This preliminary report is aimed to outline the most pressing issues with community policing in Savannah, GA, and to provide some discursive insights into how the functioning of the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department can be made de facto consistent with the slogan ‘to serve and protect’. The most challenging obstacle on the way of reaching this objective has to do with the fact that, even though 55% of Savannah’s residents are African-Americans, the Department’s operative principles continue to remain methodologically Eurocentric and therefore – innately racist. The most recent illustrative proof that this is indeed being the case can serve the incident of police officers having used stun guns on Patrick Mumford (a 24-year-old African-American resident of Savannah), simply because he happened to look similar to the person that they were looking to arrest. Even though this incident (as well as many similar ones) removes any reasonable doubt as to the fact that the practice of racial profiling continues to define the Department’s functioning, as a whole, its spokesmen keep referring to such a suggestion (voiced by the representatives Savannah’s Black community) in terms of an urban myth. For example, while addressing the ensued public outcry about this incident, Police Chief Joseph Lumpkin stated, “We must consider all the facts and not rush to unfair judgments… intended to mislead and inflame the public against the officers involved” (Ray, 2016, para. 10). At the same time, however, it became a commonplace practice in Georgia to fire police officers on account of some of them having used n-word while socializing with others through social media, such as Facebook (Suarez, 2016). Apparently, tasing an innocent Black youth almost to death without any warning is not ‘racism’. ‘Racism’ is mentioning n-word (which most African-Americans have long ago ceased to regard offensive) in one’s drunken reply to a post on Facebook.
Therefore, it will not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that there is the clearly defined Orwellian (bizarre) quality to the discourse of community policing in the US, in general, and Georgia, in particular. In its turn, this can be explained by the fact that the effectiveness of the concerned practice continues to be accessed through the lenses of political correctness – something that results in severing the last remaining links between this practice and the notion of sanity. What it means is that the foremost precondition for restoring public trust in police will be the policy-makers’ willingness to reassess the validity of many legal principles within the discursive framework of the US Law. The following responses to the provided questions are meant to prove contributive in this respect.
- Police officers are as likely to commit felonies, as the way of promoting their personal agenda, as it is the case with everybody else. The reason for this has to do with the sheer strength of influence that one’s paleomammalian cortex (limbic system) exerts over his or her rational mind. Because biologically speaking people are nothing but ‘hairless apes’, they are innately predisposed to be striving to become rich, as well as to succeed in propagating their genes and attaining a dominant status within the society (food, sex, domination) – even without being aware of it consciously (Vaillant, 2011). It is understood, of course, that such people’s agenda has nothing to do with the socially constructed notions of ‘morality’ or ‘ethics’. For our brain’s limbic system, it is of no importance, whatsoever, how we go about reaching the above mentioned objectives. All that matters, in this regard, is that we do it in the most expedient and energetically efficient (without applying much effort) way. What this means is that for as long as a particular individual has a good reason to believe that it would be possible for him to get away with committing a ‘life-advancing’ crime, he will most definitely do it – regardless of whether this person is a police officer or not.
- There can be very little doubt that capital punishment does represent a thoroughly legitimate instrument of crime control. The validity of this suggestion can be illustrated regarding the fact that it is specifically the states that have abandoned death penalty, which feature the nation-highest rates of homicide (Fagan, Zimring, & Geller, 2006). This simply could not be otherwise – the fear of death in people has always been considered the most effective demotivator of crime. Therefore, when it comes to arguing that this form of criminal punishment can no longer be considered appropriate, the opponents of death penalty tend to focus on the affiliated ethical issues. For example, they often suggest that the legitimation of capital punishment will necessarily result in making it possible for many wrongfully accused people to end losing their lives due to a judicial error. Nevertheless, it is only a matter of time before the ongoing progress in the field of forensic science will reduce the probability for such a scenario to take place down to zero. On the other hand, sparing the lives of those who most definitely deserve to die (such as serial killers, for example) due to some utterly abstract humanitarian considerations, will result in discrediting the very principle of criminal justice in the eyes of law-abiding citizens – hence, causing them to question the government’s legitimacy.
- In order for a particular measure aimed at eliminating the instances of Injustice/oppression at the hands of the criminal justice system to prove effective, it must be both: scientifically sound and ideologically/religiously unbiased. For example, the reason why America’s world-largest population of prisoners continues to grow rather rapidly, with the rate of recidivist crimes in the US reaching up to 80%, is that the functioning of the country’s penal system remains affected by the millennia-old moralistic conventions of Judeo-Christianity. According to them, one’s criminal mindedness is reflective of the concerned person’s ‘pact with devil’. Therefore, a convicted criminal must be tortured (either physically or mentally) for some lengthy period so that ‘evil spirits’ that presumably reside in his or her body would consider escaping. The retributive (as opposed to rehabilitative) paradigm of criminal punishment, adopted in the US, directly derives out of this claim – hence, the assumption that by serving time in jail criminals are being ‘corrected’ (Cook & Powell, 2003). The fact that it is namely in jails where first-time offenders become hardened criminals is simply not taken into consideration. As a result, we get to hear of more and more instances of injustice/oppression taking place in American jails – the more prisoners, the more there are complains of having been treated unfairly from them.
- As it is now, the system of justice in this country is indeed best described as highly prejudicious. The reason for this is simple – it is expected to function in accordance with the ideological conventions of the governmentally endorsed policy of multiculturalism/political correctness, which stands in a striking opposition to the very notion of commonsense logic. Therefore, while on the line of duty, police officers experience two mutually incompatible urges. On one hand, they do try hard to contribute to the cause of the society’s betterment by taking dangerous criminals off the street. On the other hand, however, they aspire to rise through the ranks while making a career in the field of law enforcement. The latter objective can only be achieved if police officers stay on good terms with their superiors. In their turn, many high-ranking cops experience a strong pressure from governmental officials to keep the crime-related statistical data more or less ‘adjusted’ with what happens to be the currently endorsed (by the government) outlook on the causes of crime and the purpose of criminal punishment. Consequently, this creates a strong motivation for police officers to apply different treatments to the different (ethnically) categories of criminals. The most effective way to address the situation would be to outlaw politicization in the domain of law enforcement.
- If a former police officer is sentenced to death it means that there were a number of good reasons for such a judicial decision to be passed, in the first place. The act of death-sentencing would be most likely to take place as the reaction to the convicted person’s involvement in conspiring against the US, or his/her active role in perpetrating a particularly heinous crime, which resulted in causing many deaths. Both case-scenarios presuppose that, as a result of having perpetrated either of these crimes, the convict has willingly transgressed the ‘serve and protect’ principle. In its turn, this eliminates any rationale, whatsoever, to think that the person’s former affiliation with law enforcement should have any effect on the process of judicial decision-making with respect to his or her case. Therefore, the city council should refrain from becoming involved in the issue – hence, proving its adherence to the idea that all citizens are equal before the law.
- Capital punishment is indeed justified in terms of costs and benefits. The two main functions that it serves are:
- Helping to preserve the society’s structural integrity. By being exposed to the news about infamous criminals having been sentenced to death, people are able to confirm to themselves that the government (represented by its judicial branch) is indeed very serious about combating crime. As a result, citizens are provided with a powerful incentive to refrain from becoming affiliated with crime.
- Enabling law-abiding citizens to feel safe while out on the street. The reason for this is that, as practice shows, there is no guarantee that the serial killers sentenced to life imprisonment will never be able to get out – the currently enacted parole system makes this scenario not as unlikely as most people tend to assume. And, as the relevant statistical data indicates, it rarely takes more than a few months, before a serial killer who has been released from jail (due to old age of rapidly declining health) strikes again (Kleinfeld, 2016). This explains the logic of referring to capital punishment as the ‘ultimate measure of societal protection’, as it used to be the case in the USSR.
References
Cook, K., & C. Powell. (2003). Christianity and punitive mentalities: A qualitative study. Crime, Law and Social Change, 39(1), 69-89.
Fagan, J., Zimring, F., & Geller, A. (2006). Capital punishment and capital murder: Market share and the deterrent effects of the death penalty. Texas Law Review, 84(7), 1803-1867.
Kleinfeld, J. (2016). Two cultures of punishment. Stanford Law Review, 68(5), 933-1036.
Ray, B. (2016). Savannah man seeks apology after police use stun gun in case of mistaken identity. Savannah Now. Web.
Suarez, A. (2016). Police racism: Georgia officer fired for using n-word in Facebook messages. International Business Times. Web.
Vaillant, G. (2011). The neuroendocrine system and stress, emotions, thoughts and feelings. Mens Sana Monographs, 9(1), 113-128.