~Indian Country Today Media Network
The death of Sandra Bland, an African American woman who died in a jail cell on July 13 has the nation abuzz about the ongoing saga of police brutality against people of color, and this time, it is becoming even more apparent just how poorly women of color are treated
But a lesser known story regarding a beautiful young Lakota woman is just as worthy of our attention. On [July 6, 2015] 24-year-old Sarah Lee Circle Bear of Clairmont, South Dakota, was found unconscious in a holding cell in Brown County Jail in Aberdeen. Circle Bear was jailed on a bond violation.
Witnesses stated that before being transferred to a holding cell, Circle Bear pleaded to jailers that she was in excruciating pain. Jail staff allegedly responded by dismissing her cries for help, telling her to “knock it off,” and “quit faking.”
A society's level of civilization should be judged on how we treat the weaker among us those poor, those ill, those socially weaker (via race, ethnicity, gender) and those jailed. How well a society treats its middle class and rich doesn't say much of anything. People with no dignity or principles at all will treat middle class and rich well most of the time.
Judging by the actions of our police lately, the U.S. is not a civilized place. Unacknowledged racism aside in people like those responsible for the deaths of those like Sandra Bland, Sam DuBose, Rexdale Henry, and Sarah Lee Circle Bear, I'm starting to think that the blue culture (police culture) is too soul damaging for an individual to do for a long period of time.
I already know that a cops ability to feel like they have absolute power (as repeatedly verified by our courts) is soul corrupting over a long period of time. However, I'm also starting to think the soul becomes too hardened by focusing on the negative side of human nature for too long.
Community policing alone is not going to fix this. To be more specific, having black and brown cops is not going to fix this. I saw a video just last month where a black police officer was harassing a 14 year old girl because the 7 year old girl pressed a police call button; a bunch of black women had to group together and force him back into his car and out of their neighborhood.
Know why? Absolute power corrupts absolutely no matter what color the skin is.
Maybe we need some sort of system where certain section of the community rotates into police work. This seems completely unworkable to me in a practical way. But maybe Fire, Police, and some other state run agency could rotate duties? Prison guards sure as heck need to be rotated out into doing something else.
Some of these cops have been rendered empathy-less.
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949)
I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the
defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.
Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Quotation: Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to
watching the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/07/28/manning-sarah-lee-circle-bear-died-while-police-custody-family-seeks-justice-161204
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/07/28/manning-sarah-lee-circle-bear-died-while-police-custody-family-seeks-justice-161204
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