The Fierce Urgency of Now

For most of the past twenty years, at least a part of my job has brought me into close contact with officials at all levels of American law enforcement. I've met FBI Directors, DEA Administrators, Executive Directors of ICE Homeland Security Investigations, heads of state bureaus of investigation, and chiefs of police from places as diverse as the NYPD to the San Jose PD to the Minneapolis PD to the Leesburg, VA PD. I've met meathead cops and talented analysts. I've spent time with the head of the National Organization for Black Law Enforcement (NOBLE) and the head of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).

By a significant majority, the law enforcement executives I've met have been professional and service-minded. In recent years, their priorities have changed and they've spent a lot more time focused on department culture, mental health, and diversity. And they've acknowledged that they've got a long way to go. Leaders like Houston Chief Art Acevedo are grappling with the stains on their profession.



Majority doesn't mean unanimity. I've met cops who were obviously racist, sexist, and just plain mean.

I say all this as preface to today's topic, which is actually my daughters.

Leesburg, VA's peaceful protest march

My kids are loud pissed right now about the state of affairs in America's cities. My 18 year-old is a budding activist, full of righteous indignation about any number of things. She's liberal to a fault, and she's compassionate about the plight of people less privileged than she. We've had arguments, friends.

I'm also a lefty, but as I stare down the barrel of my 50th birthday, my liberalism is leavened with pragmatism. I'm an incrementalist, about the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, one generation better than the next.

My daughter wants to burn it all down and start over again.

So it comes down to incrementalism versus radicalism. I've spent the last three days arguing that there's no practical way to strip the system to its bones and start over in a nation with institutions as large, diverse, and ingrained as ours.

As I was researching some of the issues, hoping to provide by daughters with the wisdom of their elders, I came across something that stopped me in my everloving tracks. This, from Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, shook me to my core:

"I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season.""

Am I telling my daughters to prefer a negative peace? Am I paternalistically setting a timetable for black mens' (and all womens' and all LGBTQ people's) freedom?

We marched together on Sunday in a peaceful demonstration in our town to show solidarity for our black neighbors as they grieve let another senseless death at the hands of the state. My 18 year-old drew a banner that depicted Officer Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis PD officer that murdered George Floyd, as a pig. I told her not to take it, because it would reflect poorly on our family. She ignored me. I'm proud of her for that, even as I cringe a little because I know there are good cops who hurt for their communities.

But I know more fully that I don't know.

I write this to you today not because I have the answers, but because I'm genuinely at a loss. My girls, whether they know it or not, have made me question what I thought I knew. I watched the President of the goddamned United States of America teargas Americans so he could have a ham-handed photo op and saw no members of his party save Mitt Romney blink a fucking eye in protest.

Maybe we should burn it all down.