Black chiefs and black cops cannot change racist police culture
A former African-American police chief was fired for trying to dismantle what she characterized as racial paternalism, misogyny, and nepotism. RaShall Brackney lost her job when the city of Chorletsville decided to allow racism and corruption to continue rather than addressing the systemic issues eating away at the community, according to former chief Brackney.
Yes, this is the same Chorletsville, Virginia, that became infamous for the unite the right tiki-torch rally in which counter-protester Heather Heyer was mowed down by a white terrorist and killed.
“They would rather conspire to oust me than dismantle or confront corrupt, violent individuals in CPD and city government.”
(Rashall Brackney).
The former chief told the media that her attempts to change the good old boy culture got so dangerous that she felt the need to have her service weapon in her hand when she left the stationhouse out of fear that she would be killed by the officers under her command.
Brackney says she was fired in part for disbanding and reprimanding the SWAT team and its members after an incident in which videos of the team surfaced using profanity. This followed an independent release that found group chat texts between officers containing “nude videos of females and themselves” and texts in which they said they wanted to “kill” City staff members.
The former chief filed a $10 million lawsuit against the city of Chorletsvilles and several city-employed individuals because she was wrongfully terminated based on her race and gender.
A federal judge dismissed her case on the motion to dismiss filed by the city despite all of the evidence of corruption and crimes submitted by the chief’s attorneys!!!
The assault against chief Brackney did not come from the police alone; city officials and citizens opposed to the changes she put forward banded to have her removed.
Here is one petition started by one gun-monger who decided the chief attempts to rein in the proliferation of guns was an assault on his whiteness.
James Crocker started this petition to City Manager Tarron J Richardson and 1 other
“We the people of the Commonwealth of Virgina, Are calling for the resignation of Chief of Police RaShall Brackney. We would like her to relinquish her position as Chief of Police, On the grounds that she is not honoring her oath to the Constitution of The United States of America and would like to see law abiding citizens turned to criminals. We firmly believe in our second amendment rights and we don’t appreciate our appointed officials stepping on our Constitution. So we are demanding that our officials either uphold their oath or resign. We call on City Manager Tarron J. Richardson to force resignation for RaShall Brackney’s crimes against our second amendment rights to bear arms. She is working along side Mom’s Demand Action an activist group calling for more gun control, when she should be tracking the real criminals, the ones obtaining guns illegally the drug dealers the gangs etc… We urge our government officials to stand by their oath and to not infringe upon our rights. We ask Tarron J. Richardson to take action if not him than our Mayor our Governor and even President Trump himself please listen to the voice of reason and force this resignation. See this through for we shall not be bullied by tyrannical forces. All we wish is to exercise our 2nd amendment right freely and to not be threatened anymore.”
Former chief Brackney’s statement speaks to the smoke being blown up the collective rear end of this country’s forty million black people.
It is just as disrespectful to our community to suggest that hiring a few black cops will change the culture of impunity that has characterized police response toward the African-American community. The morons who murdered Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennesee, demolish that myth. In instance after instance, we see evidence that black cops are either (a) too scared to speak up when white cops abuse blacks or (b) they are more complicit in the criminal conduct than the white cops.
We see what happens when people who never had power are given power. Black officers who, in many cases themselves, were victims of police violence as youngsters, feeling they are powerful because they have a gun and badge, become just as bad as white cops. Unfortunately, the rules of the game as to police accountability are different. They are just too stupid to realize it.
The killers of Tyree Nichols are now coming to terms with that reality.
But it is not just about black cops. Most police officers are not the most formally or otherwise educated individuals. And so vested with the sudden infusion of power after a few weeks of training can be dangerous to the defenseless public.
The idea that hiring a few black cops to lead departments or hiring a few token blacks into a culture of policing steeped in racism, misogyny, and lack of accountability is tantamount to sticking a band-aid on the entry wound of someone shot in the gut. To begin with, the band-aid will most likely do nothing to stop the bleeding. Secondly, it will certainly not help the likely organ damage inside the person’s body, not to mention the need to repair and reconstruct vital organs and tissues and remove the bullet from the body.
“Getting officer buy-in can be a big challenge … particularly, white officers are likely to get defensive, Jacinta Gau, professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida. “We need diversity of all sorts, but we need it, particularly in those higher ranks,” Gau said. “It is not enough to have a Black chief.”
The caustic and dangerous culture that permeates police departments has nothing to do with people of color who may happen to lead them. It comes from an ill-conceived belief that white people are inherently superior to everyone else and are entitled to establish the rules by which everyone else lives.
It is a culture on which the very nation was built. It permeates every branch and stratum of national life. Policing is merely the enforcement arm of it.
No one should be surprised that the courts, from the highest to the lowest, side with the police over the citizens they are supposed to serve, even when they are wrong.
.
.
.
.