New Guards For Our Security

“Taking A Stand In Baton Rouge” by Johnathan Bachman via Reuters. Used for education under “Fair Use”. If the copyright owner wants this image removed, contact me at sansuthecat@yahoo.com.

“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

— The U.S. Declaration of Independence

The Crisis

These are times that try men’s souls. Some will bend and others will break. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are the latest unarmed black victims of police brutality. Their deaths have fueled renewed protests against the racist and militaristic nature of American policing.

Floyd had the Minneapolis cops called on him after using a counterfeit $20 dollar bill to buy cigarettes. He might not have even known that the dollar bill was fake, and this hardly seemed like the sort of issue that required the presence of armed officers. In the process of arresting Floyd, Officer Derek Chauvin rested his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, even after Floyd cried that he was out of breath. His death brings to mind Eric Garner, who famously said, “I can’t breathe”, after being strangled to death by a Staten Island police officer. Or the late Eric Harris, whom, after being tackled and shot by the Tulsa County Police, warned them that he was losing breath, only for an officer to yell, “Fuck your breath!”

Breonna Taylor was an EMT, who appears not only to have been a victim of police brutality, but also of the War on Drugs. The Louisville police were investigating drug sales they believed were in a home far from Taylor’s, but were given a warrant to search her place because the suspected culprits might have used her residence to get packages. The judge gave the officers a no-knock warrant, which permitted them to enter without warning or identifying as police. The police claim that they did identify themselves repeatedly and were immediately met with gunfire by Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. This version of events, however, is disputed by Taylor’s family and lawyers, who claim that they officers never identified themselves and that Walker feared they were home invaders.

Furthermore, the alleged suspect had apparently been apprehended by the time they broke into Taylor’s home. Taylor’s lawyer has asked why the police didn’t just pull over the suspect when he received these packages, instead of waiting until March to attempt a midnight raid. There’s also the question of how Taylor ended up killed when she wasn’t even the one shooting. This is manslaughter at best and trigger-happy recklessness at worst. Unless the suspect was especially violent with their drug sales, I don’t see why this required any police involvement at all.

We Still Can’t Breathe, But One Day We Will

These are not isolated incidents. Racism is a systemic problem in American policing. In 2015, The Washington Post noted that while white people are killed by the police than black people, black people accounted for a higher proportion of police killings relative to their minority status. In other words, despite black people making up 13% of the population, the police are more likely to use deadly force against them. A Stanford University study of 93 million traffic stops between 2001 and 2017, found that black drivers were 20% more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. The ACLU found that between 2010 and 2018, black people were 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana offenses, even though they use the drug at rates similar to white people.

Investigations into the police by the U.S. Department of Justice have also uncovered evidence of systemic bias. Its 2011 investigation into the New Orleans police found routine abuse of excessive force and pat-downs, along with bias against blacks, women, non-native English speakers, and the LGBT. Its 2014 investigation into the Cleveland police found that officers frequently used excessive or lethal force against citizens, and that this behavior was usually ignored if not endorsed by superiors. Its 2015 investigation into the Ferguson police found that they were more interested in public revenue than public safety and that disproportionate arrests stemmed from unlawful bias. Its 2016 investigation into the Baltimore police found that constitutional rights were routinely violated with excessive force and unlawful stops, and that black residents were often discriminated against. Its 2017 investigation of the Chicago police found that excessive force was routine, condoned by superiors, and often targeted against blacks and Latinos. These patterns of abuse should disturb all who claim to care about “law and order.”

Nor is police brutality a simple story of black people versus white people. The officer who shot Philando Castille was Latino. One of the officers who stood by while his partner killed George Floyd was Hmong-American. Three of the officers responsible for the killing of Freddie Gray were black. A police officer does not have to be white to view black people with undue suspicion and cruelty. Nor do the victims always have to be black. Police violence has been lethal for all races.

Consider the case of Erik Salgado, a 23 year old Latino from California, who was pulled over by the Oakland police under the suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle. As far as we know, he was unarmed, though the police accused him of ramming their vehicles. Erik and his pregnant girlfriend were shot multiple times. Erik died and his girlfriend miscarried. There is, so far, no indication that the officers tried to deescalate the situation, or if they knew a pregnant woman was in the car when they fired. Consider also the case of Sean Monterrosa, a 22 year old Latino who was shot dead through a police window while on his hands and knees. Furthermore, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics found that while Hispanics make for only 17.6% of the population, but represent 23% of all searches and 30% of all arrests.

Or take the case of Daniel Shaver, a white man whose video still haunts me to this day. From the body cam footage, we see him first with his hands up, then on his knees, then crawling on the floor, sobbing all the while, trying as best as he can to obey the officer’s orders. The officer murders him anyways. Or take the case of Wayne Jones, a white homeless man who suffered from schizophrenia. Police stopped him for walking on the street instead of the sidewalk, and then fatally shot him 22 times. These deaths show that police brutality is not exclusively a racial matter, but an authoritarian mentality that sees brute force as the only means of keeping the peace. The police see themselves less as domestic guardians and more as soldiers occupying an enemy territory, as The Washington Post observed, “Militarization makes every problem — even a car of teenagers driving away from a party — look like a nail that should be hit with an AR-15 hammer.” The inevitable result, as linguist John McWhorter wrote, is that “Police officers are too often overarmed, undertrained, and low on empathy.”

The Crimes

The police exist to “protect and serve,” but too many police departments have devolved into criminal gangs with military power and legal impunity. Throughout the protests against police brutality, many officers have thrown off any pretense respecting the right to protest, the freedom of the press, and the opposition to cruel and usual punishment. Let these facts of injustice be submitted to a candid world:

• In Buffalo, New York, the police pushed down the 75-year-old protestor Martin Gugino. He hit his head on the concrete and bled out while they walked past him.
• In Atlanta, Georgia, two black college students, Messiah Young and Taniyah Pilgrim, where caught up in traffic during the protests. The police broke open their car windows, tazered them, and placed them under arrest for no apparent reason.
• In Kansas City, a protester shouted at police, accusing them of excessive force. The police then proceeded to prove his point by pepper-spraying him and placing him under arrest.
• In Louisville, Kentucky, reporter Kaitlin Rust was fired on with pepper balls while doing live coverage of the protests.
• In Minneapolis, Minnesota, CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew were placed under arrest while covering the protests.
• In Las Vegas, Nevada, two photojournalists of the Review-Journal, Bridget Bennett and Ellen Schmidt, were arrested while covering protests.
• In Minneapolis, Minnesota, Linda Tirado, a freelance journalist from Tennessee, was left permanently blinded in her left eye after police fired rubber bullets on her.
• Also in Minneapolis, John Sanders, was merely taking photos of the graffiti, when he got caught up in the protests, and was also lost an eye after a bean bag round was fired on him.
• In Fairfax County, Virginia, an officer faces up to three years in prison because he used a stun gun on a black man who had previously cried out, “I can’t breathe.”
• Also in Minneapolis, the police fired paint canisters at Tanya Kerssen for sitting on her front porch after curfew.
• In New York City, a protester had his hands up when an officer tore his mask off and pepper-sprayed him.
• Also in NYC, a NYPD car drove through a crowd of protesters.
• Again, in Minneapolis, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at MSNBC reporter Ali Veshi and his crew.
• Once more, in Minneapolis, Ryan Faircloth, a reporter at the Star Tribune, was fired by police through his car window on his way home.
• The New York Times also has a disturbing visual catalogue of abuses by the NYPD during the protests, which include, among other crimes: attacking people who had their hands up, attacking people already in custody, attacking people at random, using bicycles as weapons, and aggressively disrupting peaceful crowds.

I know that not all cops are bad. I can attest to this personally, as my first karate teacher was a cop. I also understand that many officers do right by their citizens and many more die in the line of duty, but seeing this problem as a simple issue of “good cops” versus “bad cops” is a mistake. Most cops, good or bad, are a part of a corrupted system which encourages bad behavior just as strongly as it does good. Even the “good cops,” it must be said, have been complicit is aiding and abetting the bad ones. We now know well of the “blue wall of silence,” an unspoken code in which the police look the other way at the abuses done by their colleagues. Daresay, many officers have a bloated sense of entitlement and won’t tolerate much criticism from the very citizens they’re supposed to protect.

Consider that after a grand jury’s failure to indict Eric Garner’s killer, New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio (of whom I am no fan), spoke about the difficult conversations he had to have with his biracial son, Dante, about police encounters. Later that year, two officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, were horrifically murdered by a man who wanted to avenge Garner. Even though de Blasio never called for violence against police and that most of the protests for Garner were peaceful, the head of the NYPD police union said that there was blood on the hands of the mayor and the protesters. Many policemen seemed to agree, as when de Blasio spoke at the funeral of these two men, hundreds of officers turned their backs on him. Furthermore, the NYPD went on strike, refusing to respond to any but the most serious of crimes. Their aim was to demonstrate society’s dependence on the police, but it unironically led to a decrease in crime. The message of these actions was quite clear: the NYPD should never be held to account, no matter how egregious we may find their actions.

President Donald Trump has only further inflamed the tensions. To support St. John’s Church, which had been damaged in a fire from earlier unrest, Trump ordered federal law enforcement to clear away protesters with tear gas, so he could have a photo op with a Bible in front of the church. This was done in direct violation of the right to assembly under the First Amendment. In response to further unrest in Portland, Trump had the Department of Homeland Security unleash its federal agents on the protesters. The feds often arrested protesters without explanation, threw them into unmarked vans, and detained them without identifying themselves, in blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure. Mathieu Lewis-Rolland, a photojournalist for the Portland Mercury, was shot by feds in the back. Justin Yau, a freelance journalist and Army veteran, has sued the feds for firing a tear gas canister at him. Doug Brown, an observer for the ACLU, witnessed the indiscriminate use of tear gas against the protesters as well as threats to shoot journalists. The ACLU also found that the feds brazenly attacked volunteer medics, some of whom felt that they were intentionally targeted. Christopher J. David, a Navy veteran, confronted the feds about these constitutional violations, and they proceeded to beat him with batons and pepper spray.

The brutality we are witnessing in America is that which we are often used to seeing in Hong Kong, Egypt, or Venezuela, but it can happen here, and indeed, it is happening. Those who enable the abuse of the police and the feds are not patriots, but the enemies of freedom. They dress themselves up in the symbols of the republic, while violating its deepest principles. Trump and his slavish sycophants do not love America, the America that values freedom of expression, criticism of authority, and the liberties of the individual. No, they pledge their allegiance to Trump and his sadistic cruelty, as he prods us along to martial law.

The Cure

I wholeheartedly support the Black Lives Matter protests, and given what these activists are facing, I greatly admire their courage. Disruptive and peaceful protests that stretch across lines of gender and race are what we need to rattle and awaken the conscience of our nation. Alicia Garza, Patrica Cullors, and Opal Tometi owe our respect for founding this latest phase of the fight for racial justice. I understand that some of these women are Marxists, of which I am not, but this is a movement which crosses ideological lines. This uprising did not spring on their command, but it spontaneously swelled up from the hearts of the righteous. You need not be a socialist to fight for the humanity of black people.

Now, in our support of the protests, we must also be mindful of the pandemic. Coronavirus does not discriminate by political persuasion and one can’t help but be disturbed by the large crowds of people gathering in the streets. Many on the Left justifiably criticized those who gathered at beaches, in bars, and or who protested the lockdown. It would be hypocritical to not also apply a similar standard behavior of out of political convenience. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t protest, but rather, the protests must be disciplined. To their credit, nearly all of the protesters are wearing masks, which can reduce transmission, but the crowding does not. No less an authority than Anthony Fauci has remarked on the protests, that they must have “masks plus physical separation.” And it is certainly possible to socially distance while protesting. A great example of this was the Israeli protests against Benjamin Netanyahu, where all of the protesters stayed six feet apart. The police are hardly innocent, either. Their indiscriminate use of tear gas is all the more dangerous given that it causes people to take off their masks and cough.

Now, don’t expect to hear any support from me for rioting and looting. In the midst of record unemployment and financial loss, burning down and stealing from local businesses is a horrendous crime. Did the riots help black life when Korboi Balla, a black firefighter in Minnesota, saw the business he spent his life savings on go up in flame? Did the riots help black life when black business owners Zola Dias and Kris Shelby saw their clothing store destroyed? Did the riots help black life when they killed black St. Louis police officer David Dorn, who was only trying to defend a local pawnshop? Will these rioters be there to help these people rebuild, pay their bills, and provide for their families?

When people justify riots, they demean nonviolent protests. There’s an implication that peaceful protesters aren’t as angry as the rioters are, as if the most radical way to express anger at injustice is through self-destruction. When people justify riots, they also ignore the wills of many protesters in Brooklyn, Pasco, Miami, and elsewhere, who have defended local businesses from pillage and flame. It is true that some rioters are motivated by righteous anger, but you can empathize with one’s anger while also discouraging their behavior. This balance was deftly made by the rapper Killer Mike in his impassioned speech during the protests in Atlanta:

“I’m duty bound to be here to simply say that it is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy. It is your duty to fortify your own house so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organization. Now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize. It is time to beat up prosecutors you don’t like at the voting booth. It is time to hold mayoral offices accountable, chiefs and deputy chiefs.”

There are those who say that we must “abolish the police” which means investing so much into our communities that police departments will become unnecessary in fighting crime. Civil rights activist Angela Davis told Democracy Now that police abolition is “about shifting funding to education, to housing, to recreation.” Reforming the police, meanwhile, is viewed as a neoliberal half-measure, as community activist Mariame Kaba wrote in the New York Times, “We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.” I half-agree with these abolitionists. While I hate the slogan “abolish the police,” I agree with the activists that policing, as it exists in America, needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. I also think that investing more money into our communities would reduce criminal activity, and by extension, police presence. Call that “abolition” if you want, but that’s where I stand.

Where I disagree with the abolitionists is in their rather utopian view of a police-free world. They ignore studies from criminologists that found more officers on the streets reduces violent crime. In the words of criminologists Justin Nix and Scott Wolfe, drastic budget cuts or outright disbanding of police departments will lead to an increase in crime and victimization: “More people will be robbed, more people will be shot, and more people will die. More homes will be broken into and more cars will be stolen. People who have the means will pack up and move. Businesses will suffer. These collateral consequences will disproportionately harm minority communities that need help, not further marginalization.” This isn’t to say that we should be over-policed or that officers should act with impunity, but that the police have an essential job and that removing them wholesale could do more damage than what the abolitionists intend.

Even leftists appreciate the value of disciplinary violence when it suits them. Davis told Democracy Now that “safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety.” This would’ve been news to the political prisoners of the Soviet Union, East Berlin, and Cuba, to whose police states Davis once lent her proud support. In fact, through a secretary, Davis once smeared dissidents jailed in Eastern Europe as capitalist traitors. Many leftists also support Antifa, a sort of vigilante police force that uses preemptive violence against Nazis and white supremacists. Antifa, however, will attack anyone they deem a “fascist,” provoke violent incidents that often feed into fascist victimhood narratives, and show an open disdain for freedom of speech (or part of a “regime of rights” as supporter Mark Bray once put it). The Left expects the police to be held to account, but will they do the same for their own enforcers?

Earlier this year, we got a small experiment in what a police-free society could look like with the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). As one protester told the New York Times, “We are trying to prove through action and practice that we don’t need them and we can fulfill the community’s needs without them.” The protesters successfully cordoned off six blocks of Seattle, during which they created a sort of hippie commune: a free food co-op, a garden, a medical center, a library, documentary film screenings, and performances by Lakota and Yakima tribes. Woodstock, however, soon made way for Altamont, as CHAZ became the site of several shootings, including one which led to the death of a black teenager. Police Chief Carmen Best accused the protesters of not cooperating with their requests for help. Anti-police gestures were apparently more important than public safety. If leftists, with six blocks to themselves, were unable to create a successful police-free society, then we should be skeptical of their ability to do so elsewhere.

So, you may ask me, what are my solutions? It isn’t enough for me to simply criticize the police, or declare solidarity with the protests, I should also provide my own way forward. Here are some basic steps that I think will go a long way:

1) Every single police department should embrace Campaign Zero’s “8 Can’t Wait.”

Campaign Zero, a police reform campaign, has listed eight immediate polices that the police can adopt to reduce unnecessary violence. They came up with these recommendations after comparing the use of force guidelines of over 100 police departments. These include: Banning chokeholds and strangleholds, requiring de-escalation, requiring a warning before shooting, exhaust all other means before a shooting, requiring officers to intervene when they see inappropriate use of force, ban shooting moving vehicles, requiring a use-of-force continuum, and require comprehensive reporting on the use-of-force against civilians. These policies should be adopted post-haste.

2) We need to encourage more police officers need to speak out against the corruption in their departments.

If we are to speak of good cops, then let us speak of the cops willing to break the blue wall. They need our support. Many former cops have blown the whistle on police brutality. There’s Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia Police Captain, who said at the Ferguson protests that “The whole system is corrupt.” There’s Matthew Fogg, a black retired chief deputy U.S. marshal, who testified that his department enforced drug laws more often in black communities because those residents had less legal connections. There’s also former Baltimore cop Michael Wood, who famously tweeted about all of ugly things he witnessed the police do, such slapping an innocent woman, defecating in people’s homes, and illegally searching people with no justification. Then there’s the legendary NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico, who recently argued that unless police whistleblowers get witness protection, the blue wall will never break.

There are police who are just as outraged about these abuses as we are. Many have even joined arms with the protesters. Some of it was performative. Like the Buffalo officers who kneeled with protesters, and then, one day later, pushed Martin Gugino’s head into the pavement. Some of it, however, was also genuine. Like Michigan sheriff Chris Swanson, who took off his riot gear and marched with the protesters. Any gestures of solidarity, no matter how sincere, must ultimately be followed with action. I could think of no better example than of that in St. Lauderdale, Florida, where a police officer aggressively shoved a kneeling protester and was loudly berated by his black colleague, Krystal Smith. We need more officers like Krystal Smith.

3) The police should be demilitarized.

Our police forces look and act too much like an occupying militia. The ACLU found that the police abused SWAT teams for drug raids, often razing homes, injuring pets, and even needlessly killing innocent people. One study also found that SWAT teams are overwhelmingly used in African-American communities, even after controlling for crime rates. It should be illegal to use to SWAT teams for anything but the most extreme circumstances. Tear gas is banned in war as a chemical weapon, and yet, has been abused by officers against our protesters. Its domestic use should be severely curbed, if not banned outright. The feds also need to stop funneling so much military equipment to police departments. This does not keep us safe. The Washington Post found that a more militarized police force often led to more dead civilians. We also need to fundamentally change the way police are trained. Less like military generals, and more like servants of the public. As Alec Ward wrote in Reason, “Armies of occupation used soldiers to control and pacify populations; police, by contrast, were supposed to serve and protect. American cops seem to have completely forgotten this in favor of military cosplay.”

4) The police should not handle most incidents with the mentally ill.

While I may disagree with the “abolish the police” crowd, I do think that they are right to question the necessity of the police in all areas of disturbance. This is particularly evident in cases involving the mentally ill. One report found that half of the people killed by police had some form of mental illness. This is probably due to the fact that most officers are not trained to handle such matters. Incidents involving the mentally ill should be handled by mental health professionals who are often equipped to deescalate such situations. When you call 911, there should be an option to get a mental health professional to you. When the police interfere in such sensitive situations, they can often end up making matters worse. Consider the case of Charles Kinsey, the black therapist who was shot by the police while trying to retrieve his autistic patient.

5) The powers of police unions should be severely restricted.

Police unions are among the most politically correct institutions in the country. They are the brick and mortar that keeps the blue wall standing. They do not want the police to be public servants, held accountable to their citizens. They want a police state that acts above the law and can use any and all methods to frighten its citizens into submission. Now, the police are workers who, like anyone else, have the right to collective bargaining for fair wages and protections. However, police unions as they currently exist, go far beyond such goals and give direct aid to corruption.

When officer Daniel Pantaleo was fired for strangling Eric Garner to death, Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, accused the commissioner of bowing to anti-police extremists. When Philando Castile was murdered for holding a licensed concealed gun while pulled over, the president of the St. Paul Police Federation lashed out at the city’s mayor for suggesting that the killing was racially biased. After the recent murder of George Floyd, the president of the Minneapolis Police Union, Bob Kroll, referred to the protest movement as terrorism and pointed to Floyd’s criminal record.

A study from the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that collective bargaining agreements pushed by police unions often allow the coverup of misconduct investigations, as well as the purging of disciplinary records. An investigation by Stephen Rushin of the Pennsylvania Law Review found that police contracts have such a generous appeals process for misconduct cases, and that most officers fired for misconduct are usually rehired.

I must reiterate that none of this keeps us safe. Peter Suderman of Reason, citing findings from the economics department of the University of Victoria, wrote that the introduction of police unions does not correlate to a reduction of crime, but to an increase in killings. It should be of no surprise, then, that a study from Bowling Green State University found that police were arrested 6,724 times for criminal activity, 41% of which was done on duty.

When the police know that the unions won’t be there to bail them out of every instance, they’ll consciously conduct themselves with more discipline. If you only feel safe in a nation where the police can do whatever they like, then perhaps you’re more suited for a state like Cuba or Venezeula.

6) Qualified immunity for police should be abolished.

On paper, qualified immunity sounds reasonable. Nathaniel Sobel of Lawfare describes it as, “a judicially created doctrine that shields government officials from being held personally liable for constitutional violations — like the right to be free from excessive police force — for money damages under federal law so long as the officials did not violate ‘clearly established’ law.” Daniel Epps, an associate professor at St. Louis’ Washington University, wrote in the New York Times that this can have an unfortunate effect: “In theory, this requirement protects government defendants from unexpected liability when law changes. In practice, courts apply the doctrine aggressively to shield officers from lawsuits unless plaintiffs can point to other cases declaring essentially identical conduct unconstitutional — a difficult hurdle, even when police conduct appears clearly wrong.”

For instance, in Reason, C.J. Ciaramella wrote about an ACLU petition on behalf of Alexander Baxter, who was bitten by a police dog while his hands were in the air. Baxter sued, but the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the police actions were not clearly unconstitutional. Billy Binion, also from Reason, recalls the difficult story of Trent Taylor, whose prison guards were granted qualified immunity after forcing him to stay naked in two cells with human feces and raw sewage. It should be of little surprise, then, that the constitutionality of this doctrine is questioned by legal authorities. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has expressed skepticism of this rule, writing, “In an appropriate case, we should reconsider our qualified immunity jurisprudence.”

7) To reduce undue police presence, we also need to reduce crime

If we want to reduce violent interactions between the police and civilians, then that means we also need to reduce crime. It is an uncomfortable fact that African-Americans are disproportionately represented as the perpetrators and the victims of crime. As President Barack Obama once said in a town hall on race relations, “The single greatest cause of death for young black men between the ages of 18 and 35 is homicide. And that’s crazy. That is crazy.” Indeed, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that from 1980 to 2008, black people were 6 times more likely to be the victims of homicide than whites, and 8 times more likely than whites to be the perpetrators. With these statistics taken into account, it should of no surprise that 81% of African-Americans want the same, if not more police presence in their communities.

Of course, this hardly excuses brutality and discrimination on behalf of the police, which, as I had earlier demonstrated, does not reduce crime. Nor does it excuse the beliefs that black people are naturally predisposed to violence or that they are instilled with culturally inferior values. I would argue that the primary cause of outsized black crime in this country is America’s legacy of slavery, which deprived generations of black people of heritable wealth, and segregation, which herded them into ghettos of squalor. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about those who use the victims of “black-on-black crime” to deflect from racism:

“Derrion Albert and Hadiya Pendleton are no less victims of racism than Trayvon Martin. The neighborhoods in which these two young people were killed are a model of segregation funded and implemented by private citizens, realtors, business interests, the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois and the federal government. This segregation is not a mistake but the desired outcome of racist social engineering.”

To the end of reducing black poverty in these afflicted areas, I propose two solutions. Just as the great George C. Marshall used economic recovery to rebuild a Europe devastated by World War II, so too should we consider using government funds to rebuild he failing infrastructures of many urban areas. We should also pass a universal basic income, a variant of which was advocated by Martin Luther King, to wean people off of regressive welfare programs and give them the power to start their own businesses and invest in their own communities.

While the police are pivotal in reducing crime, the burden for stopping crime in our society shouldn’t be on them alone. We should also support organizations like Cure Violence, which work in cities all across the country and around the world to reduce violence using public health approaches. We should also support after-school programs, which have a proven effect of diverting young people away from crime.

10) It’s long past time that we ended the War on Drugs.

The “War on Drugs” is one of the most disastrous policy failures in modern American history. It should be ended immediately and its victims should be repatriated. Marijuana should be legalized and all other drugs should be decriminalized. Drug addiction should be treated as a public health issue, not a criminal one. This policy costs more than $51 billion a year and has been a boon to the cartels in the Mexican Drug War. The “War on Drugs” hasn’t stopped American drug use; it’s only made it more violent and lucrative. To quote Stossel again:

“Cigarettes harm people, too, but there are no violent cigarette gangs — no cigarette shootings — even though nicotine is more addictive than heroin, says our government. That’s because tobacco is legal. Likewise, there are no longer violent liquor gangs. They vanished when prohibition ended.”

According to John Ehrlichmann, a former aide of Richard Nixon’s the purpose of the War on Drugs was to use government authority to attack Nixon’s enemies, namely, black people and the anti-war Left. This tracks with revelations from Nixon’s tapes that he believed that there was a relationship between marijuana and anti-war demonstrations. We see this racial disparity in how the drug war is enforced. A study from the Brookings Institution found that between 1980 and 2011, arrests of black men from drug crimes increased while arrests for violent and property crimes did not. To quote Washington Post columnist Radley Balko, this isn’t because black people use more drugs:

“Black people are consistently arrested, charged and convicted of drug crimes including possession, distribution and conspiracy at far higher rates than white people. This, despite research showing that both races use and sell drugs at about the same rate.”

There cannot be true racial justice in America until this terrible war is brought to an end. This truth makes it all the more shameful that the Democratic Party, which champions itself as the bulwark of racial justice, cannot commit to a policy as simple and as obvious as legalizing weed.

11) We need to celebrate black lives, not flagellate white guilt.

It is most appreciated that everyone wants to help out in the fight against racism, but some cures are bad medicines poorly administered: Face-saving television producers hastily removing their blackface episodes from digital circulation. A statue-toppling craze that was once squarely aimed at Confederates, but has now extended to abolitionists. Grotesque displays of whites kneeling to blacks and begging for forgiveness. Videos of protesters (most of whom are white) harassing random diners or flashing lights into people’s homes while they sleep.

This is a movement for the humanity of black lives, and also by extension, the humanity of us all. An obsessive focus on “white privilege” or “white fragility” will bear us no good fruit. While it is important to acknowledge inequality in our society, these phrases do more to divide the races and instill guilt. The black experience in America should be at the center of our discussions. We need to tell their stories. To quote Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Consider the example of Daryl Davis, a black blues musician who de-radicalized 200 members of the Ku Klux Klan. The lesson of Davis is not that we need to start befriending white supremacists. It’s that we need to tell our stories, with all of the passion, suffering, and complexity they entail. It’s harder for someone to hate you once they know you.

We should be reading the works of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. We should be listening to the music of Marvin Gaye, Lauryn Hill, and Tupac Shakur. We should be watching the films of Sidney Poitier, Spike Lee, and Ava DuVernay. We should be studying the art of Henry Ossawa Tanner, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jacob Lawrence. We should be emulating the noble lives of Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr.

These protests ultimately reveal what makes America great: a never-ending struggle to fulfill the promise of its founding letters and to build a more perfect union. The founding was far from perfect, no nation’s founding is, but the principles that guided the American Revolution have guided the battle for justice to this very day. 1619 may have laid down the sordid foundations of American slavery, but it was 1776 that gave us the the first tools with which to dismantle it.