Are we asking toomuch of the Police Department?

Preparing for the Fourth of July Weekend, Chicago Police were cautiously optimistic. The two previous Fourth of July Weekends saw a decline in shootings. A recently conducted sting operation on that preceding Friday arrested 58 potential shooters. Top police brass recruited 1,300 additional police officers to work each day of the holiday weekend. Chicago also received support from the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for its weekend peacekeeping mission. But by the end of the 2017 Fourth of July Weekend, 102 people had been shot in Chicago, 15 were killed, and the 12,000 officers of the Chicago Police Department were out- manned, out- gunned, dispirited, beleaguered and resigned.

Are we asking the Chicago Police Department to do what no police department can do?

We are asking the Chicago Police Department to make up for a century of Chicago being themost segregated big city in America with all the associated ills. Wewant the police to compensate for schools that have failed to properly educate hundreds of thousands of black students. We want the police to serve as spiritual guides for wayward youth when ministers and pastors in our faith organizations don’t.

We are asking the police to substitute formany decades of bad parenting. Wewant the police tomitigate the fact that 89 percent of young black men between 16 and 19 are out of school, out of work, hopeless and desperate. Wewant the police to fix economically devastated communities, which even economists can’t do. Wewant police to act as social workers to diagnose communities’ problems and devise and enact viable solutions to address those problems.

On top of all that, wewant the police to stop young black men from killing mostly other young black men!

The police are not miracleworkers; they are police. Their primary training and function is to serve and protect people in the city of Chicago. Instead, our society expects the police to be responsible for that over which they have no control. We put the police in a no- win situation and then blame them when they fail. Theywill never succeed in their core mission becausewe have expanded their mission far beyond its original and logical scope.

Yes, police need to stop shooting young black men in the back. Yes, police need to change theway they patrol most African- American communities. Yes, police need additional and higher quality training. Yes, police need towork better and more cooperatively with the communities they serve.

Even so, the police can’t stop the violence that emanates from our households, our blocks, our neighborhoods and our children’s spirits. They cannot be mental health professionals, drug counselors and surrogate parents while preventing crime and apprehending rapists, robbers and murders. By being charged to do both, the police don’t do either well.

We must stop asking and expecting police to do what they cannot do.