Feb 12, 2015

FBI Director James Comey gives brave, but clumsy speech on issues of race and policing in America.

By:   Shaun king

FBI Director James Comey waded into deep waters today on issues of race, racism, and the police. Rarely, if ever, has any FBI director made such a bold attempt to discuss and confront such issues so publicly. It’s no easy speech for the top cop in the country, a middle-aged white man, to give without a few rough edges but Director Comey was sincere and earnest throughout.  According to the Washington Post, Comey said,

“Not long after riots broke out in Ferguson, I asked my staff to tell me how many people shot by police were African American. They couldn’t, and it wasn’t their fault,” he said. “Demographic data regarding officer-involved shootings is not consistently reported to us. . . . Because reporting is voluntary, our data is incomplete and therefore, in the aggregate, unreliable.”  “It’s ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people have been shot by the police in this country,” he later said in response to a student’s question.  The gross underreporting of police shootings and killings in America is being highlighted more and more, but to have the director of the FBI express his frustration about the problem is significant.

The challenge with Comey’s comments, though, came when he made a common mistake many public officials often make when attempting to make sincere comments about racism. Comey, possibly not wanting to appear as if he was just picking on whites, felt the need to highlight his opinion that “everyone’s a little bit racist.” Going a step further, he seemed to almost absolve cops from any of the problems and blamed economics.

But he said police are not the root of the problem, which he said is a legacy of struggling families and lack of good education, jobs and role models that leave young people with “a legacy of crime and prison.”  “Changing that legacy is a challenge so enormous and so complicated that it is, unfortunately, easier to talk only about the cops.”

Again, the challenge with this perspective is this—while Comey made it clear that more documentation needs to happen with shootings by police, he basically wrapped his comments in a package stating that we’re all racist and that economics are the root problem with poor policing—which just isn’t the case. While poverty is a real thing in America, it is not the root of racism, discrimination, or poor policing, which impact African-Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds.

Is that they don’t have data at that level from all jurisdictions.

So, his office probably does have decent data about cops shooting people, but he probably doesn’t have data about the circumstances of shootings or detail about the people who have been shot. Therefore, data showing whether one group of people are being subjected to cop shootings versus others is does not exist.

It is possible, probably, to reconstruct that data, though. It would be a huge undertaking if it were a nationwide project. But if someone wanted to analyze the Ferguson police force’s record, for instance, they could use police reports, death records, hospital records, news reports and obituaries to create a picture of what their track record is. Good luck getting a project like that funded by either this Congress or the Missouri state legislature, though.

Issues of discrimination are an ongoing conversation and ongoing struggle for humans.

Tolerance like marriage requires hard work and it is a constant struggle for people to figure out how to get along that requires attention, compassion and reminders of the big picture value of a cohesive society rather than one that is fractured and entrenched in an assortment of rival camps.

The task and responsibility are harder in this country than in most others on earth. We have one of the most diverse countries in the world and it is never going to be a cakewalk, but I think that it is do-able.

The following is a video that might better explain why our racial issues are such a divide.  The biggest impact is the upbringing of blacks.  Most blacks are raised without a family structure and are raised to hate instead of “respecting” the police.  So from birth this brain-washing has taken place and will not change because there is big money in “race” baiting.

kommonsentsjane

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