You know the old saying – When the only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  This is the perfect descriptor of  policing in America today.  Police are equipped like warriors, dress like warriors, are trained like warriors, and certainly act like warriors.  Violence is often the first response to a police call, often with deadly consequences and completely unnecessary.  Don’t get me wrong, police have a difficult and dangerous job; however, the range of responsibilities of police are far too broad, and personnel are woefully untrained for a lot of them.

How did we get here?  It’s taken a long time to screw up a vital function this badly.  Setting aside some of the origins of US policing in slave patrols to protect slave owners, policing has grown from its origins in the 19th Century to today where it has been militarized, and expanded to the point that it handles everything from domestic violence, to mass shootings, to mental health treatment.

The mental health role was forced on municipal police forces beginning in the early 1980s when Reagan ceased funding federal mental health programs, pushed those programs to the states, but left them unfunded.  To deal with the mentally unstable, municipalities expanded policing to manage it, making jails the first place those suffering from mental problems are detained.  Today, 15% of men, and 30% of women booked into jails have serious mental health problems. Making matters worse, police training in general and in mental illness specifically, is woefully inadequate.  That’s why many encounters with those suffering from mental illness end in violence and even death of the victims.

Sending police to deal with mental illness and emotional problems is like sending in the Marines to unplug someone’s toilet.  The mismatch is that bad.  Like last week in Rochester NY, police pepper sprayed a sobbing and handcuffed 9 year old.  On the video of the assault, you can hear one officer say, “This is taking too long,” just before the child was sprayed.  There is simply no excuse for this kind of violence especially against children.  Add race to the mix, and the violence almost always escalate.  AND, this kind of violence is more the norm than the anomaly.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Period.  Last summer’s “Defund the Police” movement tried to address this precise issue, but was inarticulate and then converted to a bludgeon by conservative to beat reformers with after every instance of violence during demonstrations against police brutality.  Denver is handling this issue differently, with a new pilot programs that is dealing with mental and emotional issues without the violence normally associated with police response. Called the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program, specifically trained mental health professionals are dispatched to non-violent police calls; police stand back and let them work whatever issues they dealing with.  Starting in June of last year, the team has responded to 748 mental health calls.  Of those 748 calls, not ONE resulted in violence or arrests, or even require police intervention.  Denver is expanding the pilot program.

The great results from programs like STAR are that 1) people get the help they need; 2) they don’t end up in jail or assaulted; 3) the police like it because it’s one less thing they have to deal with.  Police do need to be defunded, but not how opponents to reform try to frame it.  If you take this funding for mental health treatment out of the police budget and put it into social services, where it belongs, it frees up police to actually do police work, it reduces overcrowding in jails, and it has the most important feature that fewer people who encounter police will be assaulted or even killed.

We still must de-militarize police which includes taking away the armored vehicles, military weapons, and even the black uniforms.  We must increase foot patrols and neighborhood policing and re-engage police with communities.  Part of this reform must including increasing training, increasing police wages, AND requiring police to live in the communities where they police.  These practices have proven to have huge benefits.

It’s long past time to fix policing in the US.  We even know how to do it – we now need elected leaders who will make it happen.  Let’s not take the hammer out of the toolbox; let’s add the other tools we need.

An hour in and I’m proud of our side.  Joe Neguse from Colorado did a masterful job of explaining the constitutionality of impeachment post defeat.  An eighth grader could have understood it but never once was it patronizing.  It was brilliant.

Rep. Ruskin made me cry.  And you did, too.

Okay, I got distracted.  My grandson got hurt at school but he’s fine now.  So, back to the teevee.

The ex-president seems to have chosen his counsel from Barkin’ Bob’s Bargain Basement Barrister Barn!

Why are Republicans so damn patronizing?

Plus, this guy is admitting that Trump got beat and the people kicked him out?

Oh Lord, this is Epstein’s lawyer?  Now I believe the guy committed suicide. This guy looks unstable.  I know he’s talking to Trump and the base, but holy cow, screaming random words?  He’s worried about foreign enemies seeing us at our worse – divided.  What the hell does he think January 6th was?

more to come

This is from my friend Kary, who has retired to Spain and has not regretted it one single day.

It kinda takes the fun out of watching any game when you know the final score before a ball is thrown.

That’s what is gonna happen today, but I will watch anyway.

CNN is running an itinerary but everything is subject to another attack of the termites on the capitol.  I don’t expect any surprises today but if there’s witnesses later in the week, that might be fun.

And last night on the Brian Williams show, they closed with this gift from The Daily Show.  The greatest love story every starring Lou Dobbs.  Enjoy!

Completely off normal topics, did anyone happen to see the halftime show during the Super Bowl last night?  Holy Jesus.  That had to be the worst selection of half-time entertainment in the history of half-time entertainment. It’s even worse than the famous incident where Justin Timberlake ripped off Janet Jackson’s bra cup during the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show.  For those of you fortunate enough to have missed this year’s catastrophe, the entire performance was by a guy from Canada who calls himself The Weeknd, but whose real name is Abel Tesfaye.  His weird trademark is performing wearing bandaids/bandages sometimes with fake blood on his face.  It’s just weird.  I’m an old Stones fan, so I get weird, but this guy is WEIRD.

His performance for the Super Bowl was this dark dystopian vision that began with hundreds of ghoulish ghost-like figures in the end zone stands with glowing eyes that revealed themselves as orchestra members.  Unsettling, to say the least. When The Weeknd came out on stage, I didn’t recognize him because he WASN’T wearing bandages and I’d never seen him without them.  At first, I thought it was strange that Jake from State Farm was doing the half-time show since, after all, he was wearing a red jacket, but then realized who it was.  The setting and the stage was so dark and the sound was so terrible that I couldn’t even tell what the tunes were that he was singing.  His second song was under that stands in a golden hall of distorted mirrors where he was carrying the camera himself doing a moving selfie, surrounded by a bunch of other guys also in red jackets but wearing bandages over their heads that resembled upside down jock straps.

Then came the worst part…The Weeknd came out onto the field, joined by about 500 more guys with jock straps on their heads all marching to the beat.  It looked like a take off of the rallies that the Nazis held in 1930s in Germany.  It was surreal, almost scary.  Mercifully, the performance ended and we returned to funny commercials.  I looked at Ms. Jefe and all I could say was, “That was weird.”  Because it was.

We’re coming off one of the worst years in US history. Millions of Americans are unemployed.  The economy (not the stock market) is in the ditch.  Many businesses are closed, schools are closed, and everyone, except the very wealthy class, is struggling.  We’ve had 27 million Americans infected with the virus and over 450,000 dead.  The Super Bowl is the FIRST major event in almost a year that is supposed to be a celebration of football, funny commercials, heavy drinking, terrible food, and spectacular half-time shows.  Some of the best performers on the planet have appeared in past years, from the Stones, to J Lo and Shakira, to U2, to Prince, to Bruno Mars, to Maroon 5, to Beyoncé, to Lady Gaga, to Madonna, to…you get the picture.  What everyone needed this year was a spectacular, flashy, fun, and uplifting show.  What they got was a modern version of Thriller with the zombies wearing jock straps on their heads.

Now I ask you:  What genius at the NFL said, ” I have a great idea!  Let’s host some red jacket wearing guy unfamiliar to 90% of the audience singing songs you never heard of or couldn’t understand, joined on field with 500 male dancers also wearing red jackets with the addition of jock straps on their heads.  Add ghosts, lots of shadows, and a golden hall of distorted mirrors and that’s a winning combination, right?  Happy days are here again, right?”

That guy needs to be reassigned to managing the locker room for some XFL team.

Well, having Trump’s new lawyers act like his old lawyers is a big giant enormous ho hum.

Brian Kalt, a constitutional law scholar and presidential historian at Michigan State University School of Law, was cited multiple times in a brief filed by Trump’s lawyers ahead of his impeachment trial, but the professor said they took his work out of context to craft the opposite argument he’d made.

Dude, they thought it was opposite day in congress.

And, while we’re discussing Trump, CNN reports that he’s fuming and has got the cray-crays.

“a stir-crazy Trump has spent the last two days livid and fuming to aides and allies about what he views as a betrayal by McCarthy for standing by Cheney and not punishing her for her vote to impeach.”

We should get to watch that.  They ought to do a live feed with the sound turned off.

And by the way, I do not like having to defend Liz Cheney. Not one bit.