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After George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, the investigation into his death found that the Minneapolis police department regularly used excessive force against Black and Native American people. In response to this incident, various proposals have been put forth to address the issue of systemic racism in police departments, such as increasing the amount of training on unconscious bias and providing more funding for body cameras on officers.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette agrees that systematic racism is prominent in law enforcement and believes significant new reforms are needed to change policing standards.
This means that those folks who’ve been saying for years, even generations, that when it comes to policing and race, or systemic racism in policing, something was rotten in Denmark — well those folks were not wrong. They were right.
A lot of people who thought of themselves as pro-police refused to accept the truth, but that didn’t make it any less true. We don’t need fewer cops, and we shouldn’t defund the police. As President Joe Biden says, we need more police officers and more funding for police.
We also need to return respectability to a profession that can’t even seem to recruit new officers. But another way to get people to respect cops again is to accept the fact that we need better police.
That means police reform; not the kind dictated by police unions, but real changes in the culture of policing to make it more about offering aid than doling out punishment. And before we can change cop culture, we have to admit that it has long been infected by some bad and ugly viruses, including — wait for it — racism.
