With No Community Ties, Police Forces Are Occupiers

[Commentary]

Relations between police and the communities they occupy cannot improve as long as officers have no ethnic or other emotional bonds with the people being policed.

The catholic Irish and catholic Italians who dominate most police departments nationwide in the U.S. have never looked upon the people they terrorize as humans. This will not change by itself or with empty statements about "goodwill."

In many countries including Mexico where i live the police come from the same ethnic and socio-economic class as the people they observe and arrest. Consequently the barbarity we so often see in the U.S. doesn't exist. Now the Mexican army is completely different due in large part to the fact that troops from one region are deliberately deployed outside their home areas so as to lessen any congenial feelings they may have for the populace.

Community control is the obvious answer. But how can the people attain this given a total lack of power over every aspect of their lives? Can anyone imagine Turkish police patrolling German communities or Hindus patrolling White communities in England?

Can anyone imagine Black police patrolling Italian neighborhoods in New York?