“Liberty & Justice For All”—Ideals That Demand We Get Into “Good Trouble, Necessary Trouble”

By Dr. Debbe Deane, Director

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A Knee On The Neck

What will it take for white America to reckon with our country’s tragic history of institutionalized racism? It is our other pandemic…the one that looms large over CoVid-19 which has exposed the gaping hole in any aspirational liberty and justice. For months, activists have held demonstrations in cities across the country in the wake of the immense evidence that a sweeping overhaul of law enforcement must happen now. George Floyd’s murder with a knee on his neck was the catalyst that propelled the current social movement toward racial equality, with policing at the forefront.

Historical Truths

A huge first step to change is understanding the history of policing — a vital adjunct to understanding why vicious scenarios of officers clad in riot gear with tear gas, armored vehicles, and wartime ordnance continue in 2020. One must understand how current protests by and for Blacks are rooted in our history of slave patrols seeping with the blood of our nation’s past.

Centuries ago policing was all about protecting white elites’ property that included slaves. Today’s problem is a systematic carry-over of a 2020 ‘master mentality.’ Too many in policing ignore the plight of those who are the object of irreverence that often ends in Black death. Often, there is a tacit assumption that Blacks are ‘automatically’ criminal, therefore must be guilty of some wrongdoing, even if just standing in a group on the corner sharing stories. That sort of thinking from the past is now the present.

How Can Policing Change?

It must be addressed head-on. It is reasonable to believe that communication is the key — the first step toward rectifying this ugly dilemma. Communication calls for all of us to come to terms with our nation’s great stain and educate ourselves about how and why centuries of injustices perpetrated against Blacks who are simply trying to live, continue.

‘De-funding Police’

It is not enough to acknowledge police’s role in historical racism. We must have real conversations about an uncomfortable topic: the ongoing effects of slavery’s great stain. That must happen among whites, and between whites and Blacks —engagement. We must act to correct injustices inextricably tied to the foundation of our country. Thus, the call for defunding police is a result of police brutality, and an ignoring of already known remedies to fix such injustice.

Day-to-Day Police/Community Interaction

Let’s take a deeper dive into what is needed to impact the way law enforcement interacts, in the main, with Black communities. In communication, clarity is the key to understanding that it is necessary if we want to affect the change we want to see. The term ‘De-funding Police’ as coined by Black Lives Matter activists means either reorganizing local departments or abolishing them altogether. It is the former that is the focus of this writing.

Reorganizing Local Departments

Communicating what ‘Defund Police' means is vital to understanding how we get to ‘there’ from here. It means a re-allocation of resources away from continued militarization of police…away from a ‘warrior’ rubric toward a more humane allocation of budgets by committing a greater portion of that money into Black communities through amelioration of systemic disparities in healthcare, jobs, housing, and education. Continuing to ignore the need for vital economic support toward these huge clusters of inequality means continuing on our ongoing calamitous path—doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result…[is] the definition of insanity.

A Non-Verbal Communication Perception Example

In many places there are white neighborhoods with satellite police offices. White neighborhood signs I have seen read ‘Public Safety Office’ while neighborhood signs in predominately Black neighborhoods read ‘Police.’ From a non-verbal standpoint, a very different type of communication is conveyed. It is an ‘US’ versus ‘THEM’. The terms are reflective of a mindset by those who ‘police’, rather than ‘protect & serve’, conveying a warrior mentality through hyper-arousal mechanisms in cognition.

The re-allocation of resources, i.e., de-funding police, could mean retraining officers to sensitize them to vital differences in how they approach and interact with Black communities, verbally and nonverbally. There should be more emphasis on vetting cadets, who typically get less hours of training than a cosmetologist and more emphasis on psychological evaluation would include enhanced cross-cultural aspects. Additionally, independent citizen review panels comprised of those without direct connections to appointed or elected politicians, law enforcement, and lobbyists. There would be funding to employ mental health specialists, social workers, and community liaisons to enable them to respond accordingly to calls for assistance that clearly require support rather than deadly firepower.

Abolishing the governmental loophole that protects police (Qualified Immunity)—is a statute that generally provides that a police officer, as an employee of a governmental agency, is immune from liability for injuries to persons or property— damage caused by the officer while in the course of employment needs to be re-evaluated. There are too many cases of police behaving badly, then using this loophole to do it again, and again. Finally, there should be enhanced assistance to dispatchers. They would learn to listen to 911 calls while maintaining objectivity that the caller may be communicating implicit bias, thus giving misleading or even phony information, which might then be relayed to officers on their way to the scene.

In conclusion, the above are just some of the ways systemic change through a re-distribution of annual police department budgets could significantly improve relationships between Blacks and law enforcement. Citizen pleas to do so matter because without a doubt, Black Lives Matter.

In Memory of Civil Rights Icon, Congressman John Lewis (1940 – 2020)

*Dr. Debbe Deane holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, is a pioneering multi-award-winning former broadcast journalist, an educator, and motivational speaker. She is also a founding member of the Linguistic Communication Development Center.