It probably comes as no surprise that I spend a lot of time thinking about the Civil War, and I have watched the Ken Burns’ documentary so many times I have lost count. It really makes me upset every time it comes off Netflix (as it is right now). I truly believe that slavery is this nation’s original sin, and our history can very easily be traced through our race relations. This friction between North and South originated over slavery, blew up into open war over slavery, and has simmered ever since about how to we integrate slaves and their descendants since finally abolishing slavery. You might remember a while back now when Fox News sent Jesse Watters to ask people who won the Civil War, and he of course found all the usual idiots that show up anybody comes to ask obvious questions on the street for TV. I would argue, though, that the Civil War never really ended. Sure, we stopped the organized warfare, but look at the sort of culture wars we fight and how we vote. The ideals never went away, even if slavery technically ended. And when it comes to culture wars, I definitely think there is a case to be made that the South has done quite well for themselves in the intervening years. To that end, I have thought a lot about John Brown. He was born into comfortable enough circumstances. His father had large roles in the early histories of both Case Western Reserve University and Oberlin College as well as offering safe houses in the Underground Railroad. John took up the family trade of tanning as well as the family ideas about God and slavery. He was quite a fan of the former and quite against the latter. He managed to start his own successful tannery, and he very well could have rested on this success, spoken out against the evils of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, and he would have had a comfortable life. If you know anything about history, though, you know that living a comfortable life is no way to enter the historical record. Instead, two things happened that seem to have lit a fire under John Brown. First, he tried to open a new tannery in Ohio, which failed in an economic panic. Second, Elijah Lovejoy (a prominent abolitionist preacher) was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. He declared from that point on, he would dedicate his life to the abolition of slavery. And he meant it. He probably could have done well enough giving speeches and writing in abolitionist newsletters, but he quite famously said “These men are all talk. What we need is action!” So he took action. First in Kansas, where he made a bit of a national mark leading raids and specifically hunting down slave hunters. It was violent and ruthless, to be sure, but it was most certainly action. From his time in Kansas, and the success of violence in creating Kansas as a free state, John Brown decided he could replicate this success on a national scale. To that end, he was going to take a militia mostly made up of former slaves and raid the Army arsenal in Harpers Ferry. Whether he actually succeeded in capturing or destroying the arsenal seems irrelevant. The affects were more important. John Brown envisioned mass slave uprisings after his raid, where the South would have no choice but to be rid of slavery, either by choice or by force. The militia did not exactly materialize. Brown took 21 (mostly white) men instead of the 4500 he envisioned. Somewhat surprisingly, given the lack of manpower, the raid initially went quite well. Brown and his men took the arsenal with minimal resistance and minimal bloodshed. But word quickly reached the White House, at which point the Army showed up in force. Brown was offered surrender, but he refused. He wished to die there, but he ended up captured and quickly hanged afterwards. The Civil War may have been inevitable anyway, but this raid and its aftermath ensured it would happen during this time. It was the spark that finally lit the fuse on the powder keg of slavery in this nation. To that end, John Brown might be the most important figure to ever live in the United States of America. Unfortunately, we are still fighting his fight. We have seen racial tensions flare up again in this country. We have had a week of protest. Most of it peaceful, but yes, some of it violent and destructive. I don’t want to necessarily condone the vandalism and destruction and looting, but God damn. How many perfectly peaceful and clever demonstrations can we ignore and many times outright condemn as a people before this is the only avenue left? Frankly, we have only gotten what we deserve. And even at that, we have probably gotten off lightly. I would list all the senseless incidents of police violence on black individuals (to say nothing of the community as a whole), but even a list of major incidents in the last five or ten years would be literal pages long. Given the responses we have seen to these incidents and to the aftermath of these incidents makes it very clear that the spirit of the Confederacy lives on within both our citizenry and our law enforcement. I do not know if this is a culture issue with our police or a personnel issue, but I would reckon it is some combination of both. We have seen it even here in my town, in Lafayette. The police deployed tear gas on two consecutive nights here, and on both occasions, the reporter on the ground Tweeted in real time that there was no clear provocation for it. We have seen it across the nation during this week and throughout the course of the fight for civil rights that not only does force seem to be the first tool police reach for when dealing with a crowd, but the only tool they seem to have at their disposal. It also seems that in almost every instance of senseless police violence we have captured on camera since the advent of smart phones has also shown police to reach for force first. We have a very noteworthy story of a police officer being fired and blackballed for refusing to use force and instead de-escalating a situation with a black man using diplomacy instead. If we are ever to have true racial equality in this nation, we must change the culture of policing here. It seems a huge first step in making this change is changing the tools we use for policing. We have seen the rapid militarization of the police, and that has led to disaster. I think we need to follow the examples I have personally witnessed in Ireland and the UK instead. Let’s go the complete other direction. We should disarm the police. This is not to say that police should not use force in all situations, but it should be rare and it should be done by officers who have specifically been trained to use it in extreme situations. In the UK example, there are specialists who carry firearms and are called in when the situation calls for it. But it is very rare, and police offers in the British Isles just do not see a need to carry a firearm during their normal course of duty. Additionally, I don’t think any of us really see the UK or Ireland as particularly lawless or violent places, especially since the end of The Troubles. During my time in Ireland, I certainly never felt unsafe or even remotely uncomfortable anywhere. I saw the Guarda around plenty, but they were unobtrusive and faded into the background easily. The complete opposite of police officers here, and I say that as a white man who has had nothing more serious than a speeding ticket. Even if we take the firepower away from the police, that will not solve everything, clearly. George Floyd was not shot by police. He was suffocated by a knee to the neck. Obviously, nobody is going to take knees away from police officers, so we need different training for police. I was quite shocked to learn that police academies are almost like a summer camp. Indiana’s police training lasts for 600 hours, or 25 days. And that only became mandatory in 1972. A month is not nearly enough time to become fully trained in anything but solving Rubik’s Cubes. In that amount of time, it is no wonder we have the police force that we have. That is not enough time to learn all the different facets and conflict resolution strategies our police should have, and it is certainly not enough time to weed out the sort of people who have no business being a police officer. Police academies should be running at least on the order of a junior college. Wearing that badge gives police the ability to take away our most fundamental of rights as human beings, let alone as American citizens: our rights to liberty and the right to live. It seems you should at least have to spend the equivalent time to earn an associate’s degree to earn the privilege of doling out that sort of justice. I would still feel better if police didn’t carry firearms as a matter of course, but maybe it wouldn’t be such a problem if academies were doing more complete, more well-rounded training of officers that also doubled as a way to weed out people who could fake it for a month because they have a power fantasy. If we can start to change those sorts of culture and perception problems around the police, maybe we would also see more diversity on police forces, which was just discussed on the FiveThirtyEight podcast to be one of the most effective ways to cut down on incidents of police violence. It took a high threshold to take effect, but maybe if we saw more diverse police forces more routinely, the threshold would not be so high. I would think being constantly recorded would have that effect, but it seems pretty clear by now we need a change of who is a police officer. Monitoring is clearly not enough. So let’s get some people on the police force who might know a thing or two about what it is like to be unfairly targeted by the law. This is all a pipe dream, I am sure. We might see some incremental change in policing from these protests, but as noted, there have been plenty incidents and reactions to bad policing in my socially conscious life, starting with some vague memories of Rodney King in LA. If anything has changed, it has been police becoming more heavily armed and more heavily armored. Let’s stop depersonalizing the police so they can stop depersonalizing their communities. It is just one step in scrubbing away our original sin, but if we can at least let these black men live out their natural days, that seems like a bar worth clearing. Comments are closed.
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