Conversation Starters

I had a dream that I was in a doctor's office where one of my male friends was giving medically safe abortions.  For some reason, he had invited me to come hang out while was working and so I was in the room with these women as they came in for their procedures.  I have a very squeamish empathy that kicks in with anything that could be even remotely painful but in the dream, I did my best to put on a brave face and stay there to help ease these women through their procedures being administered by my friend.  He is not a medical profession IRL but he was more than competent in this dream-space and did an excellent job making these women feel comfortable, clearly explaining what he was doing while also idly chit-chatting with me. I woke up thinking  what a weird dream . That was the morning of Friday, June 24, 2022.  Roe vs Wade was overturned mere hours after my waking. Friday, June 24, 2022 is a frightening and grotesque day in the United States of America. I le...

 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...

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...

A Brief Re-Thinking of Public Safety Policy Problem Definition, Assessment, and Description The debate over how best to approach and carry out equitable public safety has endured since before the founding of the United States of America.  While safety is a fundamental human need, a simple scan of the social horizon reveals that safety is not an automatic guarantee for all people, especially for those whose racial identity isn’t white (Kahn, 2020).  The history of inequities related to non-white residents stretches back for centuries but became especially illuminated over the course of 2020 as Black Lives Matter protests against the murder-by-police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others drew continuous media and social attention that has yet to abate.  More than ever, dialogue and debate has overwhelmed the airwaves as options ranging from a complete abolishment of the police to doubling down on the amount of money municipalities should invest in so-called “Blue Live...