I agree with you.
I beg everyone to check out what's going on in Richmond, CA (Koan's old town).
eastbayexpress.com
When Liberals Take Control of Police
Cops stop shooting people. Political protests end peacefully. And crime drops dramatically. Just ask Richmond.
By Robert Gammon @RobertGammon
Chris Magnus.
Joseph Schell/File photo
For the past century, moderates and conservatives have dominated the debate over what constitutes effective policing in the Bay Area and throughout the nation. Indeed, the conversation has been so one-sided toward the law-and-order crowd that it's often taken for granted — even among some liberals — that the best way for police to fight crime and combat political unrest is with overwhelming force. This point of view also has been repeatedly used to justify the lethal use of force by police against any perceived threat. As such, it's not surprising that Oakland police officers shot thirty people from 2008 to 2013, and killed twenty of them.
Nor is it surprising that the City of Oakland has been forced to pay millions of dollars over the past few years to political protesters who were seriously injured by Oakland police officers. It's also not surprising that police departments throughout the nation have become increasingly militarized in the past decade as they've bolstered their combat capabilities with sophisticated weaponry.
But one police department in the East Bay is proving that the law-and-order crowd has been wrong all these years, and that overwhelming force — especially lethal force — is not only unjustified, but completely unnecessary. Since 2007, the Richmond Police Department, under the command of Chief Chris Magnus, the most progressive police chief in the Bay Area, has not had a single fatal shooting by one of its officers, a fact that was first reported last weekend by the Contra Costa Times.
When Magnus took over the troubled Richmond PD in 2006, he quickly realized that overwhelming force was not the answer. In 2006 and 2007, Richmond cops shot five people, killing one of them. So he instituted numerous reforms, including training officers to defuse tense situations without firing their weapons. Magnus also emphasized the importance of investigating crime, and eschewed so-called hotspot policing, in which a department saturates an area with cops like an occupying force. "We are surgical," he told the CoCo Times earlier this year. "We concentrate on people that need to be focused on."
Magnus also installed a robust community-policing program, deploying officers into neighborhoods to forge relationships with residents. The effort was designed to reverse a longstanding problem in Richmond in which residents distrusted the city's violent police force and refused to cooperate with it. Magnus also reformed the way police respond to political demonstrations, training officers to take a softer, gentler approach. |
