Joe Biden’s decision to increase police funding betrays a breathtaking dissonance with the reality of racist policing.. There are two approaches to law enforcement encounters in the United States, one Black, one white – separate and inherently unequal. There is the all-too-frequent deadly overreach of police with Black men and women, like in Akron, Ohio, in June – when a group of cops shot at the back of Jayland Walker, drilling him with 46 bullets. All for a minor traffic violation in which Walker ran away from the police.
Even as many in the US and across the globe continue to reel from the revelations of the cowardly inaction of police in Uvalde, Texas. Even with police frequently getting it so wrong, as they did in Albuquerque, New Mexico in July when 15-year-old Brett Rosenau was killed during a raid at his home. Even as the US Department of Justice recently charged four current and former Louisville, Kentucky, police officers for their role in killing Breonna Taylor in 2020.
The simple truth is law enforcement as a US institution does not treat Black Americans as people worthy of humane treatment. They reserve their “to serve and protect” mottos for white people committing the most inhumane of crimes. It is ingrained, it is institutional, it is personal, and it may be universal. All of this is key to why law enforcement in the US must be defunded and needs to be abolished. A system designed to allow cowardly actions and near sociopathic behaviour in the name of “law and order” is too deadly to remain intact. Unless that is the point – to cower Black Americans into accepting oppression – which it may be for people like Biden.
A ist grade teacher Ms Griffin dedicated a show-and-tell day to careers, with pictures of doctors, lawyers, firefighters, nurses, postmen, shopkeepers, ambulance drivers and policemen on display. When she asked how many of us wanted to be police officers, nearly every boy and girl raised their hands. I yelled “No! No! No!” while shaking my head, hurt and angry. Ms Griffin asked if I was all right.
