Day One (Coincidentally Post One)

So, I have decided to make my first post about the first day’s events while watching the Daily Show, eating all the Starbursts from my bag and looking over my unasked ponderings after our first encounter with police and basically each other.  It was great to hear from such fantastic civil servants like Officer Grace and Officer Kevin, but it made me wonder if most police do as they should and what kind of background checks are run? How many are in this field for the power over others, to wave around the big guns? At lunch I talked with an Officer Gary, who is not a gun nut but how many officers are in it for the gun fun and is there a way to weed those people out? I mean I watched many of us line up for a photo op and a chance to wave around that large gun and it had me picturing police recruits doing the same thing for the same reason. I wondered many things as I sat and listened to these officers share their daily dangers and choices with us. There were general wonderings such as: How many times are officers working alone? How many arrests are of people under the influence of drugs or alcohol? Why does the number of fatalities increase by 1% a year? There were also more specific ones like: was the militarization of the police in Ferguson a comfort to the officers and did they believe it was truly helping them to “protect and serve”? How many non-lethal shots do officers under such stress have the opportunity to take and is there a way to increase that number of opportunities? How would an officer deal with the certain suicide situation of a person lying down in the middle of the road to end their life? And the major question of the day: Does one feature, (race, gender, etc.) shared by the most arrested by a certain officer effect that officer’s instincts when confronted with someone, who has that feature? For example if Kevin arrests more African American males than white females, is he under more stress or more on edge when dealing with an African American male in future encounters? It made me think of something another Citivas veteran, Jasen Jackson, said once about when he is pulled over by police. He said “I try to sound more white”. Do traffic stop officers, unlike Kevin, pull over more African Americans? Does gender play a role in this at all? Is a cop more likely to pull a gun on me if I were male? Though this day raised a lot of questions for me, it also answered a lot of questions I didn’t even know I would have asked.  I cannot wait for day two and the chance to know the rest of you and Saint Louis a little better. There my rant is done.