We Don’t Need a Police Force Out of Control

Many people treat commentary about the behavior of police officers as part of a for-them-or-against them conversation. That’s nonsense and naïve. Police are like the rest of us. Whether folk are in blue jackets, white coats, overalls or suits, some are great and some are terrible. If we protect the group willy-nilly despite misbehavior, we are authorizing armed men to become tyrants. Police need to be scrutinized, held in check and prevented from misbehavior, particularly because we let them carry guns. Treating them as beyond control is a large part of the problem.

We don’t need a police force that kills a man on his wedding day.

We don’t need a police force that bursts into the wrong apartment, of the wrong woman, a Black medical worker, in a wee hours no-knock raid based on a fraudulently acquired warrant and kills her in a flurry of gunshots.

We don’t need a police force that presses a knee on a man’s neck until he dies.

We don’t need a police force that escalates a mere traffic stop and beats a man to death after he is already in restraints.

We don’t need a police force that people are afraid to call because it will make things worse, and do more harm than good.

We don’t need a police force that believes and tells kids that getting “cocky” justifies throwing the book  at them, as I witnessed here in Albany, although my advice to them, for that very reason, was not to do or say anything the police would regard as “cocky.”

We don’t need a police force out of control.

People are afraid of the language that says defund the police, but we do need to replace the police with people who are trying to protect citizens, visitors and other inhabitants, and not use people for martial arts or target practice.

We don’t need police who see their job as a continuation of what some call “The Lost Cause,” the Confederate rebellion, or an opportunity to prove how manly they are by extinguishing other people’s lives.

We don’t need police who see the job as an opportunity to extinguish people they don’t like, to extinguish people of races, religions or origins that they despise – the police, if they are to keep the peace and protect us, have to protect all of us.

We don’t need police who see their jobs as displacing the constitutionally mandated jobs of prosecutors, defense counsel, judges and juries – that’s what lynch mobs were about and we don’t need members of lynch mobs or rebel organizations on the force.

The color blue and a silver badge do not make people good. They have to earn that power not by murder but by taking care of the rest of us.

We don’t need a police force that think it doesn’t matter when people attack women or schoolchildren and they can just stand by and ignore violence against them.

We don’t need to just keep hiring more people, and making it worse by lowering standards to do it. We can do better by hiring people who can cool things down without carrying weapons. A democratic police force is a force under control, a force that follows and respects the law.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on February 21, 2023.

The Court has Done Enough Damage

The Court has done enough damage. Its outrageous misreading of the Second Amendment helped unleash a flood of murders at New Year parties, schools, churches, temples, grocery stores and the US Capital, and unleashed the traitors who want to tear this country apart and overturn our democratic institutions. It embittered the lives of women, took away their ability to control their own bodies, and turned them over to the extremists who are ready to hunt them down around the country. It overturned democracy by blessing gerrymandering and other ways of controlling elections so people can’t choose their representatives and, instead, officials choose which voters they  prefer. Its lids on the EPA and other environmental agencies  contributed to fouling the air and the climate. And it protected corporate officials and businesses that have wreaked economic havoc[1] and protected public officials who use their offices to keep innocent people in prison.[2]

It’s time to pack, rebalance or dump this Court. It’s done and is doing much more harm than good. We don’t need it without major change.

Before the election there was talk of appointing new members of the Supreme Court to nullify the Republican takeover of the Court. It’s time now. Let’s do it.

This Court under Chief Justice Roberts is an abomination. It does almost everything wrong – blocking every attempt to protect the people and protecting every villain trying to strip the people of their rights.

Some have worried about the “legitimacy” of the Court. Why? The abuses of the Roberts Court have been typical of the Court’s destructive behavior for most of American history.

• We fought a Civil War because the Court denied that our African-American brothers and sisters have any rights under the law
• Between the end of the Civil War and the end of World War II they nullified the Reconstruction Amendments deciding that
  • Federal officials had no right to protect the lives and voting rights of Americans, unleashing a century long reign of terror in the former slave states
  • Overruling provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment that were specifically designed to apply the Bill of Rights to the States
  • Declaring that separating and blocking Blacks out of every aspect of American life was equal
  • Repeatedly overruling the voters’ and state legislatures’ efforts to protect workers, consumers and enforce the antitrust laws[3]
  • And they decided they were just fine with American concentration camps as long as Japanese-Americans were in them.

There’s nothing “legitimate” about any of that. This Court has been an abomination. Their decisions derailed much of what the American people and our elected representatives wanted and tried to do. Republicans focused on gaining control of the Court because the American people wouldn’t give them what they wanted. They decided the Supreme Court could be an American version of the Iranian Guardian Council – to heck with what the Constitution actually says, and to heck with human rights for Americans. So what’s worth saving?

Can we do anything about it? Of course.[4] The most straightforward solution is to change it, to nominate and confirm new justices until the honorific, “Justice,” actually describes what they do.

There are other solutions – only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I’ve suggested defunding the Court since the Constitution protects only their terms and their salaries, not the expenses of running a Court. However we do it, it is time to dump this Court or just point to a lake where they can jump.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on February 14, 2023.

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[1] Stephen E. Gottlieb, Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics 212-26 (New York: NYU Press 2016).

[2] Id. at 189-194.

[3] Erwin Chemerinsky, The Case Against the Supreme Court, 90-119 (Viking 2015).

[4] See id. at 293-330 for a mix of suggestions.

Jews Torn by Israeli Behavior

Jews themselves are torn by Israel’s behavior. Many have predicted for decades that Israel could not be Israel and swallow the West Bank. Israel’s “solution” has been to repopulate the West Bank with Israelis and push Palestinians out. Many of us never bought into that “solution”. From what Israelis have told me, Israel made no effort to integrate the populations, to school them together or share space. Israeli policy has been to separate the populations and squeeze the Palestinians out.

That approach has been coming home to roost. Israel appears to be turning itself into an “illiberal bastion of zealotry.” It’s threatening the survival of democracy, quashing the Israeli Supreme Court’s ability to enforce rules, expelling and leaving Palestinians stateless, vulnerable to both settler and official violence, and increasing attacks on civilians. Israel’s been thumbing its nose at American demands to respect Palestinian settlements and preserve a two-state solution. It doesn’t help that Netanyahu’s head of the Office of Jewish Identity doesn’t think most American Jews are Jewish. These policies are very troubling to a large segment of American Jewry. I don’t know whether another solution would work but this has painful consequences.

When I was young, I was outraged by Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. Tit for tat didn’t seem like smart policy but it seemed understandable. Nevertheless, attacks on civilians are absolutely inexcusable. Collective guilt, blaming or penalizing all Palestinians for the violence of some, makes everything worse.

There’s a bigger issue. If tribalism justifies anything for one’s own tribe, and if might makes right, which of our tribes will survive? Only if we can find ways to unite behind justice, equality, and the Golden Rule, loving and respecting our neighbors and fellow human beings, can any of our tribes, ethnic, racial, or religious, survive intact.

The American Founding generation tried to bequeath us that lesson. Their answer to the religious wars that shredded seventeenth century Europe and would again shred the twentieth was the philosophy of the Enlightenment, of universal principles of justice. They sought a road to peace through tolerance and community.

In the great words of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

“All” people have those rights though it took a civil war to enshrine those principles in the text of the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment, attempting to protect life, liberty and property with equal protection and due process of law, the Fifteenth Amendment attempting to guarantee voting rights to the descendants of those brought here as slaves, and the Nineteenth Amendment finally recognizing women’s right to vote.

We’ll always have vicious people who care nothing for others’ rights, but our defense and attractiveness to the world has always been those universal human rights. We and Israel ignore those rights and support countries which ignore them at our peril and at the peril of our moral responsibility to honor and respect all God’s children.

Having been the victim of Hitler’s Nazi racism in the Holocaust, later euphemized in other contexts as ethnic cleansing, Israel has been engaging in a deal with the devil by trying to swallow the West Bank. It’s a bad deal and the devil is winning.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on February 7, 2023.