Retribution and punishment. That's what is seems we're all about now.
But peace-making isn't what's cool now. It isn't sexy like blowin' shit up. When you've trained an entire generation to be soldiers (a shitload of rookie cops are coming straight outa the US Military these days), and you've reduced everything to the binary - "you're either with us or you're against us" - when it's always and only either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white - what you end up with is the mindset that wearing the uniform makes you the hero, and that means everybody else is the bad guy.
So the default position is Shoot-First-And-Fuck-You-And-Your-Questions, which doesn't leave a lot of room for anybody who wants to do the real work involved in keeping the shit from hitting fan in the first place, which is what makes it way too extraordinary when real cops like Ron Johnson come along who understand what the job is supposed to be all about, with the first tenet being that a fellow American is not the fucking enemy.
Prevention is always more cost-effective than remedy. It costs us a lot less to provide food, clothing, housing and a decent education for a kid in the first 18 years of his life than it does to hunt him down, arrest him, put him on trial and to keep him in jail for the next 3 or 5 or 10 years. And the costs of grinding him up in the "Justice System" are only the direct costs; the ones we can easily see and identify. There are plenty of other costs associated with whatever his "crimes" happened to be that we usually don't even acknowledge - the Opportunity Costs of lost productivity, insurance, emergency response, recovery and rehab and on and on and on.
What's been going on in Ferguson is a really great example of all those hidden costs kinda poppin' up all at once.
And the question is: why do the people of Ferguson have to pay that price for us, instead of Wall Street and General Dynamics and Corrections Corp of America?
Mom Danielle Wolf was grocery shopping at a Kroger store in North Augusta, South Carolina when she was arrested for disorderly conduct after cursing in the presence of her two daughters, WJBF News Channel 6 reports.--and--
Ms. Richardson, 28, was arrested after an officer saw the kids playing in the park with no adult supervision, parked her patrol car, and saw the kids waving her over. What then, Bay News 9?Maybe the cops involved in those incidents could've just done a little mediating and defusing and admonishing; or maybe they could've concentrated a little more on the whole "To Serve" part of the customary motto that's supposed to be kind of a guiding principle for Law Enforcement.
But peace-making isn't what's cool now. It isn't sexy like blowin' shit up. When you've trained an entire generation to be soldiers (a shitload of rookie cops are coming straight outa the US Military these days), and you've reduced everything to the binary - "you're either with us or you're against us" - when it's always and only either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white - what you end up with is the mindset that wearing the uniform makes you the hero, and that means everybody else is the bad guy.
So the default position is Shoot-First-And-Fuck-You-And-Your-Questions, which doesn't leave a lot of room for anybody who wants to do the real work involved in keeping the shit from hitting fan in the first place, which is what makes it way too extraordinary when real cops like Ron Johnson come along who understand what the job is supposed to be all about, with the first tenet being that a fellow American is not the fucking enemy.
Prevention is always more cost-effective than remedy. It costs us a lot less to provide food, clothing, housing and a decent education for a kid in the first 18 years of his life than it does to hunt him down, arrest him, put him on trial and to keep him in jail for the next 3 or 5 or 10 years. And the costs of grinding him up in the "Justice System" are only the direct costs; the ones we can easily see and identify. There are plenty of other costs associated with whatever his "crimes" happened to be that we usually don't even acknowledge - the Opportunity Costs of lost productivity, insurance, emergency response, recovery and rehab and on and on and on.
What's been going on in Ferguson is a really great example of all those hidden costs kinda poppin' up all at once.
And the question is: why do the people of Ferguson have to pay that price for us, instead of Wall Street and General Dynamics and Corrections Corp of America?
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