IT'S NOT INSTITUTIONAL RACISM

Time after time we are confronted with heart-wrenching accounts of people of color killed by police. It has become a shallow media exercise to gain clicks. Behind the heart-wrenching superficial details, the inevitable story of a violent or mentally disturbed or criminal past emerges. The rare collateral damage stories about innocents are even more disturbing. 

My father was a career police officer in a poor city who never used his firearm in nearly 40 years of policing. He was a WWII veteran and hated firearms. When asked why, he would gladly recount his experiences of walking through European battlefields covered in dead bodies. 

My own experience as a registered nurse in state psychiatric hospitals gave me deeper insight into dealing with the constant threat of potentially deadly violence from those I was hired to protect. Walking through the locked doors of those units every day without a weapon widened my understanding of being a keeper of law and order for a community's safety and healing. 

I confiscated one gun and many knives in my career as a psychiatric nurse. I was routinely attacked by criminal or psychotic or drug-addled or drunk patients. Sometimes by their visitors. Fists, knives, chairs, steel-tipped boots were all used to assault me at various times. I assure you the race of the person attacking me had absolutely nothing to do with my response to protect my own life. My pure and simple goal was to survive and subdue the threat to protect my other patients. 

Always making police error about institutional racism is simplistic and childish. Urban police forces across America are diverse racially. Non-White police chiefs and police commissioners are more numerous than ever. Non-White mayors administer major US cities from coast to coast. Police officers walk out into an uncertain world for every shift on the job. Enforcing the laws in the US is no longer a respected role, thanks to those who would undermine our nation's better values of hard work and honorable living. 

Police officers who are in a position to defend their own lives from a potentially lethal attack are doing what they are supposed to do. They are not mind-readers. Most are not clothed in body armor. They must respond to the behaviors with which they are confronted in a particular situation. And, with the proliferation of illegally held handguns all over the US, the possibility of being fatally shot by a suspect is greater than ever.

The "driving while Black" excuse has been overplayed by activists with any number of ulterior motives. Actually looking at the evidence behind most police shootings of suspects, fatal or otherwise, reveals a plausible motive for the officer's suspicion and defensive action. Stolen vehicles, vehicles with expired registrations, erratic driving, ignoring traffic signals, speeding near a crime scene, speeding near an accident scene, etc.. Today's media relentlessly ignore or minimize these elements when reporting on shootings. 

The exploitation of George Floyd's apparent homicide at the hands of a police officer whom he knew is a recent example of something we have seen before. The dredging up of racial discord is a tool used by those who have political motives. The exaggeration of personal race-hate encounters in the US is used to promote all kinds of economic, social and political manipulation. It inevitably recedes when enough Americans who are generally not racist stand up and say, "Enough is enough." 

Badly trained police officers, or police officers who are ill-suited to the job, are not part of a vast institutional racist conspiracy of White supremacists. That is simply a paranoid delusion, exploited by some very evil and exploitative people. Institutional systems are in place to deal with bad behavior by police officers. And we see evidence of those systems working when a police officer screws up. That evidence is less widely reported, in part due to pressure from police unions. 

Defunding police departments will not improve the lot of urban citizens in gang-infested neighborhoods where illegal handguns are sold to children from the trunks of cars by criminal residents of those neighborhoods. Funding police outreach programs for those neighborhoods or actually placing beat cops on the streets of those neighborhoods might do more to help the decent citizens who are the real victims of crime there. Abandoning those neighborhoods to fend for themselves is actually a return to an earlier era of segregation.

Institutional racism is a patently absurd concept. It implies that every institution in our country has a board room where White supremacists plot against non-White people as their mission. It implies that all of us who cannot claim non-White status have been brainwashed into being unconscious racists. Quite the opposite is true. 

The push to enhance affirmative action systems and to teach anti-racist philosophies in all levels of education, public and private, has been in place for decades in America. Corporate America is rife with sensitivity training programs. In fact, I would argue it has paradoxically created a hyper-sensitivity to racial differences in America. Solutions that are overapplied run the risk of reversing their own gains. 

Compassion is compassion. Yes, it is honorable to have compassion for the misguided who fall to a police bullet after a life of crime or an incident of insane violence, no matter what their race, gender or ethnicity. It is no less honorable to be compassionate toward the police officers who go out into our communities every day to protect those of us who are lawful and non-violent. 

Reaching for "institutional racism" as a reflexive excuse for all police shootings is neither compassionate nor intelligent. It is manipulative propaganda. Rioting and looting are also not rational or justifiable 21st century protests in America. The reality of conscientious progress over decades in America away from racialism should be seen as a great and real achievement. Those who wish to deny that progress for whatever motives they may have are the problem, not the solution, to helping some struggling individuals in America.