Violence, racism, corruption, and abuse of authority are all baked into the batter of the system. Presidents and by police departments themselves-the Chicago Crime Commission in the 1920s, President Hoover’s Wickersham Commission in the 1930s, President Johnson’s Kerner Commission in the 1960s, the Knapp Commission in the 1970s, all the way up to President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing following the Ferguson uprisings-have detailed widespread, fundamental flaws and suggested desperately needed reforms. policing system is incorrigible, virtually since its inception. There is plenty of evidence to suggest the U.S. “What we need to do is take a more holistic approach to understanding community safety, and recognize that these other institutions create the public safety that’s required to no longer force public order with the threat or actual use of violence,” Baker says. The institutions that could make police obsolete are those we do not invest in enough: education, medical and mental health care, economic security, housing, community centers, and youth athletics, dance, and art programs.
Most of all, Baker believes addressing the basic causes of socioeconomic inequality to be a comprehensive solution. “If thinking about the world we want to see,” Baker says in an interview, “we think about a world without the police.” But in the meantime, he says, present-day police should have limited contact with the public, be subject to rigorous accountability methods, and be given intensive competence training. in criminology, focusing on police violence, at the University of Missouri–St. In 2014, the year protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown, Baker quit the force and entered graduate school, where he’s currently completing his Ph.D. “I was representing the interests of these rich people upstairs who are making decisions,” Baker recalls, “and I was risking my life to clean up their mess on the street and providing them security-but I wasn’t fit to eat in the same place as them. Resentment starts to well up deep inside him. Now Baker is among them in his police uniform. All the Black and brown workers who keep the hotel running.
He sees chefs in freshly soiled white aprons. He is directed to a side door and down a shaded ramp into the hotel basement, where food is being made for the officers on the scene. Baker walks past a gaggle of mostly white executives gathering to smoke outside the front of the fancy hotel. “If you want to eat, they have chow for us,” he tells him. He turns to see his supervisor, leaning in to be heard above the raucous chants. In 1937, a number of Chicago Police Department officers quit in protest following the “Memorial Day Massacre” when fellow officers gunned down ten strikers, wounding dozens, during the opening days of a massive strike against steel companies across the Midwest. At the protest line, his baton firmly in hand, dozens of protesters are looking him in the eyes as they shout: “WE! ARE! THE 99 PERCENT!” Watching the protesters stoically through the plexiglass visor of his helmet, Baker found himself agreeing with them.
That day, Baker’s black uniform was soaking up the desert heat of the Arizona winter. On November 30, 2011, he was assigned to provide crowd control at the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a protest at a conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an influential group of private sector representatives and rightwing politicians who draft state legislation to promote their interests. At six feet four inches and 290 pounds, Thomas Owen Baker looks the part of a hulking riot cop.
0 kommentar(er)
