasnetski

Recently there was a story done by the newspaper in my city about how the number of unsolved homicides has increased to about 70% that means out of every 10 people murdered the local police solve about 3.5 of them. This is down from about an 80% closure rate in the 70’s. I don’t know about you but that doesn’t make me feel very safe. While there have been a number of reasons offered up for this frightening trend what strikes me as odd is that while the nature of the threat has changed how the police counter the threat has not.

I believe that there are two main reasons for the increase in unsolved homicides. The first is that despite changes in who commits homicides the police are still using the same methods for solving them. Because of our refusal as a nation to deal honestly and effectively with the “War on Drugs” many of the new homicides are drug related where there may not be a direct connection between the victim and the perpetrator. Continuing to use the same methods used when most homicides were committed by people who were connected to the victim to me seems counterproductive. What the police should be doing instead is developing more human intelligence resources inside these communities. This of course would require becoming connected to the communities they serve and getting out of the safe confines of their squad cars.

Because of how we are prosecuting the drug war we no longer do community policing. The idea of community policing has been replaced by the idea of having more police on the streets but in squad cars to cover more territory as a possible deterrent. The problem is that by using this technique the police never make contact or connections to the community because all they do is ride through the neighborhoods. What you see riding through a neighborhood is not the same things you see walking through a neighborhood and also you make personal connections to the residents who live in those communities. This squad car technique may work in some communities and should be continued where it is effective, but the truth is that for most of the urban areas it has been a disaster.

We should be placing small police substations in these neighborhoods to send a message to the community that the police share their concerns and are taking a stand with the community. By having these substations the police are saying to the community we have a presence and we will be here when you need us. This I believe will help to build relationships with the community that have been strained by the tactics of the drug war, which criminals have exploited and rightly so as a war against our community.

The second cause of this exploding number of unsolved homicides is the growing insurgency that is taking place in many of our urban areas by gangs of terrorists. I refer to it as an insurgency because many people in the community are harboring and abetting these criminals by not cooperating with the police. One of the main reasons we cannot repopulate our urban areas (not just with whites but also successful blacks) is the belief that not only will the community stand around and watch someone shoot, mug, or rob them but will also refuse to identify the people who did it. Few people are willing to put their families at risk under these conditions. The time has come for people living in these communities to take a stand and turn against this penitentiary mentality of no snitching. Reporting and helping to solve crimes is not snitching, it is what citizens in a free society do. The reason so many of our neighborhoods are in the condition they are in is because we allow them to be that way. We accept this penitentiary nonsense as if we were living in the penitentiary and not in a free society. By refusing to uphold our duty as citizens we not only allow murders, rapist, and robbers to walk free and continue to prey on us, but we also give them a feeling of invincibility and brazenness to do more heinous crimes.

With the increase of gang and drug related murders, murders have increasingly been committed by people who had no or little connection to the victim making it more difficult to solve...Another factor is that witnesses have become less likely to give statements to police and testify in court. In some communities, people are becoming very proactive in letting residents know that if they talk to the police about a crime, there would be serious repercussions. - Shorstein & Lasnetski

The solution to this phenomenon will be more difficult and require the same type of tactics we have been forced to use in other insurgency campaigns throughout the world. We must begin to attack the conditions that feed the insurgency. This means we have to create more employment, education, and training opportunities for the people living in these neighborhoods. We should also begin to change how we view and redevelop our urban areas. It makes no sense to me to believe that the people who moved out of these outdated and inefficient homes fifty years ago are now going to move back into them. We should be looking at ways to begin rebuilding entire neighborhoods. Just because something is old doesn’t mean it is valuable. We should be offering people incentives and homes that are comparable to those they are looking at in the suburbs. This cannot be accomplished one house at a time; we must be willing to do large scale rebuilding projects. If we do not then we are condemning these neighborhoods to always be what they are today.

Right now many of these neighborhoods are crime incubators where instead of raising productive and successful children they are raising the next generation of criminals. The work to turn this around will not be easy. We have become a photo-op society where we want to take the turkey or toy to the poor family and watch them smile and say thank you and then we go back to our safe neighborhoods and fine homes feeling good about our efforts. What we don’t think about is that someday the turkey will be eaten and the toy will be broken and that family will be right back in the position they were in. We are trying to defeat insurgencies abroad by nation building. Isn’t it about time we started doing some nation building at home? We should move beyond sustaining lives to changing lives.

“Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.” - Karl Marx

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Race, Politics, & Immigration

With the new law in Arizona which allows local police personnel to act as immigration agents many people fear that it will lead to widespread arrest and detention of Latinos legal or illegal. While this is a valid concern it really misses the whole point of the law. Except for some small town sheriffs seeking to use this for political or personal gain most local police have their hands full with the crimes they already enforce and will not have the inclination or desire to add this onerous duty to their already busy schedules. So if there is little chance of real enforcement of the law then why propose it and sign it into law?

What we are seeing in Arizona is similar to the sundown laws in the south during Jim Crow. The real purpose of these laws is not to be enforced but to intimidate. They are designed to say to all Latinos not just in Arizona but all over the southwest that we can mess with you anytime we want so don’t get comfortable. Historically whenever some whites have felt disenfranchised they have enacted these draconian and odorous laws to inflict psychological damage on those who they feel are the culprits. Do we really think that most local police will stop investigating crime and begin to focus on illegals? No, this law has broader implications and is a heavy-handed attempt to put Latinos back in their place. Don’t think for a minute that there won’t be some cowboy sheriff with a posse that won’t try to make some local political hay out of this, but overall police will continue to pursue local crimes.

I believe because this is an election year and the media can’t seem to get enough of the angry white voter, the politicians in Arizona decided to pander to the worst of our angels and send a message to that socialist in the White House that we have no intentions of just sitting back while our precious America is overrun with this brown tide of illegals that you seem incapable or unwilling to stop. I think everyone agrees that we need to secure our borders. Every country is entitled to know who comes in and who goes out of its borders, but let’s not use this as an excuse to marginalize a whole race of people. It seems important to some folks to be able to intimidate other folks but that solution has never been useful in bringing about positive change. It only seems to allow chaos and confusion to replace dialog and mutual understanding.

I find it interesting that there has been no major outcry from the libertarians or the tea-partiers concerning the fact that a government official can stop Americans and ask for their “papers”. Hell, I didn’t even know we had papers in America. I can’t imagine what I would do if a policeman stopped me on the street and asked for my papers. In my opinion the only way this could be even remotely constitutional is if we were all required to carry papers to verify our right to be in this country. Could you imagine the outcry from these patriotic white Americans if they were forced to carry papers to verify their being in America? You see it is ok for “those people” to have to prove their citizenship, but not those pure blooded Americans. When I heard about this law my first thought was did I accidentally be teleported back to an episode of “Hogan’s Heroes” and we now had Sgt. Schultz guarding our southern border?

I believe we must do more to secure our borders and for those who have to face this issue daily I sympathize with their frustration. I agree with those who are calling for a larger or even military presence on the border to stem the tide of undocumented. But the border is only one facet of the problem. We have millions of people who are residing in this country right now. What are we to do with them? What about the businesses that make it profitable for illegals to cross the border and work here? Do we ignore their role in this? Despite the decision of the folks in Arizona this is a complicated issue and one that requires more than a knee-jerk reaction. The time is overdue for real comprehensive immigration reform. We need reform that will recognize the complexities of this issue and balances the rights of current Americans with those of the immigrants. I hate to burst the bubble of the wing-nuts but you were once an immigrant in this country yourself.

It is vitally important that we implement immigration reform. We need a bill that strengthens our borders and protects this nation, but that also makes it simpler for good people to become Americans. - Dave Reichert

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Militarization of America’s Police

One of the most troubling results of the “War on Drugs” in my opinion has been the militarization of our local police forces. Using the usual tactics of fear and race many police organizations and politicians have promoted the false picture that the police are under constant assault and threats and therefore need the same material as the armed forces. They need armored personnel carriers, assault helicopters, assault rifles, and all of the other gadgetry being employed by the military.

The truth of the matter though is somewhat different than what is being presented. While one of the hazards of being a police officer is the possibility of death, the numbers do not bear out the need for such military hardware in civilian life. In 2005, there were 153 police officers killed in the line of duty out of over 800,000 officers, this hardly resembles the full scale assault being touted by the military hardware manufacturers and the police organizations. It is important to remember that many current police officers are ex-military so the thought of using military equipment will always appeal to them and arms makers looking for civilian markets for their military hardware will continue to overhype the threat to police officers.

The next step it appears is to arm the police with military style assault weapons. It seems that our local police do not have enough deadly force at their disposal, so the officers in Miami will now be offered the option to carry assault rifles.

MIAMI, Sept. 16 (AP) — Patrol officers here will have the option of carrying assault rifles as they try to combat the rise in the use of similar weapons by criminals, the city’s police chief said Sunday.

The chief, John F. Timoney, approved the policy last week, before a Miami-Dade police officer was killed on Thursday in a shootout with a man wielding an assault rifle.
Years ago, law enforcement specialists like SWAT teams were the only officers to carry assault weapons, but now even some small town police agencies are arming officers with the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M-16 rifle.

Patrol officers in Danbury, Conn., have been allowed to carry the weapons since 2003. Police departments in Merced, Calif., and Waterloo, Iowa, have put them in all patrol vehicles for several years. In Stillwater, Okla., about 70 miles west of Tulsa, every patrol officer is issued an AR-15.[1]

As we move closer to the time when there will be only two classes in this country, it will be important that the police forces are heavily armed to beat back the hordes of poor people storming the gated communities. There was a time in America when the police actually did policing, where officers knew the people in their patrol areas and actually walked their “beats”. The drug war has replaced community policing with military tactics. We have declared war on our communities and the people living in those communities. Instead of the police being accessible and respondent, today they are disconnected to the communities they are hired to protect and serve.

This disconnection to the communities has led to more violence and less cooperation with law enforcement. Instead of the police and the communities coming together to solve the crime issues, today they appear to be at odds with each other. With many in the community no longer willing to participate in the efforts to prevent crime believing that they can’t count on the police for protection the hoodlums and thugs have taken over entire neighborhoods. The answer is not more powerful guns and hardware, the answer is a return to the style of policing prior to this failed attempt at a war on drugs.

Somewhere it was decided that having the police riding around in their patrol cars would extend their range and reduce crime, I think it is time to rethink this policy. A community must feel connected to those that are assigned to protect them. The citizens in the Black community do not feel this connection. Hence, a lot of crime goes unreported or people refuse to testify for fear of retaliation. It should be incumbent on the community to protect itself, ie vigilantism, but if the police refuse to protect the citizenry something has to be done. Enforcing the laws should be a joint partnership between the police and the community, but this is going to require better communication and more interaction.

The only time most people in the Black community see the police is either while being arrested or after a crime has occurred, this is not an acceptable police policy. No matter how many or how powerful the guns you give the police, there will be no change in the climate until we have a police force that is more responsive to the community. A police force that is willing to interact with the community on regular basis to develop the lines of communication and repair the lack of trust within the community.

Just as our military is limited in its war with Iraq, so will our police force here in our communities, if we continue to stress the hardware and not the software. Our neighborhoods don’t need occupation forces, they need policing that is empathetic to their plight. There was a time when the police lived in the areas they patrol, it gave them a sense of ownership and it gave the locals a connection to the police. Let’s call off the war against our communities and begin to demilitarize our police.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/us/17miami.html

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