Читать книгу Uncomfortable Ideas - Bo Bennett PhD - Страница 10

If you’re convinced that the United States has a problem with racist cops, then you would focus on the problem of racism—no doubt a worthy social issue. But what if you consider the less socially acceptable ideas that the United States has a problem with police brutality and use of excessive force? Entertaining this idea might lead you to facts and data that justify that conclusion (such as the percentage of white suspects who are also unjustly shot), which would turn your attention to what might be the larger problem. Racism might have an effect on the number of black suspects being unjustly gunned down by cops, but excessive force used by police and the laws that protect such force might have a much greater effect on the number of all suspects, regardless of skin color, being unjustly gunned down by cops. If we don’t entertain the alternative ideas, even if they go against our ideology, personal experience, or anecdotal evidence, we can be wasting our time on solving the wrong problem.

Uncomfortable Idea: The police in the United States have a much greater problem with excessive force than racism.

Here is a fact. The U.S. locks people up at a higher rate than any other country.¹ Clearly, the United States has a problem with crime. Or does it? What if we took a closer look at the laws, policies, and social norms and questioned them? Should we be locking people up for using recreational drugs? Should we be locking people up for selling and buying sex? Should an 18-year-old girl serve jail time for having sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend? The United States has many laws that are based on outdated ideology, iron-age morality, and incorrect assumptions. Unless we deal with the uncomfortable idea that our concepts of morality and justice might be way off, we will continue to create more crime by making more things illegal. In other words, our outrageous incarceration rate in the “land of the free” is a symptom of the the real problem. The problem, however, is not an excessive number of evil people hurting other people; it is locking people up who don’t live up to our moral standards.

Uncomfortable Idea: We are locking too many people up because of our rigid understanding of morality and justice.