Chris Powell: Conn. politicians strike hypocritical poses about distant police outrages; Afghans blew their chance to defeat Islamo-Fascism
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut’s population is barely growing (only 0.1 percent in 2022) and its economy growing very slowly, but its elected officials are as busy as ever deploring the awful things happening elsewhere in the country, and they may be thankful for the distraction. In recent days mass shootings in California and murderous misconduct by police in Tennessee have prompted Connecticut's leaders to issue proclamation after proclamation deploring the incidents, as if their constituents had any doubt about their feelings, or thought that those feelings might make any difference.
Connecticut's leaders seemed to feel the need to strike a pose -- to gain publicity for their self-righteousness.
The people who do the hiring for the Memphis Police Department may have a lot to answer for, but then Connecticut has enough of its own police misconduct to answer for, misconduct captured on body-camera video just as it was captured the other day in Memphis.
A Connecticut state trooper is facing a charge of manslaughter for repeatedly shooting a young man, Mubarek Soulemane, three years ago as he sat quietly in a car that had been stopped on a highway in West Haven after a wild chase.
Five New Haven officers are facing charges of reckless endangerment and cruelty for dragging and dumping Randy Cox, whose neck had been broken during an abrupt stop in a police van last June.
The execution in West Haven and the rough treatment of the man in police custody in New Haven evoked from Connecticut's leaders only a fraction of the indignation they have mustered for the police misconduct a thousand miles away in Tennessee.
And while elected officials should avoid prejudicing proceedings in criminal justice, Connecticut's elected officials might do well to show more awareness of the social disintegration that police officers confront every day -- social disintegration that has made recruiting officers critically difficult, especially in the cities, which have the worst crime.
As Connecticut's elected officials were fulminating about the mass shootings in California and the police riot in Memphis, two 16-year-olds were shot on the streets of Hartford. The incident passed without official comment and nearly without any notice at all by news organizations, this kind of thing long having become typical of Connecticut's cities, too common to deplore. Besides, any elected official who deplored what has become so common might be obliged to fix responsibility for it, a search that would lead him to some of his own constituents.
Better to deplore California and Tennessee, since nobody there votes here.
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Afghanistan and especially its women are getting sympathy around the world as the theocratic fascists again ruling the benighted place, the Taliban, are banning women from education and service with the international charitable organizations that are trying to prevent starvation and disease in the country.
But disgraceful as the Taliban regime is, sympathy for the Afghans is misplaced. For Afghanistan's men and women alike had their chance during the Western world's 20-year attempt at nation building there.
While some Afghans showed courage in pursuit of a more democratic society, most Afghans, including most Afghan women, were indifferent. Many Afghan women now realize that they won't have much of a future without education, but they can do nothing about it -- unless, of course, they want to pick up a gun, learn how to use it, and fight a revolution.
Few want to do that. Instead many will try to leave the country. Some will head for the United States, and a few may deserve consideration.
But most Afghans now deserve to live under the oppression they refused to fight, and the United States should not make that oppression any easier for the oppressors with financial or material assistance of any kind. Neither should the United States intervene to help overthrow the Taliban. No, Afghanistan should be left in peace to evolve gradually in its misery.
If Afghan women want a better life, they will have to contend for it themselves over the long term, just as women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other women-oppressing theocracies will have to.
No one will be liberating them but themselves.
Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
Llewellyn King: My brief for America’s embattled police
Los Angeles Police Department officers arresting suspects during a traffic stop. Such stops can be life-threatening for the police.
— Photo by Jim Winstead
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Police excess has gained huge attention after the death of George Floyd, in Minneapolis in 2020, and the alleged beating death of Tyre Nichols, in Memphis, last month. But police excess isn’t new.
A friend of mine, who had been drinking and could be quite truculent when drunk, was severely beaten in the police cells in Leesburg, VA., a couple of decades ago. I have never seen a man so badly hurt in a beating -- and I have done my share of police reporting.
That he provoked the police, I have no doubt. But no one should be beaten by the police anywhere, ever, for any amount of provocation. I might mention that my friend -- and the officers who might have killed him -- were white.
I used to cover the Thames Police Court, in the East End of London. That was before immigration had changed the makeup of the East End. It was then, as it had been for a long time, solidly white working class.
Every so often, a defendant would appear in the dock showing signs that he had been in a fight. One man had an arm in a sling, another had a black eye, a third had bruises on his face. One thing was common: If they looked beaten-up, they would be charged with “resisting arrest,” along with such other charges as drunkenness and petty larceny.
In the press benches, we shrugged and would just say something like, “They worked that bloke over.” We never thought to raise the issue of police brutality. It was just the way things were.
At least nowadays, when social norms don’t allow for police hitting suspects, there is a slight chance of redress. Although I would wager that nearly all police violence goes unreported, and the “blue wall” closes tightly around it.
People in uniform, men and women, hold dominion over a prisoner. If there is ethnic bias or verbal provocation, bad things can and do happen.
Yet I hold a brief for the police. Policing is dangerous and heartbreaking work, especially in the United States where guns are everywhere, Also it is shift work, itself a stressing factor.
Wearing the blue isn’t easy, and abuse and danger go with the job. Sean Bell, a former British policeman, now a professor at the Open University, described the police workload in the United Kingdom this way, “Those in the policing environment can become a human vacuum for the grief, sorrow, distress and misfortune for the victims of crime, road crashes and the plethora of other incidents dealt with time after time.”
Many of the incidents of American police being shot and police exceeding their authority have as their genesis at a traffic stop, as with Tyre Nichols. These are a cause of fear for both the police and criminals. It is where the rubber meets the road of law enforcement.
We motorists form our opinions of the police largely through traffic stops, which we rail against. But to the police, they are a life-threatening hazard as they approach a car that may have a crazed or dangerous criminal driver with a gun. They face danger and tragedy in plain sight.
The only thing that police officers are more wary of than traffic stops are domestic-violence calls. They are the worst, officers in Washington have told me.
Yet the traffic stop is an essential police tool, partly for controlling traffic but importantly for arresting criminals, fugitives and drug transporters. It is how the police work within the constitutional prohibition on illegal search and seizure.
People who have control of other people — drill sergeants, wardens and the police — are in a position to abuse, and some do. A uniform and authority can bring out the inner beast. Remember what went on in Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq?
Following the two terrible incidents of police excess, Floyd and Nichols, all the solutions seem inadequate. But when out on the streets or in our homes, most of us are vitally aware that we feel secure because a call to 911 will bring the law — the men and women in blue who guarantee our safety and well being.
What to do about police violence? Vigilance is the first line of defense, but appreciating the police as well as holding them to account helps. Not many police officers feel appreciated, and that isn’t good for them or for society.
“The policeman’s lot is not a happy one!” So wrote British dramatist W.S. Gilbert in The Pirates of Penzance, an 1879 comic opera, one of his collaborations with composer Arthur Sullivan.
And Gilbert and Sullivan had never dreamt of a traffic stop.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Boston has the oldest municipal police department in America.
Police are asked to do too much
— Photo by Scott Davidson
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
There’s something to be said for those fliers cropping up in Providence that say “Don’t Call the Police. Scan for Alternatives’’ around a bar code. The Providence Journal’s Madeleine List wrote about this in the Oct. 27 paper.
If you scan the QR code with your smartphone you’ll be taken to a Web site that lists agencies that city residents can use to obtain assorted services, such as for housing, mental health and substance-abuse issues. These are things that the police don’t necessarily have to be brought into.
Unfortunately, Ms. List’s article says, the list also includes domestic violence. The police need to handle that.
The main point, to me, is that police are called upon all too often to act as social workers rather than as anti-crime and public-safety personnel. There’s no way that cops can be trained and otherwise resourced to adequately address all the problems that they’re unfairly called upon to face these days. School personnel are also increasingly asked to serve as social workers, especially in places with lots of dysfunctional and impoverished families, many with only one parent around – the mother. The more of these functions that can be spun off to specialized agencies the better.
Of course, some of these problems are intertwined. Much criminal behavior is caused by perpetrators’ mental illness. So you sometimes need to bring in the police and social services.
Chris Powell: Police are forced to deal with cities’ social disintegration
Main Street in Hartford
Responding to complaints about a fireworks party in Hartford on the evening of July 4, three city police officers were pelted with explosives, one device going off just as it struck an officer in the chest. Their injuries were not serious but easily could have been, even fatal.
While the horrifying incident may be dismissed as part of the worsening social disintegration afflicting Connecticut's cities, disintegration that also is reflected lately by the cities' appallingly small response to the U.S. Census work now underway, one can't help but wonder. Was the attack on the Hartford officers inspired or encouraged by the "defund the police" demagoguery raging here and throughout the country?
Of course, the Black Lives Matter movement has a peaceful component, with compelling objectives that most of the country endorses. But even in Connecticut a big part of the movement is not peaceful. It often blocks traffic, even on superhighways, and shouts people down, and its ridiculous demand to reduce or even eliminate policing just where it is most needed harmonizes with the simultaneous demands to release all criminals from prisons, even the murderers, as well as with the general lawlessness, vandalism, and anarchy breaking out in many places.
In the face of the July 4 incident in Hartford and worse incidents around the country, police officers may be feeling like the small-town southwestern sheriff played by Gary Cooper in Stanley Kramer's 1952 Academy Award-winning movie High Noon.
With a vicious criminal gang on its way to take revenge on his town, the sheriff appeals to the townspeople to mobilize to help him but all the able-bodied men refuse. Many urge him to flee. But he holds fast to what he understands as his duty and instead awaits the gang alone.
Their confrontation produces an extended gunfight in which the sheriff takes the gangsters down one by one with some crucial support from his new wife. Then, as the cowardly townspeople gather in the street to marvel at the sheriff's triumph, he tosses his badge into the dust with contempt and rides off in a carriage with his wife.
Like everyone else, police officers may make mistakes, especially in the heat of the moment. As with many other people, some police officers can be cruel, malicious or corrupted by power, and they must be held accountable. That they often have not been is the fault of cowardly elected officials.
Far more often, of course, police officers are brave and heroic even as this is seldom noted — and they are all we've got against the social disintegration that our elected officials have caused, pretend not to see, and do nothing about.
So it was disgraceful that among Connecticut's elected officials only Mayor Luke Bronin and City Council President Maly D. Rosado said something about the July 4 incident in Hartford. Elected officials throughout the state should stop being intimidated by the lawlessness and start demanding better from their constituents.
Indeed, the state's elected officials should find the courage to acknowledge the social disintegration all around them and confront those who claim the right to bypass democracy and disrupt and destroy. For the calls to defund the police and empty the prisons are essentially claims that there is no way of getting the underclass to behave decently, no way of elevating the underclass and stopping the disintegration.
Any jurisdiction that yields to such madness won't deserve police officers any more than the town in High Noon did.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.