A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SCHEME

The police promotion event euphemistically called National Night Out is a disturbing, but not surprising continuation of America’s gradual drift to the right. Innocuous activities such as block parties, festivals and cookouts all serve to mask the uneasy and dishonest relationship between police and the communities they are paid to serve. A glance at the National Night Out website exposes this alarming trend.

As Americans across the country are urged to report and persecute fugitives seeking abortions, the National Night Out website proudly announces their DogWalker Watch program, which “provides neighbors a new, more effective way to observe and report suspicious activity in their neighborhood.”

This is not the time to celebrate American police practices. We have the paradox of the Akron, Ohio police department shooting an unarmed black man 46 times while the mass murderers in Ilinois, South Carolina, Tennessee and Michigan (all white men) are apprehended without a shot fired. We have the entire Uvalde, Texas police department under investigation for criminal malfeasance; To Serve And Protect, indeed.

While the Black Lives Matter movement is crying out for desperately needed police transformation, it is unconscionable that White Americans should hold a cookout and cavalierly fete any police department. This is a time in America for deep soul searching. Why are police departments so vicious and trigger happy when confronting Black individuals while White criminals are treated with deference?

The National Night Out for White families, who will casually engage in clubby fraternization with armed government officials who have relentlessly used brutality and coercion against an entire group of Americans, betrays a shocking ignorance of both American history and present day police behavior. It is arrogant and insensitive.

Many of us thought the days before civil rights and women’s rights were a distant memory; a fading picture in our rearview mirror. Now the sharp right turn the country has taken has put us on a headlong crash course with the good ol’ 1950s.

Police departments across the country need a National Night of Reform, not a parade down Main Street and a no host barbecue.