Chuck Canterbury, President of the Fraternal Order of Police, on NPR yesterday:
I think the tensions are there in a lot of areas, and I think there's one common denominator. In any place that there's tension with police officers, there's abject poverty. And politicians tend to use their law enforcement as the only form of government that those neighborhoods ever see. They're normally high-crime areas, and the police department cannot [be] alone in trying to fix the problems of those neighborhoods. There's over 60,000 police officers assaulted every year. The vast majority of those occur in the same areas that these tensions are felt in.
Here's a quick look at a few of our priorities.
1. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
2. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
Source: Judgmental Map of Baltimore
3. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
4. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
Source: Map of Baltimore Life Expectancies
5. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
6. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
7. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
8. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
9. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
10. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
11. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
12. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
13. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
14. Creating walls between the poor and the rich
Seems to me we're at a crossroads as a country
We can continue to think that market forces are going to make things better. We can continue to invest in security and police and the military and media propaganda and walls. This is going to get uglier and uglier and will require ever more walls as ever more people fall into poverty.
Or we can acknowledge why things like this happen: we live in a country where our economic system creates poverty. It doesn't have to be this way. We just need to start with the premise that our economy should benefit everyone, not just a few.
Here, I'm with Mr. Canterbury. This shouldn't be a "police problem".
I don't think the investment is much different. The outcomes, however, are radically different.
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David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.