Where Did Sanity Go?

I am pretty sure I no longer recognize my home state.

I live in Minnesota.  I have, in the last five years, been utterly befuddled by the police shooting a man who had his girlfriend and daughter in the car.  The police shot a woman who had called them because she had heard noise.  The police murdered a man by kneeling on his back.  And this past Sunday, a police officer shot a young man who was not threatening her.  His behavior was clearly that of a terrified child, trying to get away - and it gave good evidence as to why he wanted to get away - because he was afraid of dying.  Now he's dead.

I am not sure I understand what it is that's happening in the world.  I do see where the men who were killed were of one racial type.  The woman who died was of another.  But the police officer shared the same general ethnicity with the men who died.

And I am intelligent enough to recognize that all people who share a similar skin color are not the same.  But it sure as hell looks like there is a racial group in this country that has good reason to fear the police, and that really breaks my heart.  

We need to get this sorted out damned quick.  I learned a very long time ago that the bottom line in any system is that any sort of unfairness could be used both to mistreat those who it was designed to harm along with being used to hurt those who created it.

Let's take a very simple example - if a game is rigged so you can win, that same method of rigging can be used to make you lose.  

And so any system needs to be scrupulously, utterly, completely fair.  Right down the middle fair.  Because to build in bias makes it both unfair, and likely to be used to mistreat some segment.  And if it can be used to my advantage, eventually it could be used to my disadvantage.  So I am absolutely in favor of a fundamentally fair system - because it is as much to my advantage as it is not.  

So what ever it is that's biased this system we need to fix.  I really think what we're going to need to do is develop some level of testing that will assist us in evaluating and removing any bias that might be built into the system.

Perhaps we need to start with the training.  We need to evaluate the trainers.  We need to insure they are not creating a biased system.  We then need to insure that any bias is not being built in from the new members entering the system.  This will be a little trickier.  But then we'll need to make the same evaluation of the rest of the system.  And if there's a bias there, that portion of the system needs to be excised.

And then we need to provide our first responders more tools.  That is, if you are the first person on site when there's been a call for help, maybe you need to have more than one sort of tool as your first response.  Let's augment the responders so that they can respond not with force, but rather, with consolation and understanding.  

It's a little bit like trying to put out a grease fire with water.  It ain't gonna work, it's gonna spread that grease.  So instead of hosing it down, maybe try another approach.

But hey, there I am talking insanity.  I'd best go to bed and come back with a better idea.  God willing, anyway.