COVID-19 and us — 6.12.20

A Few, Not So Random, Thoughts on COVID-19, the Police and School

Yes, I’m going to keep wearing my mask while I’m in public and around people. If I get seriously ill, my wife is in trouble because her health issues mandate 24-hour care. If she gets gets COVID-19, she probably won’t survive.

This summer, we stay home and wear a mask in public. And, if you don’t wear one, STAY AWAY!

The Police

I believe that the police, or someone who performs their functions, are a necessary evil.

Given the above, de-funding the police will not accomplish anything positive. Are reforms necessary? Yes, most certainly.

What Reforms?

I’d like to propose two reforms.

First, there is a need to better screen those we recruit and train to be members of our police departments. We need to make sure that those who become policemen, and policewomen, are primarily, if not exclusively, interested in helping people. Those who, for whatever reasons, need to bully people must be weeded out. We must screen out those who are inclined to throw around their authority and hide behind its badge and who lie to cover up their mistakes.

Think lying is not a problem facing our police departments? Look first at the videos currently circulating on the internet, and then think of how many times your friends complained about a run-in with the police in which they claimed the police lied about what they did. (I would imagine most of us know someone who was given a traffic ticket they didn’t deserve because the traffic cop lied. Maybe, it’s happened to you. Did the cop actually lie? If the cop lied about something small like a u-turn, missed stop sign, unsafe lane change, what would stop him/her from lying about an assault or firing a weapon?)

We need honest police who believe that violence is a last resort, not a first response.

Two

Second, we must de-militarize our police departments. Police departments are not armies and police are not soldiers. The primary purpose of the police is to protect a community and its people. The primary purpose of an army is to, using extreme violence, destroy an opposing army.

When a police department becomes an army, the people it is supposed to protect become the enemy. If you doubt this, look at any recent, or not so recent, video of police behavior at rallies in which people are exercising their rights to assemble and protest. Yes, like the right to bear arms, the right to protest is a right protected by the U.S. Constitution.

And, maybe, we should give the police a chance to become members of the community they are hired to protect. How about we subsidize their purchase of housing in the cities they work. Beginning officers aren’t going to be able to afford to live in high priced cities like San Francisco or Newport Beach. If they lived among those they policed, might they better identify with those they came into contact with? And, again maybe, have them park their cars and walk around the neighborhoods they patrol. Once or twice (or, maybe, more often) a year knock on people’s doors, introduce themselves and ask about the community. Make the police us and not them.

School

Ghads, the more I think about making schools ready for the 2020-2021 school year, the more I want to laugh or cry.

Social distancing? Take a class of forty students and set it up for social distancing and you have a class of fewer than twenty. If you give teachers the same 240 students, they must now teach twelve classes. (No, this is not a fantasy. During most of my forty year career, my classes had 35-40 students and I taught six classes each day.)

More classes? Or, shorter classes but teachers are still responsible for students learning the same material? Students coming to school every other day? On-line school on the other days?

Do you know any teachers who are looking forward to teaching under COVID-19 conditions next year? How about, do you know any teachers who have just retired and are breathing a sigh of extreme relief?

How about, do you know any teachers who are considering early retirement because they, belatedly, see what is coming?

Remember, the economy tanked and tax receipts will be down, school budgets will be down; teachers will get fewer supplies and salaries and benefits may, will, be re-negotiated.

More work, lower salary — they all have college degrees; do you think many of them may look for work in some other profession?

Can you imagine being a newbie, first-year teacher, just beginning his or her career under these conditions? I can and still cannot decide whether to laugh or cry.

California State Department of Education

Cal-Ed recently published a guide on how to open schools in the Age of COVID-19. What’s in it? A lot of educational and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. Don’t believe me? Read it yourself.

In essence it says local districts are responsible for everything, reasonably practical or not, with no realistic how-tos.

Typical response like Donald John: I take no responsibility; handle it at the local level. I imagine it will devolve to individual schools and teachers, like most things educational do. They have no real authority but have all of the responsibility and will take all of the blame when (not if, in my humble opinion) things don’t work out.

My take: by October everyone gives up and things go back to the way they were last October (pre-COVID-19), come heck, high water, illness and death.

Jokes, Two

Joke One

The Cab Ride

With the holidays upon us I would like to share a personal experience with my family and friends about drinking and driving. As you may know some of us have been known to have brushes with the authorities from time to time on the way home after a “social session” out with friends.

Well, three days ago I was out for an evening with friends and had a sampling of rye, scotch, Jack and several mixed cocktails. This was followed by dinner and some rather nice red wine. And to finish the evening a couple of snifters of Hennessy Paradis. Feeling jolly I still had the sense to know that I may be over the limit. That’s when I did something that I’ve never done before . . . I took a cab home!

Sure enough on the way home there was a police road block, but since it was a cab they waved it past. I arrived home safely without incident. This was a real relief and surprise because I had never driven a cab before. I don’t even know where I got it and now that it’s in my garage I don’t know what to do with it!

Joke Two

The Salesman

Bubba Boudreaux, the smoothest-talking Cajun in the Louisiana National Guard, got called up to active duty. His first assignment was in a military induction center. Because he was a good talker, they assigned him the duty of advising new recruits about government benefits, especially the GI insurance to which they were entitled.

The officer in charge soon noticed that Boudreaux was getting a 99% sign-up rate for the more expensive supplemental form of GI insurance.

This was remarkable, because it cost these low-income recruits $30.00 per month for the higher coverage, compared to what the government was already providing at no charge.

The officer decided he’d sit in the back of the room at the next briefing and observe Boudreaux’s sales pitch.

Boudreaux stood up before the latest group of inductees and said, “If you has da normal GI insurans an’ you goes to Afghanistan an’ gets youself killed, da govment’ pays you benefishery $20,000. If you takes out da suppmental insurans, which cost you only t’irty dollars a munt, den da governmen’ gots ta pay you benefishery $400,000!”

“Now,” Boudreaux concluded, “which bunch you tink dey gonna send ta Afghanistan first?”

###

Laughter Holding Both His Sides

By James Whitcomb Riley
1849 – 1916

James Whitcomb Riley
James Whitcomb Riley

    Ay, thou varlet! Laugh away!
All the world’s a holiday!
Laugh away, and roar and shout
Till thy hoarse tongue lolleth out!
Bloat thy cheeks, and bulge thine eyes
Unto bursting; pelt thy thighs
With thy swollen palms, and roar
As thou never hast before!
Lustier! Wilt thou! Peal on peal!
Stiflest? Squat and grind thy heel –
Wrestle with thy loins, and then
Wheeze thee whiles, and whoop again!

Newspapers – A Love-Hate Relationship – 3

The Orange County Register (Newspaper Hate – would like to love)

Well, I guess it was too good to last. For the first time in two weeks on last Saturday, Dec. 6, I received a copy of the Register. Too much of a good thing: didn’t get one Sunday and didn’t get one today. Also, found out a friend of my wife’s who lives just a couple of miles away hasn’t gotten a copy since October.

LA Examiner - Newspaper
LA Examiner

If things continue this way the Register will go the way of the LA Herald-Express and the LA Examiner, for which my father used to work.

LA Times: Three articles (Newspaper Love, well sort of)

1) Fewer pass state bar exam

Ah, breaks my heart, as though we didn’t already have too many lawyers already.

2) Newspaper Editorial: The troubling militarization of local police

Under current programs the US military gives police departments used military equipment. Just what a local police department needs – military equipment.

This might have made sense years ago when military equipment and civilian arms were identical or close to it but today?

What local, or school district, police agency needs grenade launchers? LA Unified, maybe?

Two years ago Burbank got a new armored car and sold its used one to South Pasadena for $1.

Saddleback College police need a mine-resistant armored vehicle?

Wheatland, CA (Pop. 2300) needs five M16 rifles?

Do we really need police departments that look, and maybe act, like occupying armies?

3) Newspaper Op-Ed: The pope’s woman problem

The Catholic Church, and Pope Francis, does not treat women on a par with men, e.g., no female priests.

Does Islam treat women on a par with men?

Does Judaism treat women on a par with men?

How many groups, religious or otherwise, really treat women the same way they treat men?

I’ll give it to you straight folks: it isn’t just “the pope’s woman problem.”

“To Protect and to Serve” : Kelly Thomas and us

On July 5th, 2011 Kelly Thomas was subdued and hospitalized after a confrontation with Fullerton, California police. He died at the UC Irvine Medical Center on July 10th, 2011. The confrontation was videotaped and widely played on television news and talk shows. Two of the police officers involved were charged with involuntary manslaughter; in addition, one of them was also charged with second degree murder and the other with assault under cover of authority.

Their trial began on December 2nd, 2013 and on January 13th, 2014 a jury found them not guilty on all charges.

But the story does not end here.

Kelly Thomas’ father will go ahead with his lawsuit against the officers and the FBI will investigate to see if there is cause for the federal government to get involved. One of the officers has said he will try to get his job with the Fullerton PD back. The DA may run into re-election trouble. Life goes on.

Many of us refuse to go along with a jury verdict when that verdict does not run parallel with our own thinking. Twelve average and ordinary citizens listened to all of the evidence presented by both sides in this case and decided that the defendants were not guilty of the charges brought against them. But, many disagree and between civil lawsuits and possible federal civil rights lawsuits we’ll subject these officers to “double jeopardy” under the guise of justice.

We don’t take up our quest for “justice” with a gun; we use a lawyer instead.

Deadly Force

I think, however, that there is a larger issue here than the guilt or innocence of these police officers – the issue of police involved violence.

Is there no training for police in the use of non-lethal means to control suspects? Must police go for their guns or dog-pile a suspect to arrest him? I can understand the use of deadly force when a suspect is confirmed to have a gun and has used, or threatens to use it. But otherwise – no, NO, NO!

Mentally ill guy on the street – Kelly Thomas (?), possibly on drugs – six policemen struggle to subdue him. Is someone during the struggle going to lose it? Probably – it’s only human nature. What to do instead? Talk to him without threatening him or shouting and escalating things; wait for a supervisor to arrive and take a net out of a police car trunk and throw it over the guy if necessary. Surely there is room for a net in the police car (and the training to use it during the time an officer spends in the police academy)? Let him get tangled up and exhaust himself; don’t beat him to death.

Suspect comes at an officer with a knife – what to do? Pull out a gun and put five or six bullets into him? No – pull out a nightstick/billy club and disable him, but don’t kill him; surely police are still trained to use such traditional weapons as billy clubs (aren’t they?).

Suspect reaches into a pocket; it’s a gun – several shots from two police officers later the suspect is dead – no gun, just a cell phone beside the body.

How many stories have we seen in the last few years of people dying after confrontations with police which involved “look-alike” guns or objects which officers thought were guns but weren’t? How many stories involved police shooting at vehicles and people and hitting them multiple (many, many) times? And, how many of these incidents involved innocent people thought by police to be someone else?

We seem to have become a society which goes for the “nuclear option” first. We arm our police with pistols, shotguns and assault rifles. What about arming them with common sense and a bit more regard for their fellow-man?

Protect

During the 1950s Officer Joseph S. Dorobek submitted “To Protect and to Serve” as the motto for the Los Angeles Police Academy. It has since become the motto for the Los Angeles Police Department and, in many minds, the motto for all police.

Protect – I looked up the word on Google and got the following:

verb
verb: protect; 3rd person present: protects; past tense: protected; past participle: protected; gerund or present participle: protecting
1.
keep safe from harm or injury.
“he tried to protect Kelly from the attack”

synonyms: keep safe, keep from harm, save, safeguard, preserve, defend, shield, cushion, insulate, hedge, shelter, screen, secure, fortify, guard, watch over, look after, take care of, keep

I see nothing here about shooting first and asking questions later. Train police to use common sense and brain power first; use deadly force, or the threat of it, only as a last resort.