Police face the brunt of societal ills
At Tuesday’s memorial service in Dallas, a biracial and bipartisan call to address festering problems
President Obama, speaking Tuesday to a heartbroken Dallas community and a country reeling from tragedy, sought to salve deep wounds, honor five fallen police heroes and implore Americans to acknowledge what they surely know: Officers often face the brunt of societal problems they had nothing to do with creating and over which they have no control.
“We ask the police to do too much, and we ask too little of ourselves,” the president told mourners at the service for the officers ambushed last Thursday by a hate-filled black Army veteran. The nation underinvests in education, allows poverty to fester and floods communities with guns, Obama said — and then expects police to be social workers, teachers, drug counselors and parents and to “keep those neighborhoods in check.”
Obama’s words echoed those of David Brown, the weary and saddened Dallas police chief who said a day earlier that “policing was never meant to solve all these problems,” ranging from drug addiction to single motherhood.
Certainly some of the tension between police and African-Americans can be lain at law enforcement’s door, most appallingly the shooting deaths of black men in cases where non-lethal alternatives could and should have been employed. But police officers, the only government officials some people interact with, deal directly with consequences of broad problems that have persisted for generations.
The country has made great strides toward racial equality since the 1960s. There is no greater proof of that change than the president, the first African-American to be elected, and then re-elected, to the nation's highest office. But too much disparity and injustice remain in every aspect of American life. Among the festering problems:
Family breakdown: In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an official at the Labor Department, who later became a senator, rang alarm bells when unmarried births in the black community were nearing 24%. By 2014, the number had tripled to 71%. And while some children of unmarried parents turn out just fine, evidence is overwhelming that children of single mothers suffer disproportionately high poverty rates, impaired development and low school performance.
Financial disparity: The black unemployment rate — 8.6% last month — has been about twice the rate of white unemployment ever since the government began measuring both in 1954. The disparity is about the same at each educational level. Family wealth, a crucial measure of what families can pass on to their children, shows a monumental gap. In 2013, the median net worth of white households was nearly $142,000 — 13 times that of black households, at $11,000.
Unequal education: More than 60 years after the landmark
Brown v. Board of Education ruling ushered in desegregation, many poor, black students remain in segregated public schools. Since 2000, America’s K-12 public schools have become increasingly segregated both by race and class, leaving more children isolated in high-poverty schools with fewer math, science and college-prep courses and higher rates of students held back in ninth grade, suspended or expelled. Such isolation is a barrier to attaining better jobs, higher earnings and the ability to move to the neighborhoods that provide bridges to both.
Housing: A child’s home address can be his destiny, yet high levels of housing segregation persist in large cities and the suburbs. While federally subsidized housing was supposed to change this picture, it is often built in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods African-American families are trying to escape. Housing segregation spills over into every aspect of life, including police-community relations. It is no coincidence that Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore — where violence erupted last year after black men died at the hands of police — are highly segregated.
These depressing realities, particularly family breakdown, are exceptionally difficult to reverse. But change can come, and will come, only when all sides start listening to and respecting each other.
“In this audience, I see what's possible ... when we recognize that we are one American family,” Obama said Tuesday in Dallas. At the end of the interfaith memorial service, those holding hands to the strains of Glory Hallelujah included a white mayor, a black chief of police, a white Republican past-president and the black Democratic incumbent.
That tableau alone sent a powerful message that the Dallas tragedy can bring people of goodwill together, and need not tear the fabric of the nation apart.