The protests as usual have brought about lots of talk about what is need to make the use of police brutality a thing of the past.

Operating with the backing and encouragement of President Trump—who has threatened to deploy the military to suppress protests—and the aid of thousands of National Guard soldiers, police forces throughout the US are engaged in an ongoing rampage.

More than 11,000 people have been arrested in the less than two weeks of protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd. Most have been attacked by police and arrested for “failure to disperse” or violating curfews, under both Democratic and Republican mayors.

Thousands of peaceful demonstrators have been teargassed, pepper sprayed, shot with rubber bullets and beanbags, beaten with truncheons and pushed to the ground, leading to serious injuries and in some cases death. While largely ignored by the mainstream media, video after video of police attacks have gone viral on social media, fueling popular outrage.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/06/viol-j06.html

Lots of talk, especially from politicians, it is a good subject to pad the resume for the next election….I am sorry but I doubt see many of them as sincere……

These protests and the brutality are NOTHING new.

Police brutality has been with us for many many years…..

Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old black boy, was stoned to death by white people in 1919 after he swam into what they deemed the wrong part of Lake Michigan.

In response, black people in Chicago rose up in protest, and white people attacked them. More than 500 people were injured and 38 were killed. Afterward, the city convened a commission to study the causes of the violence.

The commission found “systemic participation in mob violence by the police,” Khalil Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and author of the book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, told Vox. “When police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them.”

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/6/21280643/police-brutality-violence-protests-racism-khalil-muhammad

We all, except for the racist, want to see an end to the brutality….and there is a proposal that I kinda like…..it has an 8 fold path…..

Amend federal civil rights laws to allow more effective prosecution of police misconduct by changing the standard from willfulness to recklessness;

Abolish “qualified immunity,” so police officers can be held civilly liable for abuses; Prohibit the transfer of offensive military equipment to police departments

Strip federal funds from departments that violate civil rights;

Create a federal model policing program that emphasizes de-escalation, non-lethal force and culturally competent policing in which access to federal funds depends upon the level of reform adopted. As part of this effort to modernize and humanize police departments we need to enhance the recruitment pool by ensuring that the resources are available to pay wages that will attract the top-tier officers we need to do the difficult work of policing;

Provide funding to states and municipalities to create civilian corps of unarmed first responders to supplement law enforcement, such as social workers, EMTs, and trained mental health professionals, who can handle order maintenance violations, mental health emergencies, and low-level conflicts to aid police officers;

Require agencies to make records of police misconduct publicly available;

Require all jurisdictions that receive federal grant funding to establish independent police conduct review boards that are broadly representative of the community and that have the authority to refer deaths that occur at the hands of police or in police custody to federal authorities for investigation.

In addition, the boards would be authorized to report to federal authorities other types of abuses by police including patterns of misconduct. This would be supplemental to current federal authority to commence investigations. Clearly we need to enhance federal funding for such investigations.

So far these are the best I have heard…..

I see where there can be cheating on these requirements…but that is nothing unusual….there is always fudging federal statutes….there has been too much for too long…..

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