Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Thoughts on a sad day. Another one.

I was thinking about the police today. 

This is difficult, because we have all become painfully aware in the last few years that a segment of the police in this country just straight-up murder people, and almost all of those people are black. 

Yeah, that's sickening. And I'm ashamed that I didn't understand this many, many years ago. 

The difficulty is where do we start? There are so many endemic problems with policing in America that it seems impossible to prioritize. 

So I started thinking what the police have in common with other groups that have turned monstrous. 

Collegiate athletic programs. The Catholic Church (although they're certainly not the only one). Any political machine. 

There does seem to be one overriding "feature" of these organizations: a lack of transparent, public oversight. Any organization that functions essentially in secret seems to spin out of control in the most terrible ways, and usually they're not discovered until many years later. 

If there's any positive about this, it's that actions by the police are being documented in real time and immediately shared. It's harder to cover up what's happening. 

That doesn't fix anything. But in spite of the lack of formal, public accountability structures in many cities, at least it's become harder to hide. 

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