Op/Ed: Police Accountability and Justice – Two Causes Worth the Fight

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Category: Op/Ed, Legal Commentary

Published on Friday, 05 June 2020 11:47

Written by Janet Walker

Injustice is an insidious cancer. It metastasizes without concern, infecting more than society, it kills the cells of humanity, dulling the mind erasing the boundaries of a healthy society. Injustice, like cancer, is color blind.

Injustice sees not race or ethnicity, nor does it concern itself with the ideals of those beliefs. Injustice is the polar opposite of justice. A just society, where decisions are not bought, where lives, all lives, not simply a singular race, gender or ethnicity, all lives matter.

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Injustice cripples, wounds, and breaks trust. Not blind trust or childish naiveté. Injustice breaks down the system, like cancer, it weakens, and places unnecessary burdens on the other supporting organisms, those bodies of government that keep society working, making it nearly impossible for the body as a whole to work cohesively.

Injustice defaces the body, its strips it of its dignity, its health. Injustice is a gnawing, evil, cancerous tumor. Humankind, society is the victim of injustice. To the one or many who suffer it debilitates. Injustice surgically removes a part of the human soul it leaves an ugly scar which never heals. Injustice is an inoperable pronouncement of death.

This week the world has gathered to demand police accountability and justice, which are two distinctly different demands.

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Justice is a process. As much as many would like to build the gallows, based on the evidence of the tape and ensuing mass global protests, and secure a vigilante's end. That is not justice. A pronouncement of guilt, of holding a person responsible for a crime committed, of allowing the system, broken as it is, to work, is justice.

Police accountability on the other hand can be accomplished much easier than justice. Policies can be changed; tactics can be outlawed; people can be terminated; internal policies and procedures, reeducating the educated, are very real and achievable goals. Hoping for one while actively changing the other is the goal of humankind.

Like mass shootings, the names of most known victims of injustice are seared in the minds of the masses. Demanding the system heal itself is akin to the prayer of every cancer victim, every victim of crime, every person wounded, injured, marred, incapacitated by senseless violence, lives snuffed out, shells of thriving citizens destroyed.

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Injustice is not based on race, ethnicity, gender. It is a blight on the system. A white female, with an unimpeachable reputation, in Hudson County, NJ was raped. Irrefutable evidence proved the victim's statements. She became one of the millions of women, of every race and every ethnicity, who will never see justice for the brutality inflicted upon them.

No mass protests gathered on the streets. Sexual assault victims rarely receive a return phone call from the investigating detectives, who often still revert to the blame game in crime solving procedures.

Prior to a 2019 law rape kits in two states, New York, and California, would sit for decades before they were tested. It does not seem like a very efficient crime solving methodology, as it lends itself to acquittals. Evidence is old, time passes, people's recollections are blurred, victims or suspects are dead.

Preconceived ideas, beliefs and assumptions cloud police work, injustice like an estuary creeps into the mind of the investigating detectives, who present evidence to a prosecutor tainted with the stain of those same preconceived ideas, beliefs and assumptions which derail, destroy, and leave the victims facing a life of injustice.

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Rape is a genocide. One does not have to physically kill a population or demographic to inflict a genocide upon them. Rape can be an indiscriminate crime; it has long been used as a weapon of war in conflicts are around the world and in conflicts at home; it is meant to silence, kill, and destroy.

According to Wikipedia, "RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) estimates that for every 1,000 rapes, 384 are reported to police, 57 result in an arrest, 11 are referred for prosecution, 7 result in a felony conviction, and 6 result in incarceration." 

There are those rapists who rape to destroy success, destroy talent, destroy those who are able to achieve their goals, destroy those who refuse convention and place their career and themselves first. It is a burden than is carried, while the perpetrators walk freely, free to rape and use rape to silence competition.

Demanding police accountability, and a system change, may help victims of violent crimes in the future, right now, we are all still limping along, broken from the insidious cancer that is pervasive and spreading throughout the system, blurring the boundaries of duty, judge, jury and executioner and hoping, with childish naivete that one day, America will echo the Pledge of Allegiance that states "One nation under God indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all."