CommentsMY WAY--Every problem we presently face as a society has an historic context during which it was mistakenly allowed to start and continue to grow unchallenged.
This historic context needs to be considered and understood if we ever hope to effectively redress many of the avoidable and yet costly problems we are presently facing in our society.
Case in point here is the present and longstanding practice of overfunding the police to deal with predictable criminal behavior that could easily have been avoided in a racist free society. Regrettably, Black and Latino minorities have been disproportionately, purposefully, and systematically marginalized over the last 400 years by a racist socialization system specifically designed to deprive them of things like a rigorous education and other nurturing factors that are crucial to normal human development. What should have been rights taken for granted, like strong nuclear families or basic adequate nutrition- which are essential to reaching normal human potential- when purposeful omitted, are clear and longstanding contributors to unnecessarily burdening of our society with the necessity of overfunding the police.
Up until now we have made no provision for improving the longstanding and chronically racist system that has made necessary this overfunding of police with money that would have been better spent elsewhere. Dealing with this logically predictable, yet easily avoidable, disproportionate criminal behavior of purposefully marginalized and impoverished minority populations, which have for centuries been deprived of the basic education and other nurturing factors necessary for them to have reached their superior human potential is what has made the present overfunding of police an illogical unnecessary necessity.
In this country, this four-hundred-year-old primitive yet still extant racist system could not survive without use of the equally primitive human tribal propensity that still defines one's own wellbeing in terms of being superior, and therefore better, than another tribe of equally self-deluded "superior" human beings.
It is my belief that exclusively defunding of the police would not address the underlying intolerable present situation we have up until now only dealt with through over policing minority communities. Better would be to take periodic ever increasing parts of the money that presently goes to policing and slowly start spending it on improving and integrating inner city schools, which would finally create the universal human superiority of skill and knowledge in the inner city and elsewhere, which would obviate the necessity for breaking the law and the present need for spending more and more money every year on the police, while continuing to not address the real underlying racism cause of crime.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles, observer, and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second- generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected].)
-cw
