by Nomad
With all the protests around the country against abusive law enforcement, it is a good time to ask how we as a country got into this situation. Is it simply a matter of racism permeating police departments or does it go deeper?
With all of the safeguards hard-wired into the Constitution, how could we have allowed it to happen?
A Simple Question of Trust
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. Frederick DouglasThere's been a lot of superficial analysis about the reasons for the nationwide protests in the wake of the Brown and Garner cases. The fact that US law enforcement can literally get away with murdering unarmed citizens in front of witnesses has shocked the nation.
(In fact this phenomenon has been going on for decades and if anything, the patience of the black community is the truly surprising aspect.)
Racism in the country's police departments has been blamed. A broken-down justice system has also been pointed to. In fact, it's all of those things but there's a
deeper problem as well: A lack of trust in the
law enforcement agencies by the black and minority communities.
This lack of trust has been further reinforced by a lack of credibility of the oversight process after possible violations have occurred.
It's not something that
should be under-estimated. Trust is the glue that holds the entire justice
system together. Without trust, the entire structure of law and order collapses pretty quickly. Now America has begun to question whether we might not have bestowed too much trust in law enforcement.
Every time a case of police brutality goes unpunished, it becomes a double failure for the entire justice system. Firstly, from the offense itself and secondly, by the damage it does to public trust.