Thank God for the Police!

I know people might think I'm crazy, especially since I'm black, was born and raised in the South Bronx and have had a Police Officer put a gun to my head, but I'm telling you for a fact that if there wasn't Police, people would be begging for them. This is because there would be lawlessness without them.

Some people are going to talk sh*t, labeling me as an Uncle Tom, saying that I'm not black enough, or that I forgot where I come from but, the fact that I come from where I come from, I know the police are necessary. I've had the luxury of seeing Police in different neighborhoods, different States and different Municipalities. I've also been a member of a Law Enforcement Agency. I'm telling you there's some crazy people running around in our society.

I worked in a prison for fourteen years. I interacted with serial killers, hit men, rapists, murderers, child rapists, and arsonists. I've had conversations with them just like I have conversations with people on the street. In fact, some were quite intelligent.

So one has to think to themselves that the United States has two million people locked up out of three hundred and fifty million people. There are over half a million unsolved murders in this country alone, which means there's five hundred thousand crazy muthf*ckers running around here that haven't been caught. They're burying bodies over bodies and the public doesn't even know about it.

When they are caught, they are afforded every legal right and are guaranteed by law to be treated with dignity and respect, according to the law. If not, that same psychopath will sue the very institution that is protecting society from him. He will get treated with three meals a day, healthcare, heat and hot water, and still complain that he is being treated inhumanely. What about the people that he raped or murdered?

The whole premise of a Police Force is to protect the community, especially the tax payers that fund their salary. The mistake with Policing is that they don't have a predominant Police Force that represents the ethnicity of their community. There should never be a Police car in a Hispanic neighborhood with two white officers in it, that live in the suburbs. In fact, the officers that are stationed to that Police Station should live in that community. That way the Police Officer is not an authority figure but your neighbor who works for the Police Department. He's the one you see at Church, the grocery store, the gym and all around town. So, if you're stopped for a traffic violation, they might not be so quick to pull a gun out on you.

If these things were instituted from the ghettos to the suburbs, there would be a lot less Police shootings of unarmed black men, incidents of Police brutality and overall distrust between Police and the community, especially in the poor communities. In a sense, I guess it would be called Community Policing. Then, and only then would we say Thank God For the Police.


Read more: Ghetto Bastard: A Memoir (Volume 1) and Ghetto Bastard 2 (Volume 2) by Russell Vann