Diamonds and Cops
The Bread: When cops get famous on YouTube
The Roses: Let your diamond shine!
So Did Somebody call 911?
Last year a man who owned a store in Alabama was being burgled. He called the police and they beat him — broke his jaw — and let the burglar go. It will sadly not surprise you that the store owner was black and the burglar was white.
A white woman asked in a press conference recently “if we disband the police who will we call when someone is breaking into our house?”
That is a very, very good question. Who do you call when you can’t call the police?
What’s wrong with the police?
Racism is fascism and fascism is never satisfied. It has no end. Blacks yesterday, Mexicans today, Chinese tomorrow.
Jim Crow, Build that Wall, a new Asian Exclusion Act? Fascism doesn’t need swastikas or Confederate flags. Hate is hate. It feeds on a sick brew of fear, resentment, victimhood, and shame.
Fascists and sadists flock to the police like pedophiles to churches and for exactly the same reason: A steady supply of victims.
I’m not saying that police departments and churches are rife with malefactors.
I’m saying the malefactors are attracted to the open fields of possible victims. They infiltrate. They smile and lie and hide their agenda.
Churches these days are quietly vigilant for predators to keep their children safe.
Remember the Catholic Church pedophile scandal of, well, pick a year? For decades they dealt with their kid fiddler problem by using the Catholic Method — they shielded them, hid them, lied about them, and protected them.
The Catholic Method
Many modern police departments — in fact, I think all of them to a greater or lesser extent — use the Catholic Method for dealing with the predators in their midst. They carefully protect the predator and ignore or silence the victims.
Nearly all denominations of nearly all churches have figured out that the Catholic Method always fails. Always.
If you want any kind of long-term success you must expose predators and turn them over to the proper authorities. Predators don’t want anything but open access to victims. Everything else is secondary to them. If that is also secondary to your embarrassment or sense of fellow feeling, then you have violated your oath.
Police departments need to learn from the failure of the Catholic Method. I know a lot of churches and police departments have learned from that failure and fire anyone who betrays their trust.
Who’s the traitor?
Derek Chauvin betrayed the trust of his fellow officers. He and his three enablers betrayed the police.
A moment before the incident, the crime, these four men were the police. The moment they killed George Floyd they became criminals. They were murderers so depraved they did it knowing they were being recorded. Murderers, so smug they thought they were going to skate away with no consequences.
If a police officer observes an act of attempted murder and doesn’t intervene or arrest the perpetrator, then that officer is not fit to be an officer of the law. The police are law enforcement. If they can’t or won’t enforce the law then they need to go be Pilates instructors. Because a civil society needs law enforcement. We all need to be able to call 911 and actually get help. Every single one of us.
It’s all about access to victims
My medium-ish town has about 200 officers give or take. If 10% are only interested in opportunities to hurt people with impunity that’s 20 officers. This town isn’t that big. Twenty would be catastrophic — we aren’t Chicago, for crying out loud.
But let’s say it’s 1%. That’s two. Quite a few of the other 198 officers have met these two guys. They know who those guys are. They’ve seen the bigoted bumper stickers on their trucks and have laughed along with their violent and concerning stories and jokes. Supervisors know how many civil rights complaints are normal and which officers get excessive complaints. Supervisors are also generally aware of who has ties to white supremacist organizations.
The police aren’t children. They know racists, sadists, and thugs when they see them.
They must be scrubbed from police departments everywhere in the nation.
Don’t use the Catholic Method
Advice to police departments: Before those two hypothetical sadists murder someone in plain view of 7 billion people perhaps you should shy away from the Catholic Method. Have a blue wall, but make sure it excludes people who are going to make your department famous on YouTube.
AND ROSES
Let your diamond shine!
It’s wonderful to be affirmed by others. We want people to say and think that we are valuable and worthy of love and respect. When we treat others with kindness and respect they enjoy it. You know they do.
There is an idea that is subversive and radical (and pretty old, not new at all). The idea is this:
Each person, no matter who they are, where or how they were born, what they look like, or what they have done is inherently valuable and worthy of kindness and respect.
Each person is inherently valuable. Not just the elect, the deserving, but everyone. The snitch, the sneak, the pickpocket, the liar, the manipulator, the drug addict.
Imagine a diamond that is worth a million dollars. Diamond is the hardest substance on earth. Almost nothing can destroy it or make it lose value. You could throw it away in a sewer and even down there it is still worth a million dollars. Its value hasn’t changed in the slightest. If you lift it out of the sewer and clean it up you haven’t added one penny to its value.
So what’s up with that? And why do you not treat yourself like that? If you are a million-dollar diamond, why does (almost) nobody act toward you like that, talk to you like that?
The first question is answered by the second one. We treat ourselves badly because people around us tell us we are bad.
It’s an easy mistake. All around us, all our lives, we are told stories about an evil-doer who does evil things and then the hero fights them and either gets vengeance or justice. The evil-doer deserves nothing but death or punishment for their crimes. One way or another they are removed from the human race.
This is a children’s story. It doesn’t matter that a lot of grown-ups believe it. It gets enacted every day, over and over in our society but it is always fiction. Any of the actors could play any of the parts because each of them is a million-dollar diamond.
Any of the actors in this movie could have been born rich, healthy people. And any one of them could have been born to mentally ill, addicted parents. Anyone could have played any part.
The story of good and evil is strong in us as a human race. But that story is just for a fun evening’s entertainment. (Spoilers: Wonder Woman wasn’t a real person.)
The real story is that a million-dollar diamond can wind up in a deep hole of its own making. It can be at the bottom of a pit filled with bad luck, bad ideas, and bad choices.
To dig that diamond out and clean it off is worth the work. Each person is inherently valuable and worthy of kindness and respect. Kindness and respect to yourself (yes, you) and others, (yes even those) will bring those diamonds into the light where they can shine.
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