I can’t imagine that this article will make a lot of people happy because talking about law enforcement isn’t a great way to raise one’s popularity. The “thin blue line” is a term that typically refers to the concept of the police as the line which keeps society from descending into violent chaos and it also honors fallen cops. Lately that flag or symbol has taken a lot of heat. Detractors insist the symbol makes people of color feel unsafe and some communities have banned it. As if that’s the issue on crime?
What’s astonishing to me are the number of young kids being killed in shootings. Check out the statistics in Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Flint, and I could go on and on and none of them killed by cops. They were killed by criminals. Sadly, many of those criminals are Black. Police officers aren’t making minority neighborhoods unsafe; criminals are. That’s not to say we don’t have opportunities to improve relations between our inner cities and law enforcement because we do.
Last year police officers nationally killed 18 “unarmed” blacks, according to the Washington Post, a category that includes suspects grabbing an officer’s gun or fleeing in a stolen car with a loaded pistol on the car seat. Assuming, as a highly conservative estimate, 8,300 black homicide victims in 2020 (the toll will likely be over 10,000), those 18 unarmed blacks would make up 0.2% of all black homicide victims. The vast majority of the rest will have been killed by black criminals.
What frightens me more is that the City of Saginaw and cities like it with rising crime rates will never reach its full vibrancy and increase its tax base by being an unsafe city. I definitely understand the sensitivities surrounding our elected officials and the great divide between the community and the police force but if not them then who? It is imperative that our city leaders foster a better relationship between its citizens and the police force in order to truly drive our inner cities to greater heights.
So whether you support the police and the thin-blue-line icon or not, the idea that they are the only thing standing between order and chaos is borne out daily.
