Conversation Starters

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...

Introduction For the second time in as many presidential elections, a qualified female candidate failed to shatter the highest political glass ceiling in the United States of America by being elected president.  In 2016, former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee as arguably the most qualified candidate this country has ever seen only to be defeated by a former reality television show host, lukewarm businessman, and accused sex offender with no political experience whatsoever.  While that shocked Clinton supporters, the implications that American society is simply not ready to accept a female president remained evident as Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Kristen Gillebrand, Tulsi Gabbard, Marianne Williamson, and Elizabeth Warren all attempted to achieve what Clinton could not.  Of those six women, Warren was touted as the “favorite.”  In fact, Warren was thought to be a strong contender for the nomination, even ahe...