A Modest Proposal: Eric Garner and Efficiency
What American Cities Need
We don’t know much about Eric Garner yet, and there’s a reason for that. We do know that he was a father of six in his forties, that he had been stopped and frisked before and was none too happy about his last run-in with New York’s Finest. We know he was Black, and we know he was physically imposing, even to an eight year veteran officer. That’s about all we know.
We have heard he had a lengthy criminal record and was selling loosies before his end. We have heard he was on welfare. But we do not know these things to be true… yet. These and other details concerning the life of this newly dead Black NYC resident are unknown to us because not only do we lack the personal first or secondhand knowledge that his friends and family were afforded, we also lack the capabilty to check these things on the spot. We cannot walk down the street and come about this information in a matter of seconds in the same manner we can know the weather or Amar’e Stoudemire’s salary.
The saddest part of this case? Neither could those cops.
Cops walking the street aren’t in cars, clearly. They’re not hooked into the network law enforcement uses to pull warrants, unpaid fines and tickets and other info that could spell the difference between getting off with a warning for running a stop sign and spending a night in jail. So, if Eric Garner was the loosie slinging welfare king he very likely was, they would have had very little in the way of verification unless he announced it or bore some sort of mark identifying himself as such. NYC street cops simply lack the realtime flow of valuable info to rid our streets of vermin and freeloaders. The end result is messy, brutal and outrageous scene that played out on that fateful day. For too long we have subjected our police to the potential terror of having to encounter all sorts of vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells with the necessary firepower to mow down streets full of Sean Bells and Diallo’s (or just one at a time!) but not the information, resulting in the messy and ineffeicent law enforcement such as the effort on display in the video above. What we need is a revolution in our fight against crime.
What America needs is a new class of cop.
Technology is able to do so much nowadays. We’ve got glasses that can tell you…well, whatever it tells you it can, I guess. We’ve got alarm clocks made entirely of light, like the sun but for way more money and within the confines of our hellishly small apartments. We can watch a show while watching another show while recording another show while speaking face to face with our girlfriends while they’re on the toilet in their apartment in Newark. With all of the advancements we’ve made in loafing and staving off our national pastime, surely we can put our minds to work on something to help our boys in blue take a bite out of crime.
Take a moment to imagine the possibilities.
We could have avoided the fiascos that were Sean Bell and Diallo. Our protectors would have been preoccupied with the real criminals, Black guys just walking the street who may or may not have looked scary and had a history of criminal activity and/or welfare assistance. Electricians and corner salesmen may be unsavory, but they don’t terrorize our streets like six foot heavy set Blacks who fail to comprehend that stop and frisk makes us safer. If Google Glass was standard police issue, they could simply identify and neutralize such threats, sans public outrage. Armed with on the spot info, the American public could put itself through the rigors of our annual bogeyman parade far more quickly. Think of the process now: We must find a Black man or woman, they must die, be severely injured or become engulfed in some public scandal. Liberals and race baiters must blindly come to their defense, wagging their judgmental fingers in the direction of the informed American public. Only then do we learn the real character of said Negro villain: maybe they’d smoked weed, or lacked a job. With our new cop-tech, we won’t have to assume that the cops were privy to this information and acted in its light, we can know they were. The Sharptons and the Jacksons and the Tourés of the world can stick that in their pipes and smoke it! Eventually, after all of the kinks were worked out, we could start to sell it to the general public. Only then could we begin equipping citizens, allowing them to stay vigilant against outsiders and any criminal element in their otherwise quaint neighborhoods.
These strides will undoubtedly come at a great public cost. If they get too high, we can just start eating children.
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