We know it needs to change; we are a little bit stuck at how.

My Friend Kara posted a perfect summary:

This is the perfectly posed question and I've been thinking about the root causes of many of the systemic problems we have in this country and what needs to change to fix the problems, instead of addressing the symptoms - police brutality being the biggest symptom - it is not the problem. Changing strangle laws won't fix the problem, it can only fix a symptom.  We must change the laws of morality that allow police their wide scope of authority to infringe upon lives and fix the "justice" system that does anything but provide justice.

First, as with all problems we want to solve, we must admit the problem exists.  I know racism exists because I know racist people!  My grandmother had a black dog named the N word, a word that took me a long time to understand why I couldn’t say it, but we all need to understand why.  I also know racism is about ignorance.  If we skinned 10 different color bodies after death, very few people could tell any differences based on the inside.  We are all humans—homo-sapiens — we do not have a different a different genus for different skin color.  Thinking we are different is only ignorance, but ignorance exists everywhere so what we can do it try to reduce the ignorance, not just on color, but on the causes of racial injustice. 

Most of these problems are really Class problems, but racism is used to keep the classes in their place and therefore these laws are used against people of color more so than others in their economic class, and racists are used to keep the classes apart by using ignorance to divide the classes that should be united.  We need to fix both, the Class and Race problems.

 To do this, we need all our family members and community to wake up to how the laws are implemented.  Drugs legalization sound frightening, until we educate our community on how drug laws have been used to create our Prison Industrial Complex, and if you want to see where racism thrives most - its Prisons hands down, ask anyone - where everything is based on race and we all know rehabilitation is a joke.  In the South, it likely you end working as a slave again while in prison, so much so that local sheriffs complain about a reduction in inmates.  If this were not true, I’d think it was a conspiracy theory.  The majority of arrests are drug arrests and the majority of drug arrests are for users, not dealers, and the majority of those arrested are people of color despite the use being equal if not skewed white.  Want proof of this, just look at the prison time for cocaine versus crack.  It’s the same drug from the same plant, but prison sentences are not the same for its users: powder is used by elites, rocks by the poor, sentences are about 10x as harsh for using a rock instead powder.

Laws of Morality

If you haven’t read Chasing the Scream, it a must read, providing real insight into how our drug laws are causing the violence on our streets.  Meanwhile, American’s are pumping themselves fuller than ever of “Legal” drugs, like the billions of opioid pills handed out over pharmaceutical counters over the past decade.  Put those drug dealers in jail?  The pharmaceutical companies who lied about the addictiveness and incentivized doctors to write so many prescriptions that at one point, according to the CDC, 80% (THAT IS NOT A TYPO) of American’s got a script.  255 Million prescriptions at a rate of 81.3 prescriptions per 100 persons in 2012!  We have a war on drugs?  Who knew?  We seem really to have a war on where you get your drugs, not drugs in general.

Meanwhile, police and gangs now agree – that drugs being illegal is great for business.  We have more police than ever and more violence and more organized crime.  More arrests, more prisoners, and once in prison life is never the same.  We assume that once you are out of prison that someone is free from whatever criminal gangs they joined while in prison to stay alive.  Nothing could be further from the truth, where often those on the inside control the lives of family and relatives on the inside and the outside.  We give no actual rehabilitation and society does not treat former felons as having served their time, instead these convictions are held over these people as proof of a character flaw and it follows them around for their entire life.

Criminal Injustice System

We would all like to pretend that you get a “fair” trial, but real freedom in America is about having the resources to hire attorneys to represent you and get you out of trouble.  Many poor American’s never receive adequate legal resources as public defenders have piles of cases and no time to investigate the truth.  Police can, have, do, and will continue to plant evidence.  One of the reasons for the blue shield is that so many officers are complicit at some level.  Some take it to the Training Day level of straight up robber, while others simply stay quiet while it happens.  It is easy to justify when you see so many of the bad things as officers do.

What if we required all defense teams to be given the same amount of resources as the prosecution?  If the District Attorney’s office spends 300 hours on a criminal case, the defense should also be given access to the same amount of time and it should be paid for by the state.  If I am to be assumed innocent, why should I have to pay to prove it?  The DA’s office can spend thousands of hours investigating and interviewing witnesses, meanwhile, most of the accused are stuck in jail because we have a terrible bond system.  So, justice, or at least the right to defend yourself, is limited to those that have the means to pay for attorneys to defend themselves.

The same is true in business legal matters, and it is wrong there as well.  Want great examples, Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, where the legal resources they used to go after former employees for telling the truth and trying to let people know that this company was lying to shareholders and customers made those voices quiet and made their lives miserable and bankrupt.  How many years will Elizabeth Holmes do in jail for that use of legal force?  None!!  She might get some time for other fraud, but using legal bullying is a long-established legal practice in the US.  Kushner enterprises does the same to its low-income tenants, using legal resources to overwhelm those that don’t have the means to pay for legal counsel and defend themselves.

We have plenty of legal resources in America, way too many lawyers by all accounts, but they are busy getting paid a lot to write terrible laws that only benefit those that can afford to pay the legal costs, while those who don’t have enough money to defend themselves stay stuck in prison without bail money.  How can I defend myself if I cannot go investigate the case?

To change the laws, we need all people on board. Tough on drugs has been horrible from both parties - it was democrats who doubled down on more police and 3 strikes during Clinton's administration, after Reagan and Bush administrations pushed tough on crime and the War on Drugs.  A war against your own people?  Yes, and that is exactly what we have had, with police brutality just showing itself as tip of the spear in the war.  Police departments arm themselves, often with military equipment paid for by the Federal government, to fight this War against its own people.

Wanting to change laws of morality does not mean I do not support the police, no more than not wanting to have our country at war does not mean I don’t support the military.  I do support the police, I want them protecting us from violent criminals and protecting property, not knocking down my door at 3am and shooting me when I fire at them because I think they are trying to rob me.  I support our soldiers 100%, so much so that I do not want our brothers and sisters fighting unless it is absolutely necessary.  We have waged a 20-year war in Afghanistan for what exactly?  Why did we invade Iraq?  To create a vacuum for ISIS?

We have an alcohol problem in America - proving the laws of 21 don't work as intended. We tried legislating that problem away in the 1920’s, which lead to the greatest growth in organized crime until, right, the 1970’s when the war on drugs started the next huge growth in organized crime.  Organized crime leads to organized violence because you can’t call police to your house when someone steals your weed.

A quick note on cannabis, the police most favorite of arrests because it requires no police work, just a nose to the air.  Recently there are articles that prove cannabis use in Israel from the oldest of temples, almost 3,000 years ago.  This proves that we have been in husbandry with the cannabis plant for thousands of years.  In the 1940’s the government paid farmers extra to grow hemp.  But there are a lot of people who don’t like hemp, such as cotton growers, the logging industry, pharmaceutical companies, alcohol companies, etc., all of which have an economic interest to not want a natural plant to grow.  At least with this discovery, we can hope to count on the Jewish community’s support for legal cannabis and Colorado has shown, it does not increase crime.

But let’s get back to alcohol for a minute.  Alcohol is so bad for society that in the 1900’s we had laws against it – prohibition – and those proved to be only useful to criminals, and also created the easiest ways for police to get kickbacks from, and become a part of,  organized crime.  Yet while businesses were closed for Covid-19, liquor stores were open as “Essential businesses” but Alcoholic Anonymous meeting closed.  We have commercials and advertising constantly promoting alcohol for every occasion but very little information on the number of people it kills every year and the amount of violence that comes from its use.  So, alcohol, one of the worst drugs, we treat its problems as “Social” problems, and we have classes and AA meetings and family counseling, but other drugs are immediately criminal acts?

The other part of making drugs illegal is that we stopped the research on their use (again – great benefit to pharmaceutical companies, but bad for citizens).  We are finally looking into the use of natural occurring hallucinogens including psilocybin (mushrooms), ayahuasca, MDMA and LSD for their use in treating PTSD and reducing anxiety in those facing death.  We have deprived ourselves of knowledge of plants that grow naturally and instead, allow off use prescriptions for psychiatric drugs including a large use of antipsychotic drugs for off label use.

This is the conclusion of a report from the US national Institute of Health:

Atypical use has grown far beyond substitution for the now infrequently used typical agents. Antipsychotics are increasingly used for conditions where FDA approval and associated clinical evidence is less certain. Despite the value of innovation, the benefits of widening atypical antipsychotic use should be weighed against their cost, regulatory status, and incomplete nature of available evidence.

We should also note, that most of the mass shootings in the US involve the use of anti-depressants and antipsychotic drugs.  We have obviously been arresting all the wrong people.

Drug laws also allow the police to make criminals out of any of us at any time of their choosing.  Got pulled over for a traffic stop, what is that I smell?  I’ll need to you step out of the vehicle.  Then the cop plants some drugs and you are arrested and will now deal with this for months if not years to come.  Right back into the system where if you do not have the resources to defend yourself, then you have no rights.  How about no-knock warrants.  No drug war, we can stop killing innocent people in their homes by breaking down their door for no reason.

Financial Crimes against the Poor

Next, we need to talk about financial institutions, many of which, including JP Morgan, MetLife, American Honda Finance, Toyota Motor Finance, Countrywide Financial have all settled lawsuits for lending discrimination.  No one let me repeat, no one did jail time.  What did they do?  They charged African American and Hispanic borrowers more on their loans and fees just because they could.  They took advantage of government programs to make more money based on racial discrimination.  All settled, without trials and no one goes to jail. 

Lastly, let’s talk about schools.  If we lived in a fair society, where we did not consider ourselves segregated, then wouldn’t we all agree that all kids deserve the same opportunities?  We know that based on Jim Crow laws and unwritten rules around neighborhoods that people of color have consistently been forced into specific neighborhoods and school funding is based on local real estate collections.  We could make school funding a state issue, not a local one.  We tried bussing students across town, but the only real answer to undo this is equal funding.  People who are not in poor neighborhoods like to pretend that the segregation is intentional by people of color.  If that was the case then rich athletes would be moving in, not moving out.  It may be the neighborhood where they feel safe because they are surrounded by people who look like them, but they don’t want to be there.

In summary, if we want to reduce police violence and live in a more free, more equal society, we need to eliminate laws of morality, enforce drug abuse laws against pharmaceutical companies, give people the same resources to defend themselves as those that are amassed against them, ensure equal treatment for all financial transactions (especially government loan programs), and spend an equal amount of money on education for all children.  But our attitudes towards these things must change.  Both political parties are the problem.  Washington DC is a problem, it is full of old people, who are not open to change.

Just like the blue line of the police exists in large part because of all the bad shit they have done in the past, so too does Congress protect itself from having to answer for the unintended consequences of its laws on drugs, prisons and the lack of transparency around criminal prosecution.  Kamala Harris wanted to arrest parents for student truancy, and she is our “Black” representative to create change?  Biden was part of Clinton’s hiring of more police and increasing prison budgets.  Who did they arrest?  Users, many of which started using legally with prescription drugs. 

Our Needed Actions:

So, what else?  Educate our friends, our families and our communities on the facts of drug arrests, the amount of money we spend on legal drugs, especially antipsychotic drugs that are almost always part of our mass shooting epidemic and why we need to change the drug laws.  We don’t’ need to fear the “what if” everything was legal as much as we should fear the destruction we have done We need to acknowledge that the justice system is anything but fair that no one was has been reformed in prison and that prison perpetuates racism.  We need to elect local prosecutors who will stop pursuing drug cases and who want defendants to have the same resources to defend themselves.  We need to end the War against ourselves.  We need to create equal funding for all children for education.

The problem with all of these things is that change is hard, especially from old people who don’t want to see the other side because they never had to live on that side of the tracks and they don’t have friends who have had to deal with police discrimination, lack of fairness in the justice system, race problems in prisons and a lack of educational resources.  Therefore, they don’t know it exists.  Had I not played basketball in college and developed relationships with people who didn’t look like me, I would probably be one of these people that someone needs to convince, instead of knowing people who this system has affected and willing to not just acknowledge that it exits, but understand the things that need to change. 

Then we vote.  We vote for people who are not old and who are willing to change things.  Make no mistake that those in power will do a lot of things to keep things the same, remember police and drug gangs want the same thing, that we have for-profit prisons that do not treat their inhabitants as human beings but simply something to make profit from.  Pharmaceutical companies do not want legal drugs, lest their profits reduce, and we have fewer people addicted their drugs.  People in communities that have great schools do not want to discuss sharing funding with their fellow Americans who live in poorer communities.  Financial institutions love the ignorant, it is so much easier to take advantage of people then give them a financial education and honestly earn your profits.  Institutions do not change easily.  That’s why we are here. 

Police brutality is not new symptom.  Unless we address the problems instead of the symptoms then things won’t change.  To create this change, we need the attitudes of all American citizens need to evolve to allow the change and see the problems.  To do that, being Woke, means now that you know there has been racial and class injustice in America for centuries you have a responsibility to educate and continue to have the difficult conversations with your family, friends and community.  Systemic racism cannot be trampled in a day, it will take time, and it needs a lot of educators to combat the entrenched beliefs of those who came before us who don’t know their own ignorance and the effect on the system to those who end up in it.

The long winded answer of what else we can do is become an educator to help allow the path for change to be made.

Hit me up at dave@keepyours.org if you’ve got questions or want to open a discussion. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Watch our video on this here: