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W
hen asked about defunding the police, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted and hit on a very important valid point.
Summed up, Ocasio-Cortez said what everyone wants is to live well and free, like folks in the suburbs. In other words, wealthy, with access to cash, credit, housing, the extra comforts of contentment and the greatest asset, having close to zero encounters with the police. In that ideal place, there are no one-way tickets from the court to jail to prison. No pipeline. No being barred from security clearances, healthcare, voting, housing, and the right to just eke out a living.
Defunding the police is like telling a child that they aren’t getting an allowance for a year. You send them to the corner of Famous Time-Out Avenue, and once there and saddled on a three-legged stool named the Law, Police, and Public, the orders are to first think about what you did. Second, write down why you did it. Third, self-evaluate and decide on the punishment deserved. Fourth, apologize and make restitution and fix it, and change forever whatever inexcusable, heinous, abhorrent act occurred so it will never happen again. Thirty minutes later, the police are excused and told to go about their duties, as usual.
As for the root of evil, it is racism—the problem is not the police. The police did not create racism; they follow the law. Law is made by the people’s appointed and elected proxies entrusted and legally mandated to make, enact, and remove unbroken, ironclad chains of injustice; decree, by decisions of our courts —pre-positioned by the police, sheriff’s, DEA, ICE, FBI, ATF, to name a few— and enforce rules of containment. Law enforcement is not the creator of this human rights debacle. Taking their money away is not going to stop this engine. It is a machine with no checks and balances run amok.
The police did not create the problem, Black people did not create the problem. In fact, Black folks did not ask, pay, or want to venture to colonial shores. However, it is a fact that they built the capital, the White House, and picked millions of bags of cotton for the people who rule over them in the buildings that Blacks built, without a union, pay equity, or healthcare. Unfortunately to this day, excuse my humor, the ruling houses that Black Jacks built have ensured that they will not enjoy the full benefits enacted by the Constitution of the United States.
Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Ghandi all in different ways addressed the perpetrators. Basically, white people need to look at themselves and bare their innards as to why they don’t like Black people. Because it is all in their minds, and it is one of the most covered-up crimes of humanity in the world.
