Our police problem

The lead article in the Times-Herald on Nov. 20 — as well as the article about Vallejo and the Vallejo Police Department in a recent issue of The New Yorker — confirm that policing here has to change. I think this change has slowly started, but I am not sure.

Policing has to change all over the country. I don’t need to run down the list of young men killed in Vallejo, but I should point out that none of them fit a “White” stereotype. Nor the list of Black and Brown men and women killed around the country. The statistics on police killings put this country to shame.

We need to work at the local level to make changes. We need to work at the statewide level to make changes. And we need to work at the national level to make changes as well. There is currently a joint bill in Congress called the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020.” Our Bay Area legislators are all cosponsors. The House of Representatives has approved H.R.7120, but the Senate majority has blocked the companion bill, S. 3912.

The Act includes the following very reasonable provisions for police departments: No profiling, police training, data collection, enforcement of use of force standards, use of deescalation (and training), ban on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and limits to the use of military-grade equipment.

I had the privilege of speaking recently (via Zoom) with our representative in Congress about this issue as part of a Quaker lobbying effort to respond to police violence. U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson has cosponsored H.R.7120 and is a leader on the issue of gun violence in the country as Chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force and his leadership on background checks.

The issue of police violence and gun prevalence are closely linked. We need to get guns off the streets to make all of us — including the police — safer, and also to make sure that police training helps them respond with solidarity and not with fear. An officer on the street has a right to assume that someone they are questioning is armed. And the same is true of me as a pedestrian, a bicycle rider, or a driver if someone confronts me aggressively. It happens that I don’t carry a gun, so my response will be accordingly different from the officer who has the gun.

And, of course, armed police are not trained for nor should they be expected to respond to mental health crises or issues of domestic violence, and certainly many other situations that aren’t part of their training. Other trained professionals should be called on to deal with these situations. It seems to me that we can all agree on this no matter our political views.