October 26, 2023

By David W. Marshall

Each year during the month of October, the National Faith and Blue Weekend is held in communities throughout the nation. The purpose of this community engagement initiative is to use local faith-based organizations as a means to develop relationships between police department officials, residents, businesses and community groups.

The various Faith and Blue events gives members of the community, particularly those who may be skeptical of law enforcement, the opportunity to see police officials in an entirely different and non-threatening light. The bond between the police and the residents they are sworn to serve and protect will also be critical based on the fact that one side will always need the other.

 If a person holds the position of serving the people, how can you effectively do so if there is little or no understanding of the people? Robert Contee was an assistant Chief of the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington D.C. at the time he stated, “I think we’ve gotten smarter about things, in terms of the way that we deal with the communities that we serve.

We’ve learned that you can’t arrest your way out of problems.” Two years earlier, D.C. police began enrolling every recruit in a 10-hour curriculum at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Officers coming here need to understand not just the city, but the people in this city.” Contee says.

Individually, there are police officers who are making a difference and it often gets overlooked. Daniel Hahn, who served as Sacramento’s first Black police chief, never wanted to be a cop. Growing up in the Oak Park, a historically Black, working-class neighborhood of Sacramento, his early interactions with the police were largely negative. “Officers weren’t held in high regard in my neighborhood,” Hahn said in an interview.

The racial tensions which are common between the Black community and the police presents a unique challenge for the Black police officer who has to navigate between two worlds: a Black world and then the blue world. Many Black officers want to “be the change agent”, and then realize they fighting against an entrenched police culture with a legacy of racism, protected by police unions and resistant to self-examination and change.

There are approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide, the most common are small-town police departments with 10 or fewer officers. Every law enforcement agency, large or small, is fixture within their respective community. As a result, any form of racism which is a part of society will spill over into the police’s blue code of silence.

Jacinta Gau, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida, said Black police chiefs are often hired because they are seen as “reformers” who can “clean things up and alleviate or eliminate racial tensions.” Black police chiefs are believed to able to bridge two communities historically at odds with one another.

In reality, while cultural competency and bias training are being instituted in departments nationwide, the necessary changes will not be institutionalized if the institution itself is committed more to individual who discriminate. The substantial financial loss a local jurisdiction ultimately pays for police misconduct has not been an effective reason to embrace the level of cultural changes needed within police departments. “Behavior is more likely to conform to culture than rules,” stated the 2015 report from President Barack Obama’s task force on21st-century policing.

While police misconduct can devastate the lives of victims, their families and residents of the community, the misconduct can be a major financial price for cities and taxpayers to pay. Police misconduct costs cities millions of dollars each year in legal fees, settlements and judgements.  Despite these significant financial costs, there is little accountability for the officers responsible for the misconduct. In many cases, officers who engage in misconduct are not disciplined, and may even continue to serve on the police force.  It is rare for settlements to include any form of admission of guilt or wrongdoing.

Not long after the National Faith and Blue Weekend, Baltimore’s Board of Estimates panel approved a $48 million settlement to three men who were wrongfully convicted of murder as teenagers and spent 36 years in prison. It becomes another example of why there remains a lack of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve. Baltimore is not alone. The city of Minneapolis paid $27 million to the family of George Floyd. The family of Breonna Taylor’s family was paid $12 million.

Aside from high profiles cases, most claims of police misconduct are resolved quietly and with smaller sums. Local justifications say payments to resolve misconduct allegations, ranging from excessive force to illegal search and seizures, are more cost-effective than fighting the lawsuits in courts.

The amount paid by cities along with the identity of the officers are often hidden from the public even though their taxes are covering the cost. The professional men and women in blue who serve and represent their department with dignity are often forgotten when all of the attention goes to the “bad apples”.

David W. Marshall is founder of the faith-based organization, TRB: The Reconciled Body, and author of the book “God Bless Our Divided America.” He can be reached at www.davidwmarshallauthor.com.

October 12, 2023

By Rev. Jesse Jackson

TriceEdneyWire.com

America owes much of its prominence and prosperity to the fact that it has led the world in popular education. Even without a public school system, we had the highest literacy in the world in the 19th century. We were among the first to provide public school to the young through the 12th grade. We were the first to open the doors of colleges and universities – significantly through the GI Bill after World War II – to children from all levels of income.

Today, however, public education in the United States is under siege. Public school teachers and librarians have become punching bags in the political wars. Teachers are underpaid and overstressed. College is priced out of reach for more and more children, with administrators and facilities consuming ever more of the resources, while professors and graduate assistants fall behind. Schools are now battlefields in our partisan political wars. Job satisfaction for public school teachers is at a 50-year low.

Thousands are leaving the profession and fewer and fewer college students are taking it up.

Florida offers a good example. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, has made the “war on wokeism” a centerpiece of his presidential political campaign.

He has signed into law multiple “educational gag orders” – criminalizing classroom discussions on race, gender, and history that might make white students “feel guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress.” School libraries are purged of books, with librarians at risk if they don’t fall in line. Even the teaching of Shakespeare has been censored in some districts as too racy for children to hear (the same children who too often share far more shocking material on social media).

Florida teacher salaries are ranked 48th in the country. Now teachers are not only unpaid but they are assailed, vilified and threatened – not only with the loss of a job but with potential criminal charges.

The result – not surprisingly – is that the brightest and best teachers are headed north. When DeSantis became governor in 2019, the Nation Magazine reports, Florida already had a teacher shortage in grades K through 12 of 2,217. When he began his second term four years later, that number had more than doubled. This August, the Florida Education Association reported the number of unfilled positions at an unimaginable 7,000. The destructiveness of DeSantis’ war on wokeism is likely to be felt for a generation.

As public institutions engaged with children, schools have always been centers of controversy. In the South, segregation enforced separate but unequal schools, dividing children by race. In the North, as Jonathan Kozol detailed, public schools reflected the “savage inequality” of neighborhood disparities in wealth and race. Busing is routine across America, but it became a lightning rod when courts ordered busing to try to integrate schools in metropolitan areas.

In the countries that rank the highest in educational proficiency, teachers are treated with respect and paid well. In Finland, which ranks highest in international testing, gaining admission to a teacher’s college is fiercely competitive. Teachers are supplied with the resources, the teaching aides, the classroom sizes vital to doing their job well. In the U.S., teachers spend an average of about $700 out of their own pockets on school supplies, with those in the poorest neighborhoods spending the most.

Passionate debates about what is taught, what books are read, what history is imparted are inevitable. We want children to learn about America’s triumphs, but we also can’t whitewash our history and present it as a fairy tale. Children need to learn about our victories and our failures, our horrors, our shameful chapters, as well. We can’t learn from our mistakes if we don’t admit them.

In these partisan times, when social issues – abortion, race, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, immigration – are at the center of our political turmoil, it is inevitable that schools will be engaged in those debates.

Teachers inevitably will be at the center of such debates, not merely witnesses to them but active participants in them. Those with experience in the classroom are likely to have the best insights on what works and what doesn’t.

We surely don’t want partisan politicians using schools as a political football. We want teachers to be respected, free to express their views and share their expertise. We want parents to be involved, able to express their values, their hopes and their fears. Somehow these common sense ideas, which the vast majority would agree upon, too often get lost in the battles.

Even in the midst of the ongoing argument, we should not forget to honor and respect those who choose to teach our children. We should not forget that one teacher who can unleash a child’s imagination or feed his or her curiosity can transform a life. Thomas Jefferson believed that public education is vital to a democracy, that a well-educated citizenry would be happier, and better able to build a vibrant community. Surely that’s a lesson we should all remember.

October 12, 2023

By Ben Jealous

TriceEdneyWire.com

Forever home. That’s how folks from Aurora I met last week describe the houses they bought outside Denver.

Now those dream homes are caught in what may be America's most dire urban fracking nightmare.

Over the last year, residents have discovered, and began a grassroots challenge against, a plan to erect 174 10-story-high oil wells that stretch horizontally underground for thousands of feet.

The project is to be built next to a pristine, vital reservoir that hugs on the city’s edge and shares its name. Nearby communities without reservoirs buy their water from Aurora. The snowmelt-fed water is so clean you can drink it while you swim in it.

That all could change fast. Civitas, an oil company whose biggest investor is the Canadian equivalent of the Social Security Administration, wants to frack -- inject water, sand, and toxic chemicals underground to free oil -- under the reservoir, neighborhoods, and close to a Superfund toxic waste site. The entire area in the proposal is more than 33,000 acres with one drilling pad within 3,000 feet of a neighborhood.

What started as a Facebook page grew into a full-fledged campaign involving residents and allied environmental groups pushing city, county, and state officials to stop the fracking proposal from moving forward. Residents only learned of the plan when Civitas started trying to acquire the mineral rights under their houses and common areas controlled by homeowners’ associations.

When they go to a hearing, “it’s the suits versus the t-shirts” says Marsha Goldsmith Kamin, referring to the blue shirts she and other opponents wear. Kamin and her husband learned about the fracking proposal after they moved in November to be closer to their three grandchildren. Opposing the wells amounts to a full-time job for the retiree now.

In Colorado, like most Western, states access to water remains a contentious issue. As its name suggests, the leading opposition group Save the Aurora Reservoir leads with the threat to drinking water for much of metro Denver.

Beyond the direct threat of fracking under and around the reservoir, the proposed wells will demand billions of gallons of water that end up so polluted they’re lost to other uses. So Aurora, which has experienced recent droughts, would see precious water used to produce fossil fuels that are accelerating climate change that can make water even more scarce.

The fracking would worsen Denver’s poor air quality as well. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raised its concern about ozone levels in the Rockies’ Front Range from serious to severe last year. The proposed wells would emit thousands of tons of “volatile organic compounds” and nitrogen oxide that make up ozone.

The Superfund site, created by a now-closed Air Force base and city and county dumping, could be an unlikely hero in the story. The EPA won’t allow fracking under the unlined landfill, and more recently has raised questions about the impact of fracking close by on the already leaking site’s structural integrity. Opponents hope that federal concern will help sway regulators in Colorado.

Opponents have made progress. Civitas agreed to move five well sites. The county commission, which narrowly defeated a drilling halt, this week is considering closing loopholes to its oil and gas ordinances to ensure no development within a mile of the reservoir. U.S. Representative Jason Crow wrote to commissioners reiterating residents’ concerns.

But Save the Aurora Reservoirs activists are learning how far powerful interests can tilt the playing field. Civitas needs mineral rights from fewer than half of the property owners to force fracking on the rest. While the city has a one-mile setback preventing drilling near the reservoir, opponents must fight for the same from the county.

“We think it’s so obvious that the downside is so much greater than the upside. But it feels like so much of the structure – the laws and regulations and approval process – are really working against us,” says Julie Huygen, an Air Force veteran who moved to Aurora two years ago.

Kamin said she’s fighting for the grandchildren she relocated for. She’s energized by her eight-year-old granddaughter’s desire to take part. “She asked me, if they do that to the ground, where are the prairie dogs going to go?”

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.