When Will Police Reform Become a Federal Issue?

Ever since George Floyd in 2020, people have been getting out there and protesting police brutality. This has been an issue ever since I can remember, but in 2020, when we were all at home, living in this cell phone video everything society, we had no choice, but to watch the problematic system play out in front of our very eyes. Unfortunately with all of our protesting efforts, the narrative has changed, but not for the better.

It is no longer White police officers terrorizing Black citizens. It is not Black police officers terrorizing Black citizens and White police officers terrorizing White citizens as if that makes it any better. I guess we can’t blame race anymore, but this is still extremely problematic.

Sadly, on my birthday, January 7, 2023, Tyre Nichols was stopped for reckless driving by police officers tasked with stopping violent crimes. Why they stopped Nichols is still a mystery as reckless driving is not in itself a violent crime. After the incident with Nichols, several others have come forward with excessive force complaints against the officers of this police unit called the Scorpions in Memphis. This unit has since been disbanded, but they are considering restarting because of the good that the unit did do in the community before the Tyre incident. Crime was down by 5% since they started working the streets.

So what happened on January 7th was that Tyre was beaten to death by five Black officers while screaming that he didn’t do anything. The whole thing was caught on body cam footage. The five officers have been fired.

Two sheriff deputies in Arkansas are currently being charged with federal civil rights offenses for allegedly using excessive force during a police arrest of a man at a gas station in Mulberry. The incident happened in August of 2022 to Randal Worcester who simply stopped at the gas station and asked for a cup of water. Randal suffers from mental health issues and is homeless, and the gas station attendant reported that he was outside making threats. Randal is still alive, but video has surfaced showing the officers beating him and slamming his head into the concrete ground. A bystander recorded the video and sent it in.

Part of the problem is that the media does not shed as much light on these types of situations as it does when the police and the citizens are of different races. They focus on making this a race issue. It may have started as a race issue, but it is clearly now an issue of abuse of authority. By the media doing this, they are creating another way to divide us as a people, and if we continue to be divided, it is less likely that we will win the fight for police reform, which we so badly need in this country.

Defunding the police is not a good solution. I don’t know who came up with that, it was never going to work. What would happen when we actually need them to come and protect and serve? We just need to figure out a way to stop this unprovoked violent behavior.

One solution is to get the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act passed at a federal level. This would outlaw certain controversial police tactics, make it easier to file civil suits against officers and create a misconduct registry that would follow them in their background checks. This would at least be a deterrent for the police officers who would ordinarily abuse their authority, but who would be afraid of citizens hitting their pockets with a civil suit, or fear jail time.

Another great solution is like the professor said in the previous video, we need to start letting mental health professionals deal with issues when it is clear that this is a mental health crisis. There have been several situations where a mental health professional could have deescalated the issue before it became out of hand with the police. Maybe we really should be looking at Denver's program as a guide.

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