Police Brutality. Only A Problem If We Talk About It

Whoever say's riots don't work is fooling themselves.

Riots start conversations.  Conversations start change.

They have worked for years.  Sometimes they work to get a bunch of people drunk from the looted liquor stores that often happen behind the peaceful backdrop of organized dissent. They have also worked on freeing some people to lash out at the looters instead of joining the protest against needless deaths at the hands of those we hire to serve and protect us.

Why Talk About A 
Problem That Doesn't Exist?

The behavior of the guilty is usually to first assign blame elsewhere.  This seemingly comes across as a smart and balanced response except that people only respond to matters that concern them.  If the senseless death of blacks at the hands of white cops is not a problem worthy of conversation, it is not a problem worthy of demeaning- especially by virtue of the actions of looters.

That thought came to mind for me while doing my best to ingest white guilt in the nature of distorted statistics designed to pretend that police brutality is a myth. One blogger say's that looting is a silly way to get people to listen to your message while the other says police kill and brutalize more whites than blacks, but none of the black people are complaining about white deaths via cop.

The best of them actually dared to ask me directly:

Baltimore riots are likely to expedite chest cams for cops.
Would it happen as fast without looting and burning?

"Why do blacks end up on the wrong side of the law?"

as if he had uncovered the underlying problem to the matter by smashing that tennis ball squarely on my side of the court, since I'm the black he expected to answer this question.

My Answer?:

I know you think you've asked the million dollar question, but you've only revealed why we don't want you to ever be a cop.  Your engrained belief is what many levy at police who assume blacks to be criminals as well.

Even if your statistics bear out, it doesn't mean a hill of beans to that family with an innocent person that is the victim of perception. Every American should be invested in the lives of innocent victims- not just those who share the same color.

This particular blogger, whom I often find myself at odds with, generated the initial post that challenged the value of burning and looting your own neighborhood.  In my initial response I totally agree with him on the foolishness of the behavior, yet, I can't help but notice that the foolishness becomes the topic and the topic falls to the background every time people employ their Constitutional right to protest against patterned behaviors of abuse. Does anyone recognize the peaceful crowd or is fire and mayhem the only way to insure the intense focus of the camera? The more we watch endless hours of the criminals who come out durings protests, all fingers are pointing towards a stronger impact from the Hennesey theives than the peaceful protesters.

For a while, every station felt compelled to place the heat on Hillary or show compassion in Nepal but nothing beats an opportunity to film that fat brother with his pants falling down while running with a hand full of new clothes.

This should be a wake up call for old school protesting that seems to be nothing more than the smokescreen that malcreants will use to benefit themselves.  These people don't start out in the peaceful protest and find themselves loading their trunks up with Hennesey.  They come out of their house in the hopes that some Hennesey shakes loose from all of this uproar.  If police can take some knowledge from the cycle, they would place a few cops, the elected officials and lots of public services like out-houses and free water and bouncey houses for the kids at the site of a protest, while the armed police proceed towards the business districts to quickly lock up every ass-hole that hopes to gain from another unexplained death. Unexplained means that protesters should not let a spotted history of policing allow them to automatically assume that every unexplained death was unnecessary per se. As for abhored whites who are embarrassed by the onslaught of video abuse, they need to remove their color and their guilt from the trail we are trying to track towards a solution.

One right leaning blogger tried to track a trail that explains the unrest in Baltimore in this way:

The first Democrat mayor of Baltimore was Nancy Pelosi’s brother.
He became mayor in 1967. They’ve had a Democrat in office since then.
How’s that working out? 

To which I responded:

The moment we attempt to free ourselves from the misplaced anger of our young people by pretending politics has something to do with America's deplorable history relative to racial issues, we don't actually point out the problem- we become it.

Yet, even those who misdirect their complaints are complaining their hearts out and revealing them as well.  Would we hear from guilty whites if not for the stupidity of looting? I think not.

Looting must work, otherwise we would see it regularly in the same neighborhoods instead of every several decades or more.  No one appreciates the result of looting and burning during a protest that was intended to be peaceful at the start.  In fact, they dislike it to the degree that they put their heads together towards avoiding its occurance in the future.  Some of the businesses that were burned in Baltimore recently, only came to Baltimore as a result of public brainstorming from interested parties. Those disgusted with the results of Baltimore's recent riot will have to determine if its been 50 years since the last one because of bad people and bad policing or good people and good policing?  

Would Mike Brown Jr. be alive today if he were white?

Mysteriously, every really bad police force in America with a history of a problem in the area of police brutality is one by one becoming exposed by video.  Those of us who understand the power of the spirit and the manner in which it brings us all to the end of our sinful ways find all of this to be far from mysterious and even further from over.

If This Is Not America's Problem, 

then it's not a problem at all.

WE will continue to see video ass-kicking or police murders that cause looting  until WE understand that we are all we got. There is no answer absent the brainstorming of everyone who cares to talk about it.  Once you no longer care to criticize the rioter's or stand by the protester's, then you are finally exempt from this problem.  

For the rest of US, we've got work to do.