The DeKalb Dozen

Athena and I had a discussion about a year ago. We forecasted this. The DeKalb Police (read: Vernon Jones) succumbed to political pressure that had no basis in logic or reality. In a stunning disregard of the facts and a fantastic embrace of manipulative emotion it was decreed that Tasers would no longer be employed. You see, someone had died as a result of its use so it must be an inherently evil device.

For the uninitiated, the Taser offered police officers a last ditch weapon they could employ before using deadly force. Yes, it is a bit disturbing to watch a person being Tased. By now we’ve been inundated with video of persons shaking and screaming as a result of being shocked. But I have it on good authority that bullets are more gruesome to behold. The difference here is that we’ve grown up with a lifetime’s worth of television images of people being shot. Operant conditioning at its finest. The question I have not heard uttered once, in any forum is this: Prior to doing away with that option for police officers how many people were Tased that would have been shot were it not for the Taser? No one, anywhere at the political level exercised a modicum of initiative and spoke from a position of truth. The sad fact is that in the balance Tasers save lives. Don’t take my word for it. Find the studies and look at the deployment history of departments that have had the courage to continue to use it.

The genesis of the conversation Athena and I had about Tasers was the idea that people squirm at the sight of unscripted violence. People’s instinctive, lizard-brain reaction to witnessing one person visit violence on another is that it must be wrong. And while a Taser is a weapon of violence, its use is governed by a myriad of laws and regulations. The men and women that deploy it are rigorously screened, indoctrinated, and trained. There are multiple layers of oversight and accountability within our society with regards to violence. Over the course of many years and through excessive refinement society has dictated to those that protect it the standards by which violence may be employed. The two most basic are OCGA 16-3-21 and 17-4-20.

Such discussions are merely academic though. The gospel truth here is that the people shot by the police entered an arena of confrontation. This is not necessarily the worst part of the equation. The most destructive portion of this is the fallacy and pandering that has transpired in its wake. The embrace of comfortable narrow-mindedness and worst-common-denominator cheerleading merely papers over cracks. The lack of intellectual rigor and klieg light posturing only serves to remove larger chunks from society’s mainstream while empowering a select few. It only digs the trenches deeper.

Put down your run-home-to-momma paper thin logic and your lazy paradigms. Get cozy with the cold bathwater of experience that is larger than the bounds of your television. You can rail against inexorable logic and universal truths or you can set out to test the hypothesis's of life yourself. Why are we required to give inordinate amounts of time in the public debate to those that have nothing to offer but thinly disguised paranoia that has reached narcotic levels?

The AJC's self-congratulatory tripe that it continues to trot out is a greater disservice to public safety than thugs on a robbery spree. The undertone of the tortured lexicon employed by the AJC implies at every step that malfeasance and cover-up are the order of day. That the only possible explanation for 12 people killed at the hands of an instrument of state power is blood lust and a secret campaign to euthanize the black population. That police agencies are out of control and drunk with power. Why is the idea that there just might be little pockets of evil in this world so hard to believe? That there might just be a small number of people in this world that can't be reasoned with. Notice I used the terms ‘small’ and ‘little’ in the previous two sentences. That is because even though the number of shootings is above a mythical statistical mark it still does not reflect the daily reality of over 99.9% of the population. Does anybody get that feeling after reading another journalistic hit piece in the AJC?

Perhaps the greatest disservice we as a society have endured is being sold over and over again the idea that most of life’s problems have simple solutions. Our television is packaged so that issues are presented and resolved in neatly wrapped hour and half hour increments. Our news is processed and refined so that only the most digestible portions are served. More often than not news is merely a litany of horrific events that befell a select portion of the population on that particular day. These vignettes of micro chaos are projected onto a larger backdrop and served in between helpings of entertainment and sports. The only objective is the furtherance of blame and fear. Ultimately there may not be any answers to the problems placed in front of us. But if ever there was a time to demand greater depth in our understanding it is now.

Ares