More Police Are Not The Answer

To the editor:

The conversation of race is happening all around us in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Spokane, McKinney and Charleston. People are asking ‘Is racism a problem?’ In the face of these discussions we are raising the same questions here at home. Shootings, murders, knife fights, bar brawls leading to death, high speed police chases, an officer suicide, a new police chief and police raids, sometimes with SWAT teams occurring more and more often. The typical response in media and on social networks is predictably the same: We need more police. For white folks, that may be the simple go-to answer because they aren’t the targets of over policing, injustices in the system, and disproportionately bad outcomes. Those bad things happen in communities and neighborhoods of color.

But the truth is that the people of the Fargo-Moorhead region need to stop fooling themselves. This isn’t Mayberry or Disneyland! Racism is not merely the personal choice of some ‘monster’ like Dylan Roof, it has been institutionalized into every facet of our educational, justice, housing and policy making systems in this country for hundreds of years through a myriad of policies and laws that were specifically enacted to benefit whites to the detriment of darker races; such as: Manifest Destiny, land theft, genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation laws, poll taxes, redlining, illegal and unfair lending practices, the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, the education gap, and the list goes on and on. As President Obama said recently after the mass shooting in South Carolina, ‘Societies don't, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”

I understand that people are afraid. National media focuses on scaring the hell out of people with ISIS and repeating the word “terrorist” every chance they get. But lets remember that ISIS has killed only four Americans while a white terrorist fueled by racism in this country has single handedly killed nine. Or that Trump, our newest Republican candidate for president said almost essentially the same thing about Mexicans that Dylan Roof said to nine black people before murdering them: you are rapists taking over the country. Our local media fuels the ‘fear factor’ with biased reporting especially in stories involving police and people of color. They have been guilty of using racially coded language when referring to black and brown subjects, including mentioning the entire ‘immigrant community’ as part of a news piece when only individuals were suspected of a crime. The police comments about people of color in the news are similar with high ranking officials saying words like ‘thugs’ and ‘criminals.’ Is it any wonder that the comments sections of news stories involving people of color are highly racialized and filled with incendiary and racist tirades?

Current and former police officers around the country are coming forward and outing the common practices in police forces confirming the abuse and misconduct that people of color and the poor already know. Michael A Wood Jr., exposed thousands of crimes of corruption, misconduct, racial profiling and human rights abuses that he was part of in the Baltimore PD, saying in a tweet, “Every person in low income, especially minorities, knows all this already. I’m not revealing anything at all, just confirming.”

And nothing new is being revealed to the communities of color living in the Fargo-Moorhead region either. We are already aware of what the problems are here. We know why there are protests across this country and also riots due to over policing of communities of color. We know that when white folks demand more guns and cops those forces will be aimed at us.

In case white folks haven’t been paying attention, the people involved in the bar fight outside Ricks, the recent assaults downtown and the husband/wife murders-suicide, or other recent garage suicide attempt crimes all involved whites. So, focusing on communities of color - - which is exactly what adding more police and more gun power does -- is racist and it doesn’t solve the real problems.

Over policing, militarized cops, SWAT raids, poor training, racial profiling, no body cams, no community oversight-- that is why we are here now! That's what the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the anger over the treatment of black children at pools has been about! We have weekly mass shootings and produce senseless racist idiot mass murderers like Dylan Roof in America and the people who keep saying the solution to our American nightmare is more guns and more police are broken records stuck on a crazy loop. Because only those who are insane would keep doing exactly the same thing we always have done in this country and expect a different outcome.

-Cindy Gomez-Schempp

Moorhead

[Editor’s Note: Cindy Gomez-Schempp is station manager for KPPP FM radio, Board President of the People’s Press Project, former Editor-in-chief of the High Plains Reader, and culture and language educator and consultant. She is of Mexican descent with a background as a paralegal, author/writer, executive director, activist, social service worker, community organizer, and translator.]