politics ::.
It’s About Rogue Cops and A Corrupted System |
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During the August 26 march on MPD district 6 station, held to protest the killing of Juan Perez by a Milwaukee Police officer, speaker after speaker called on Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann and the City of Milwaukee to support civilian efforts designed to investigate police conduct more thoroughly. To find the cause of a problem is to find its solution. One solution being advocated for by a coalition of organizations called the Milwaukee Coalition Against Police Brutality, is the creation of a Civilian Review Board. A Civilian Review Board reviews all allegations of police misconduct by an elected independent body of civilians elected by the community to represent them during reviews of police complaints by civilians. Currently, it is the Police and Fire Commission which reviews citizen complaints against police misconduct, however, the Police and Fire Commission has not acted on the last 815 complaints filed against the Milwaukee Police over the past few years, rendering the process a complete failure. In the last 20-years, Milwaukee District Attorney E. Michael McCann has not issued a criminal charge against any police officer who caused the death of a civilian. This record of infallibility on the part of the Milwaukee Police is incredible. Cleary, the notion that we have a perfect police cohort with not bad apples among the good cops presents a contradiction to recent news reports of police officers engaged in criminal activity in just the past few months. Three police officers are up on felony criminal charges for nearly beating Frank Jude to death in October of last year and several other officers have been brought up on charges ranging from drug activity to extortion. This leaves one wondering and scratching one’s head asking how the Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission could fail to act on at least one of those 815 complaints filed by Milwaukee civilians complaining about police misconduct. When we connect the dots, Prado and Jenkins, Fields and Rodríquez, Bell and Pérez and Jude and countless others, you have to ask yourself, “what is the cause of police brutality? Is it rogue cops sprinkled throughout the department, or is the system corrupted with special interests politics? History has taught me that oppression and injustice take many forms. Nevertheless, what they share in common is that those most impacted by oppression and injustice are the poor and uneducated classes of our society. They are prey to the rogue police who engage in abusive actions against civilians as a means to entertain themselves and seek prestige while embedding their authority and power in the mindset of the weak and vulnerable. Seldom does anyone speak on their behalf. No one of stature would ever dream of coming to the streets of our community defending the rights of the weak and poor when police kill a civilian, for fear of being targeted and labeled as a supporter of thugs and malcontents. So, our undereducated and poverty class, like the serfs in Europe, find themselves as pawns of the nobility, merely here as cogs to be used to provide leaders of this community with title and possession, and as cover to continue their rackets of empire building and self-indulgence. Justice is but a fleeting notion to the poor, while it is a part of life for the affluent. When most police engage the wealthy, the well-to-do are usually treated with respect. On the other hand, when the poor are confronted by the police more often than not, it is the poor who are cussed at and treated with indignation by some police officers. Police will say that they are treated with disrespect on the streets by civilians and that they deserve to be respected as well, this is true. But cops are paid to be public servant professionals. They are trained in the art of public communication. Taxpayers spend millions sending police officers to the Milwaukee Police Academy to learn law enforcement. Cops are paid over $5,500.00 a month in salary and benefits to protect and serve and to be professional. Do cops deserve to be respected? Sure they do. But it is the police who must show themselves to be professional. Rolling onto a scene and yelling at a group of small children by calling them “little shits” is not what a professional police officer does. People respect a strong character and professional presentation. People, unless they have the social interactions of a baboon, will respond to such demeanor in a positive way. There are rogue cops in the Milwaukee Police giving the rest of the department a bad image. Hopefully, good police officers will begin to correct locker room talk that promotes violent confrontations and glorify beatings and shootings of civilians. • Miranda is a national award winning columnist, Latino community activist and Editor-in-Chief of the Milwaukee Spanish Journal. Email at: rmiranda@wi.rr.com >>More articles by Robert Miranda |