Statistics are meant to help us live long and healthy, not help us die early and violently. MJoTA 2013 v7n1 p0314
I love counting things. I love databases, l love rules, I love statistics. What police departments and health departments do with them, I hate.
From where I stand, when a single boy is killed in Brooklyn by a gun fired by a police officer, the statistics show that the police force has failed. When a single American child is killed when she is sitting in a car with her father, the statistics show that the police force has failed.
Statistics, publicly available statistics, show that the body count from guns tell me that in cities and towns across the United States, the police forces have failed.
Police officers know they have failed. They are us; every day I drive past the cars of 2 New Jersey state troopers who both live with their families in quiet houses, and and go to their children's sports games and Mass on Sundays.
I have seen more than one police commissioner wave data that show less murders this year than last year: proof that their police forces have their acts together and are driving the gun-toting murderers away.
What nonsense: the only successes are in towns like mine, that have not had a single gun homicide in the past decade. Haddonfield, New Jersey: 0.
Appalling to note this: Haddonfield is only 5 miles from the largest town in the county: Camden. Which has the highest rate of gun murders in the entire United States of America. I have written previously about my friend Pastor David King, who runs the most dangerous church in the country.
Gun deaths are not stopping.
On Saturday in Brooklyn a boy of 16 was shot to death by 7 bullets fired by a nervous policeman who has since reported that he believed that the boy waved a revolver at him.
Riots have erupted in Brooklyn: witnesses of the killing of the boy say he did not have a gun. New York City police report that he had a .38 revolver with 4 bullets in the chambers. I don't know. All I know is that a boy is dead and his mother is grieving this week and always.
In 1985 at the University of Pennsylvania, every department office had one or more Wang word processors: a dedicated computer for typing that was a great improvement over electric typewriters that merely typed on paper and forgot immediately every letter that was typed. The Wang word processors were big, and they frequently broke down, creating a job classification: Wang processor repairman.
During the frequent visits of our repairman, I discovered he had been a policeman. He told me his story: he had been a policeman in Philadelphia and in the line of duty, he had killed a man. And 10 years later, he had nightmares every night. He had to leave the police, he could not handle being in uniform. He lived with the horror of killing a man every day.
I am calling for disarming police officers. In the 21st century, do we not have the technology for paralyzing non-deadly force that stops suspected criminals in their tracks, and lets them wake up to defend their actions and existence? So that mothers can send their sons to college instead of to their graves.
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Fully recovered after being declared dead click here
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Council Member Williams and community leaders call for end to unrest in East Flatbush
Brooklyn, NY, March 14, 2013:
Council Member Jumaane D. Williams (D-Brooklyn) and community
leaders held a press conference on the corner of Church Avenue and
East 55th Street calling for an end to the unrest in East Flatbush.
The Council Member was joined by Melba
Brown (D-Brooklyn); 58th Assembly District Leader; Natasha and Crystal
Davis; sisters of Shantel Davis; Sherif Fraser, District Manager of
Community Board 17; Jackson Rockingster, President of Haitian American
Business Network; Marlon Peterson, program coordinator of Youth
Organizing to Save Our Streets; Shanduke McPhatter, Founder of Gangstas
Making Astronomical Community Changes, Inc.; Eric Waterman, President
of East Flatbush Village, Inc.; Steve Yamin, President of Nieuw
Amersfort Civic Association; Hazel Martinez, President of 4-in-1 Block
Association; Doris Wilson, President of East 57th Street Block
Association; Berlotte Antoine, Host of Comedy FM; other community
leaders.
The Council Member and the Rev Gil Melrose called for calm.
They told the crowded street that violence against their own community members is not the solution: and asked those present to channel their rage at the senseless murder of a 16 yo boy into working together to remove guns from the streets of New York, and working together to create a police force that understands them and does not harass and threaten them. The Council Member invited Police Commissioner Kelly to tour his district: the police commissioner declined saying he was not interested in a photo op. The previous day, Mr Kelly told the Council Member that he should move out of his district, if things were so bad.
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Slaving for slaveowners in New York City click here
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New York State Black Caucus Weekend in Albany click here.
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