Excessive force by whom?

Occasionally my frustration builds to a point where I must vent my thoughts. Similarly to much of the country right now, my frustration has been rising over the past few weeks. Now comes my rant, and I encourage anyone to respond as they wish, unless the only response available to counter my statements is something along the lines of “You racist, white privileged, idiot.” If that is what you choose to take from this, then I had no chance with you anyway.

The Michael Brown case was virtually cut and dry, but was overblown by media, politicians, and celebrities. The Eric Garner case is fully caught on camera, but was silenced and overshadowed by people defending a teenage thug many states away. Yes I said it, and no the word is not racist.

Thug - a brutal ruffian or assassin. (Merriam-Webster)

Was Eric Garner a bootlegger, selling loosies AKA individual cigarettes, on the street without the ridiculous $5.85/pack tax? All evidence says that yes, he has a history with such, and may have been doing so on that fateful day. Was he assaulting or threatening officers of the law? Well it was all on video, and though he did resist what appeared to be an unnecessary and poorly performed arrest, I surely didn’t see anything that could have caused harm to several highly trained LEOs. So my question stands at “why did the grand jury fail to indict an officer who killed a man through a use of force which is admittedly against NYPD policy?”

Through all of this information, we come to another question which has been the talk of the nation for weeks now. Race! Through the use of Eric Holder’s Dept. of Justice, I propose to you that the 44th President of the United States of America is compounding Charles Manson’s joy of upcoming nuptials with the race war he is attempting to spur. Helter skelter pen-pals they may just be. Ok, dark humor aside, I clearly intend to draw forth the question of whether or not there is racial inequality involved in the excessive use of force in law enforcement.

The media has been feeding us all sorts of statistics about racial profiling, and in ways they are right. Anyone that knows about statistics though, is aware that virtually any point can be made by quoting numbers without giving all the details. A simple example is the proven fact that 100% of mass murderers were exposed to dihydrogen monoxide shortly before they began their sprees. Clearly dihydrogen monoxide is a dangerous substance that needs to be dealt with, so as to avoid future slaughters. Now most of us have seen this reference before, and so we know that the fault in this argument is that 100% of all living humans have recently been exposed to dihydrogen monoxide, which translates to H20, or water.

The numbers that the race baiters like to give us are that twice as many black people are killed by police officers as white people are. That makes it clear that racism is prevalent in law enforcement. So how true are these statements? Well in 2012, according to a CDC database, 123 blacks were killed by officers with guns, while officers used firearms to terminate 326 whites. As opposed to MSNBC’s, CNN’s, or HuffPo’s stats, Fox News would love for you would take this to mean that more whites are killed by officers than Blacks are, which is, technically, also not true. The first flaw in the logic is that the database is reported to on a voluntary basis, and the second is that Caucasians make up 63% of the U.S. Citizenry, whereas African Americans cover 13%.

Taking these numbers into consideration, Black Americans are actually twice as likely to be killed by a police officer’s bullet as White Americans are.

Wait, am I saying that there IS racial iniquity in law enforcement? Hold your horses and get all your ducks in a row before releasing the hounds. There is something that still isn't being said here. Regardless of whether or not these deaths were justified or not, the majority of them were actually spurred by some action, interaction or crime. Yes, I just said it. The majority of cases involving police shootings did not involve an officer wandering up to a random person, drawing a weapon and squeezing the trigger. The words both sides may now try to place in my mouth, or in this case fingertips, but were not even remotely implied, are that “all of these cases were justified or were directly caused by the victim’s own actions.” Let me now clarify that this in no way reflects my views or statements.

The job of law enforcement requires the ability to detect actions that are being specifically and deliberately hidden. One of the best ways to do so is to recognize patterns associated with said actions, the process of hiding the actions, or even commonalities among those committing the actions. So if a bony, shaky, and raggedy person is wandering down the middle of the street, with chicken like jerking movements, an officer might deduce that the person could possibly be a crackhead. If a person has a history of legally purchasing pseudoephedrine containing cold medicines at the maximum amount allowed every single month, they just may be cooking meth, or supplying someone else’s lab. IF, in rural communities this is usually done by redneck, unemployed, white folks, then officers in those counties will probably profile those people, keeping close tabs on them, and rightfully so. On the other hand, IF inner city urban environments see a high rate of murders, drug deals, or whatever being perpetrated by young black men, then officers are merely doing their jobs by seeing the common denominator and looking into it.

Hold up! That is so racist, insinuating that African Americans perpetrate more murders than crackers.

Sorry, let me again clarify and say that I was not insinuating, but rather stating as fact. According to, once again, an FBI database, 5,375 murders were committed by Black Americans in 2013, whereas only 4,396 were by White Americans. Clearly a few more murders are committed by African Americans than European Americans(Let’s face it, we were born here. we’re all just Americans with varying genetics and skin color) but not enough to justify racial profiling, right? Well, if we again consider the overall percentage of population with specific skin tones, then we can come to the conclusion that African Americans are 6 times as likely to commit murder as Caucasian Americans are. Maybe statistics make me racist too, but it’s also possible that some people just don’t like to hear facts and logic.

NOW, by my previous paragraph, I do not in any way condone the belief that African Americans are all thugs, murderers, criminals, etc. On the contrary, there are a great many Black people whom I have the utmost respect for. Some are close friends, others are virtually family, and some I’ve never actually met in person, but one is even among my top two choices for our next president. Now I know I said that I encourage debate and commentary, but if you disagree with me on this, then I ask you as well to refrain from placing your racial hate speech in the comments thread. The numbers had nothing to do with skin color, and everything to do with environments.

What is the answer then? Are there injustices in the use of police force, or not? Yes, sometimes there are. There are injustices everywhere we look. There is corruption all around us. Power corrupts. As far back as the 19th century Lord Acton knew this, yet recently we seem to be considering this a new revelation even though black deaths at the hands of police officers are down 70% since 50 years ago. I repeat myself, yes, there are corrupt police officers, and something definitely needs to be done about it. Don’t use this as a reason to hate all cops. Most LEOs leave their homes in the morning knowing they may never see their families again, but they take that risk to protect the people in their communities, regardless of race, background, or creed. Moreover, officers ARE dying at the hands of the people they are now even more afraid to defend themselves against than they were before. Every human being should have the right to self defense, but when an officer hesitates to eliminate a threat because he or she is afraid to be the next face crucified in the media, we end up adding another number to the statistic of officers killed on the job. I may not be a cop, but I am in one of the top 10 most deadly careers, and I understand that people need to eliminate any risk they reasonably can.

YES, we do need to have a national conversation about how we deal with the problem of excessive use of force. No, this is not a reason to steal, smash, and burn. So what is the answer? Well the 44th has proposed spending $263 million dollars that our nation doesn’t have to help provide body cameras and better training to more jurisdictions around the nation, as well as fast-tracking the DOD’s 1033 Military Surplus program. I commend him for proposing action to congress rather than attempting to go it alone again. Where do I stand on his proposals? As much as I’m against big brother having cameras everywhere, and against federal debt spending, I have to say that if I were in this controversial career I’d have already purchased my own body camera as insurance in case of false accusations such as Darren Wilson faced. The extra training I am not convinced would be a good thing, as some of the federal training lately amounts to no less than urban warfare war-games. As for the 1033 program, I’ve never been a huge fan of this. I do believe that SWAT teams in high risk areas need protection from what they may come against, and sometimes that means ambush resistant vehicles. When a nearby town of 834 people in rural Ohio receives an MRAP as part of this program though, that one Barney Fife in the group is likely to get troublesome notions. People often look at the Mil-surp programs as merely defensive tools, but there are some pretty nasty weapons of war that are reaching our neighborhoods as well, and there have been documented cases of these weapons disappearing from police custody. Don’t try to tell me that gun shows are the problem with illegal access to firearms.

Long story, well, still very long, I don’t have the answers. We don’t have any answers to this problem yet. That is exactly why it has been happening in so many cultures and nations for centuries, nay, millennia. This doesn’t mean we can’t find a solution through consideration, conversation, and innovation. Whatever your skin tone, I will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you to fix this, but please don’t use it to fuel a race war, and certainly don't use it to justify cop-hating.