Sidetracked

The Black Lives Matter movement is one I generally (note the qualifier generally) support, but some of its followers have gotten lost.  I have known about unfair policing for decades.  I’ve had students pulled over for DWB’s, and I worked part-time in a West Oakland warehouse for well over a decade, so I knew about racist cops.  It is important to give Americans a seminar on these matters, and it is vitally important that reforms are made. 

If you’re waiting for a “but,” here it is.

First of all the slogan “defund the police” is an absolutely terrible slogan.  I know that most of the people who use it explain that they don’t really mean to defund police departments, but they want better training, personal liability, public records of bad cops, more community policing, more emphasis on violence prevention, and other reforms.  Note what I just had to do.  I had to explain “defund the police.”  Any slogan that takes a long explanation is not a good slogan.

It is also important to build coalitions.  Sometimes to build coalitions you need to compromise or pull back from the ideal.  Pulling down statues of Christopher Columbus might make some people feel like they are doing something important, but alienating Italian-Americans, many of whom revere Columbus, is not a good idea.

It is also obvious that some of the activists themselves need to learn more history.  No statues of the Confederate general Longstreet have been pulled down, and none will be.  Longstreet, who was one of the most able of the Confederate generals, supported Reconstruction, endorsed Presidential candidate U. S. Grant, and opposed the Ku Klux Klan.  There are no statues to General Longstreet anywhere in the South.  I’m afraid if there were, some millennials who don’t know their history would say, “Yes, but he was a Confederate, so let’s pull down his statue.”

The issue of policing in America is too important to get sidetracked.