Conversation Starters

 Written April 15, 2021 Community Safety Belongs to All of Us As I write, the trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds.  This Minnesota police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man whose only crime was paying for some items at a convenience store with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.  For this nonviolent offense, Mr. Floyd was pinned to the ground with Officer Chauvin’s knee on his neck.  Video footage of the nine minutes and thirty seconds that proved to be Mr. Floyd’s final moments captured him struggling for air and gasping the words, “I can’t breathe.”  Even so, this officer of the law remained unmoved and Mr. Floyd died (Chappell, 2021).  The video itself became a tragic viral phenomenon capturing the cruel final moments of Mr. Floyd’s life.   The harsh and heartbreaking reality is that stories like this are only too common in the United States.  As “Policing in America,” a recent episode of the NPR podcast Throughline , thoroughly expl...

Policy Overview Policing in the United States has a long, often troubling, history (Anderson, 2016).  With law enforcement being tasked with the bulk of what is broadly defined as “public safety,” officers are said to “protect and serve” the public-at-large.  The harsh reality, though, is that Black and Brown people are targeted more often by the police, resulting in generations of community trauma and escalating violence between the two “sides” (Sakala and La Vigne, 2019). What’s true, too, is that these public safety trustees are called to serve functions that go outside of typical police officer training or common expectation of their duties (Vermeer et al, 2020).  This combination of implicit (or explicit) racial biases/tensions and the undue stress of calling the police for matters that they are not equipped or needed to handle has resulted in unnecessary violence and death, both of residents and sworn officers (Kahn, 2018).  In 2020, the murder-by-police of Geo...

An Introduction of the Policy Issue The dialogue on how best to approach policing and public safety has ramped up significantly since the murder-by-police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others over the course of 2020.  While egregious and often racially disparate police violence is far from a new phenomenon in the United States, the amplification of Mr. Floyd’s murder, especially, by the Black Lives Matter social justice movement catapulted the issue of law enforcement violence against Black and Brown people straight into the public eye.  Not only was murder-by-police a commonplace occurence, it came with with little-to-no consequences for the involved officers, their supervisors, or on up the chain of the command (Sakala and La Vigne, 2019).  Indeed, this sort of violence appeared to be publicly sanctioned by the powers-that-be as the results of these instances of assault and murder continued without any move to change the systems that enabled such behavior (Ande...

  I am an invisible man.  No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood ectoplasms.  I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, you understand, because people refuse to see me… When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, anything and everything except for me. In this passage from Prologue of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man , he explores social issues facing Black Americans of that same era and hones in on the futility of the minority class in this country.  They remain largely unseen, uncared for, unworthy of attention from their own community members, let alone the government.  The frustration and building desperation to be valued for their humanity leads members of the minority groups, especially Black Americans, to push through the barrier and demand to be seen, h...

One White Person’s Road to Intersectional Education --  September 2020 I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to reveal truth. Specifically, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means when something that has been kept quiet or in the background or out of the direct line of sight finally crashed through into the spotlight — like, no denying this any-fucking-more. In many ways, the recent conversations about race and sexuality and gender have done this. There’s no more excuses for not speaking up when someone makes a blatantly racist or homophobic or transphobic “joke.” There’s no more pretending you didn’t hear someone say “All Lives Matter” and going about your day. There’s no more acceptability for not speaking up about causes you align with or which directly impact you, even in the face of possibly well-meaning people who either intentionally or unknowingly shit on something you believe in. A friend posted this image on social media recently and it just resonated...