29 Aug 2014 Police-Community Relations Could Be Improved By Community Common Sense

Amidst all the talk about the police needing better community relations, Project 21 co-chairman Horace Cooper suggests agitators and a rush to judgment whip up so many emotions during tense situations — such as the one recently in Ferguson, Missouri — that people sometimes fail to see there are common sense ways to improve the relationship between cops and the community as well as promote less reliance on government assistance.

For example, Horace said:

I’m open to the idea that law enforcement can — anytime it wants to — sit down with its community where they operate and have conversations.  But,… don’t shoot at the officer, don’t wrestle with the officer, don’t engage in lawbreaking and it’s gonna be really, really hard to actually meet up with an officer [in a confrontational situation].

In his discussion on the 8/28/14 edition of “The Rick Amato Show” on the One America News Network, Horace added that there has been a rush to judgment in the case of Michael Brown being shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.  All of the facts are still not available and a grand jury is considering potential charges against the officer, yet the combination of agitators, emotional people within the community and a media that embraces the racial narrative of the case gives people a “false impression of where things are” and makes anger and violence about it more likely.

Horace said that the agitators bring with them a political agenda that society owes these communities something and is also holding people back.  This leads to bad behavior such as the rioting and looting that plagued Ferguson for a serios of nights after Brown’s death.  Instead, Horace suggested that a true civil rights agenda would be “tak[ing] productive steps that get [people] to a point where [they’re] financially independent.”  He pointed out:

I would argue that there is resentment that people like Al Sharpton and Benjamin Crump and Jesse Jackson encourage and stoke.  And when I watched the funeral — instead of allowing the family to grieve over the loss of their child, what I saw were people taking opportunities to tell people a bad idea.  And that [idea] is that America is bad and it’s OK for you to act bad in response.