The Kenosha PD Should Be Disbanded & Rebuilt

For starters, I don't think defunding or abolishing police departments is a workable public policy. No community can exist without a body dedicated to protecting the public and enforcing the law.

However, it is clear to me that the Kenosha Police Department is neither dedicated to protecting the public nor enforcing the law.

Any police force which shoots an unarmed black man in the back seven times resulting in his paralysis from the waist down for having the temerity to break up a fight is not dedicated to protecting the public.

Any police force which permits an armed teenager with white supremacist views to shoot and kill two people and maim a third person and declines to arrest him after he sees fit to surrender leaving it to a law enforcement agency in a neighboring state to take him into custody is not dedicated to enforcing the law.

In view of these facts, I believe the Kenosha Police Department should be disbanded and rebuilt with a new value system in which police will not utilize deadly force against unarmed citizens nor permit homicides to take place under its watch. In its present form, the Kenosha Police Department will have neither the confidence nor trust of its populace as they have damaged their reputation beyond repair.

It won't be an easy, quick fix. Building confidence and trust is a slow day to day process. But unless these painful measures are taken the pain and suffering of Jacob Blake and his family as well as the pain and suffering of the families of those killed at the hands of a white supremacist whose escape was aided and abetted by Kenosha PD will never be healed.