[Peace-discuss] [Discuss] Non-interaction with Champaign police

[E.Wayne Johnson]

Yeah,but they wore blue suits in Chicago in '68, not the Darth Vader outfits.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: John W. 
  To: Lynn Stuckey 
  Cc: ewj at pigs.ag ; peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net ; discuss list 
  Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 10:36 AM
  Subject: Re: [Discuss] [Peace-discuss] Non-interaction with Champaign police




  On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Lynn Stuckey <lynn.stuckey at hotmail.com> wrote:

   
     John W. wrote:

    Policing has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, and I don't think it's been for the best.
     

    Don't know if you've ever met Doug West, a gentlemen who used to attend a lot of the Champaign School Board meetings, but he says something very similar.  He talks often of how militarized the police (in general, not just in Champaign) have become in his lifetime (roughly 70-some years).


  You mean Rev. Robert West?  If so, I know him, yes.

  A great deal of the militarization is due to the Supreme Court's increasingly expansive rulings on asset forfeiture.  Local police departments get most of the money derived from the property (cars, boats, cash, even houses) which they seize from people who are arrested (mostly but not exclusively for drug crimes), so there is actually a financial incentive for cops to make arrests and seize property.  They then spend the money on higher tech weapons for their SWAT teams, etc.  This sort of drives the policing philosophy.  

  Of course there are a number of other factors.  One is the fact that we've become more of a car culture.  Cops now patrol more or less exclusively in cars, whereas in the old days some of them used to walk a beat and get to know the people on their beat.

  America simply isn't the same kind of country it was in the 1950s.  Just as the country doctor has given way to high-stakes medicine, so Officer Friendly of yore has given way to the SWAT team and the riot squad.  Even the method of responding to peaceful protest has changed quite a bit since the 1960s, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago to the contrary notwithstanding.  

  African-Americans might counter, however, that things haven't changed all that much for them.

  I don't know what the police are like now in England, but in 1968 the vast majority of the bobbies in London didn't carry firearms of any kind.  Of course far fewer criminals have access to guns in the countries that have banned them (which is just about all of the industrialized world except America).  America is the most gun-crazy place on earth, I'd say.


    If you think of how many police departments operate, and how poorly the "wars" ('invasions" is a much better descriptor) in Iraq and Afghanistan are going, you probably won't be surprised to see that a large number of cops have prior military service.


  No, not at all surprised.  And of course before Afghanistan and the two Iraqs, there was the invasion of Viet Nam.


    Lynn 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2010 02:40:27 -0500
    From: jbw292002 at gmail.com
    To: ewj at pigs.ag
    CC: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; discuss at communitycourtwatch.org
    Subject: Re: [Discuss] [Peace-discuss] Non-interaction with Champaign police 




    On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 12:27 AM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:

     
      There would not be much reason to go with a gun.

      Actually it is the lack of a participative social model that precipitated the Kiwane C. thing.

      Simply asking the kids what they were up to could have taken care of the whole matter.

      I think that city-fied folk like the rush of power they get by calling the cops on someone.

      Sort of like the little girls who used to run for the office to tattle every time there was a skirmish on the playground.

      Saying that they are afraid to intervene directly seems pretty flimsy to me.


    If we leave violence out of the equation, I quite agree.  There are certainly situations in which it's most appropriate to simply talk to one's neighbors first.  I've done that several times in my apartment building with regard to loud music.  No need to involve the cops unless the neighbor is uncooperative or belligerent.

    But it does take a modicum of courage.  And in the scenario I posited, where your neighbor's house is being burglarized by people you don't know (and who might be presumed to be armed), you call the cops.

    In the case of Kiwane, I have often wondered why the two police officers didn't simply walk up to the two boys and say, "Hey, what are you guys up to?"  Fifty years ago, and in a situation where race wasn't a factor, I think that's what probably would have happened.  Policing has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, and I don't think it's been for the best.



      On 7/19/2010 1:11 PM, John W. wrote:


        On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 11:41 PM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag <mailto:ewj at pigs.ag>> wrote:

           The whole Society-by-Proxy thing rubs me the wrong way.

           Doesn't it occur to anyone that it's pretty damn strange that the
           police power
           is invoked rather than the people in the society communicating
           with each other?

           That there is this knee-jerk response to call the cops rather than
           manage the problem
           directly and locally is incredibly strange to me.

           But then again...uh... 


        Right you are, Wayne.  If we think our neighbor's house is being broken into, we should all just run over there with our Glocks and start blastin' away!
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