How Much is Too Much?

The recent attempt to defend the merits of the use of force has opened a “Pandora’s Box” of complex questions.  What would generally be perceived as “making its wording more clearly” depends largely clear to whom.  If this “wording” is aimed at those sworn to protect and serve, the bullet still does not have a name on it.  It can just as easily claim the life of a police officer whose family may have the same or similar questions as the black community or any community.  How much is too much?

Support for policies and procedure may follow state and national guidelines well enough but the teeth in them protrude unsightly and the public detects a bad over-bite.  It does not improve the face value of perceived authority.  It seems that whenever City Council members have to ask for clarifications on the availability of it to individual police officers and community members or on something they had no prior knowledge of, there is something stinking in Stockholm or rotten in Rotterdam.

As a community, no harm, no foul is a poor excuse for enacting a procedural “use of force” policy by any stretch of public awareness.  Even when there is sufficient review on such policies there will always be someone who will say “I didn’t know.”  False impressions in any conversation whether public or private are like good intentions, they must be reckoned to clear thinking and sound judgment.  Incidents such as what took place on October 9, 2009 must be thought through.

It has been anonymously said: “Often the voice of conscience whispers; often we silence it but always we will have to pay.”  Today, there is a more nuanced but equally damaged perception of policy and practice, so much so, that blacks, more than and minority, believe the term “racial justice” is an oxymoron.

If the public concludes that incarceration is only one aspect of this menace that overwhelmingly resonate the sanction of city fathers, then our job as a community (whatever the color) must work untiringly to achieve fairness and equity in racial justice at every level of government.

The daily parade, through the court system, of young black men—and not-so-young—in handcuffs and orange colored prison jump-suits are usually replaced with black body bags.  We, as the public must ask ourselves the question, “How much is too much?”

Reverend Jerome C. Chambers,

President NAACP-Champaign County