I Can't Breathe

This post isn't very funny, I'm afraid.  

Ferguson, MO, New York City, and many other cities in America are seeing lots of protests lately, and if you listen to the news reports on television and the radio, it's all about racism.  Except it isn't, not really.  I'm not about to attempt to defend the actions of the police officers in these particular cases.  I am not informed enough to do that, and what's more, it doesn't even matter, not really.  The question isn't what happened in a few particular cases, it's what has happened over a period of time to the social contract between our society as a whole and the police forces of this entire country.

Many people are making accusations that the police in much of America have a bias against black Americans.  I can't deny it.  I not only don't deny it, I actually believe that it exists, though there is no real way to prove it or demonstrate it in a definitive way.  Just to be clear, I am a white man, and I was raised in the Deep South.  I would have to be either a liar or incredibly naive to think that racism isn't a real thing.  I have heard examples of racism from people at all levels of society, both white and black, for my entire life.  I have no "post-racial America" delusions.  Lots of white people think that most criminals are young angry black men and that young blacks celebrate being gangsters and thugs.  Some young black people ARE that way; but certainly not all of them, or even most.   Lots of black people mistrust white people and believe that white people unfairly judge them based solely on the color of their skin.  Again, plenty of white people DO think that way, but not all, or even most.  

Racism exists in our society, and we should continue to try to educate people to break down the barriers of fear between us.  No doubt about it.  

Probably better get your taser ready, officer.

Here's the thing, though...  It's not illegal to be a racist.  Racism is the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races, according to Google.  I accept this definition, as Google has never lied to me before.  But the important portion of this definition for the purposes of this discussion is "the belief."  A belief is what someone thinks inside their own mind, and it’s not necessarily dependent upon facts.  You can't make people's private thoughts illegal (even really unpleasant ideas), and you can't really police them, either—at least not in anything that resembles a free society.  Even if we come up with a mechanism to detect the inner thoughts of our citizens, I don’t think we’d want to use it.  Not really. 

The Thought Police warned about in George Orwell's 1984 are not here just yet.  Until they do come up with a way to read people's minds,  then you aren't going to get rid of racism.  I know that I’m a nutball libertarian.  Hell, I’ve read 1984, and now I’m referencing it on a blog.  That’s right up there with quoting Atlas Shrugged like it’s the Book of Revelations, isn't it?  But that doesn't mean I’m wrong. 

Hmm… the Thought Police are policing the thoughts of the police.  Badum tish. Thank you very much, remember to tip your waitress.  

Here’s another thing--everyone has prejudices.  Everyone uses stereotypes.  It’s human nature, and not only that, it’s very useful for navigating through the world safely.  Observing the world around us and grouping things that are similar together is just the way we are wired.  There’s no changing it.

Sometimes you should go ahead and judge that book by its creepy-ass cover.

So, for all the speeches and all the self-righteous rants on NPR about how being a black male in America isn’t fair, it won’t be able to solve the problem.  Because the police are human beings, and as such are going to have prejudices, biases, and all sorts of other human faults.  You can’t force people to believe things, not without getting REALLY Orwellian.  The best you can hope for is to drive it underground.  Which will do precisely zero to change the way the police and black people view each other. 

More likely, mobs of black protesters rioting and throwing flaming bags of shit at policemen on television will cause even more of a divide.  Add in the images of those policemen arresting black people in droves, hitting them with tasers, tear gas, pepper spray, and good old-fashioned billy clubs, and it gets even worse. 

There's another thing that's been going on with police forces over the last 20 years or so.  It's been called “militarization," and usually people are referring to the acquisition of military equipment, but it might also be called “aggressive policing,” meaning that the focus is on an in-your-face, intrusive, confrontational style.  

Here's a good book about it...
Seriously, read this book.  It's a bit politically partisan, but he tells the story well.

Militarization is more than just tanks and guns and ninja outfits.  It's a mindset.  It's the idea of incremental escalation of force, until compliance is obtained.  It was this mindset that was applied by the Police in Ferguson, Missouri during the initial protests over the shooting of Michael Brown.  

Interestingly, I think some of this tendency by some policemen to resort to violence more quickly is actually enabled by the new "non-lethal" tools most cops carry these days.  Things like tasers, pepper spray, and stun guns are supposed to be making us all safer by giving the officer a choice less severe than a firearm, but I think that they actually serve as a sort of "gateway drug" for using violence, with less consequence.  The cop has a few tools in his tool chest to use to incrementally escalate the violence in the situation, and so that's the way he views his options.  This is a very different paradigm than one of de-escalation, where the idea is to calm everyone down.  

 

He's just trying to get the protesters to calm down.

Radley Balko, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, talks about police militarization in the video below.  Notice that this discussion took place in 2013, a year before the current situation.  He's talking about SWAT teams doing "no-knock" raids on people who are sleeping in their homes to serve warrants, which I find much more alarming.  He points out that even in examples where completely innocent people are hurt and killed in their own homes, seldom is a policeman charged with any wrongdoing. 

Click to view Radley Balko video

This is where I think the real problem is.  I think the cops in America have, in general, for a variety of reasons, gotten more aggressive towards EVERYONE, and they don't seem to be being held accountable for it.  The police themselves, or perhaps the district attorney, get to decide if an officer's actions were appropriate or not.  And they often aren't all that public about the process.  THIS is the real problem--innocent citizens by the hundreds of all races and creeds are being attacked, humiliated, wounded, and even killed by the police--and then the police themselves seem to get to arbitrate any complaints.  If any complaints ARE entertained, it's only later, after the damage is done.

It's this lack of accountability and transparency that is really at the heart of people's anger these days.  If people feel oppressed and mistreated, with no way to find justice, then they will become angry, no matter what race they happen to be.  So let's stop clouding the water.  The underlying issue is one of the accountability of police departments to the communities they serve, and the respect the citizens and policemen show for each other.  If an injustice like this exists, then it will manifest itself most vividly in minority communities, but don't let that distract you from the fact that this kind of treatment shouldn't even be allowed at ALL.

We have given up too much liberty for the sake of safety.  Politicians play on our fear, fear of non-tangible ideas like "crime" or "terrorism," in order to win elections and gain power.  They've done this for many thousands of years.   It's exactly what the framers of our constitution were trying to protect us from.

Ignorance

"It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room," warns an old proverb.  "Especially when there is no cat."

I was passed a book containing that quotation by a colleague recently.  The title of the book is Ignorance, by Stuart Firestein.  I'm not sure what made my friend think of me, but I tried not to be too offended. 

Maybe he thought of me because of the science.

Anyway, remember that when I say "colleague," I mean another Marine Corps officer who, like me, is now suddenly thrust into a position that is essentially identical to being a college professor.  Except we run through the woods sometimes and do pull-ups.  And shoot pistols.  And all our students do too.  So, other than that, pretty much just like any college campus.

Maybe there are some subtle differences.

For the most part, it's not that different.

This place is just like any graduate-level school.

Okay, sometimes we make bombs.  But only once or twice a year.

It usually looks more like this.

Or this.

This is more difficult to explain.

See?  Just like a regular school.

Getting back to my point.  So this book, Ignorance, How It Drives Science, is pretty intriguing.  The underlying thesis is that it is the things we DON'T know that drive science, rather than the things we already know.  And furthermore, we don't know a lot more than we DO know.  Facts, data, and accumulated knowledge serve mainly to show us where the dark rooms are, where those black cats may be hiding.  The book takes it a bit deeper, talking about uncertainties and the "unknowables" in life.  Heady stuff.

Donald Rumsfeld makes a clumsy attempt to explain it:

My job, at the moment, is to teach Marine officers to plan operations.  We try to teach them to think, essentially.  Again, I'm not exactly a professional educator.  But I've been pretending to be one for three years now, and I'm thinking that the way we approach our military education programs could benefit quite a bit from this line of thinking.  

Many of my superiors and even my peers might view it differently.  They might think we are showing them HOW to do something.  That we have this amphibious warfare and military planning thing pretty much figured out.  Just follow the recipe, and--Voilà!  One perfect military operational plan.  The truth of the matter is that this isn't even remotely the way planning works.

I'm certainly not against studying history.  There's nothing new under the sun, as they say.  It's cool in the military these days to brag about how much military history you read.  General Mattis said he was trying to build a 5,000-year-old mind, so that way you aren't surprised.  There's some value to that, I admit.

But this idea that the important thing is finding and embracing ignorance is so much more exciting!  And so applicable to today's Marine Corps.  We have new equipment, newly developed tactics and procedures, and lots of new challenges.  I think many of our problems stem from the fact that we want to behave as if we know exactly how these things can and should be used.  As though we have it all worked out, and the young captain needs merely to read and follow along in the manual.

The problem is, this is not in the manual.

If combat taught me nothing else, it definitely showed me that most people are completely full of shit.  There are plenty of things we don't know, plenty of problems that need solving.  And the best Marines are the ones who can come up with a way around the unexpected, rather than the Marines who can recite the manual or who know the names of the most Civil War generals. Let's empower those young minds and see what they can come up with.

As Yogi Berra, the famous philosopher and baseball player said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."  The good news is, we don't need to.