REFLECTIONS ON BATON ROUGE AND DALLAS

“You’re talking about a conversation with 10,000 nuances, but it’s revolving over the same visceral video... We’re not having a national conversation on the realities of policing because that’s boring to people... so instead the issue becomes black versus white, both literally and figuratively... Ninety percent of the narrative of is a repeat of the same conversation... we’re just on a loop.”

- Eugene O’Donnell, criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former New York police officer, on the recent shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, LA.

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Conflicts between law enforcement and members of the Black community are not new. But in recent years, since the events of Ferguson, this conflict has exploded out of control as it has entered the stage of the vicious cycle. Once a conflict enters the vicious cycle stage, each round of action leads to greater escalation.

At present, each episode of a police officer shooting a Black man, caught on camera, leads to greater anger and mistrust of the police in the Black community. This anger and mistrust leads to members of the Black community treating police with greater disdain, which only serves to make police officers more vigilant and susceptible to overreacting when confronting Black suspects. The cycle escalates back-and-forth, and the proverbial "beat" goes on.

While there is nothing new about conflicts entering vicious cycles, what is new is the speed with which this is now happening, making it exponentially more difficult to resolve these conflicts.

Imagine driving on a slick, narrow road alongside a cliff (the highway US 1 in California comes to mind) and coming upon a sharp, hairpin turn. That turn would be difficult, though manageable, driving 20 mph; but driving 100 mph it would be suicide. When it comes to the present conflicts at the vicious cycle stage, particularly the one between law enforcement and members of the Black community, it is as if we are entering this hairpin turn at 150 mph and accelerating.

The entities responsible for accelerating the escalation are the myriad media outlets of our world. This not only includes outlets of official media - TV news networks, internet news sites, etc. - but also we "citizen journalists" using outlets of social media, like Facebook and Twitter, as our medium.

In a previous post ("Beware of the Rectangles") I highlighted the dangers of exposure to various forms of edited media content. Here, I would like to add that when our exposure to the world is primarily MEDIAted by myriad forms of official and social media, we are more likely to get a distorted perspective of the world and much more likely to become addicted to outrage. When you add these components to an already challenging conflict, a rapidly escalating vicious cycle becomes inevitable.

How do you break a vicious cycle? The same way you survive a hairpin turn on slick, narrow highway: slow down and suppress your impulsive reactions. In the context of social conflicts, like the one between law enforcement and the Black community, I believe these 3 steps could help to break the cycle:

1. Limit your exposure to media (including TV news, internet news, newspapers, and social media sites like Facebook) to 15 minutes per day.

2. Recognize that everything you see from a media outlet is intended to provide a distorted perspective to provoke your strong emotions. Therefore, use every ounce of your will to resist a rush to judgment when you learn of something in the news that makes you upset.

3. If you truly want to deescalate this conflict, take a positive action rather than joining a protest march or posting something inflammatory on Facebook. If your sympathies lie primarily with the police, inquire with the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s newly established Institute for Community-Police Relations for volunteer opportunities to help protect police officers. If your sympathies lie primarily with the Black community, I can think of no better way to take positive action than joining Papillon 2030: a non-profit organization aimed at helping African Americans, community-by-community, toward the goal of significant, measurable improvement of all quality of life conditions by the year 2030.

Breaking this vicious cycle will not be easy, and we must be mindful of the decisions we make that only serve to escalate the conflict. This is especially true when, to quote George W. Bush at the Dallas Memorial Service this week, "too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions."