Justice is always imperfect, everywhere. Injustice in America, often massive, has always been here. But one cannot help concluding that it’s getting worse, much worse, when reading about police and prosecutor behavior in recent years
The systemic abuses and failures cannot be reformed or corrected from within. The police and judiciary cannot be counted on to reform themselves. Reforms have to come from legislative and executive sources and/or from organizations of people outside the formal political system.
As an example of the inability of reform from within the justice institutions, consider the case of the cop who shot and killed a 12-year old boy with a fake or toy gun in Cleveland. The 911 call was from a very calm woman at the scene who even said the gun was probably fake, but the boy was still killed. Two investigators were appointed to give “outside” reviews. Who appointed them? They were “commissioned by the prosecutor’s office”. This loaded the dice in favor of the cop. The two people chosen were a retired FBI agent and a Colorado prosecutor. Everything stayed within the “justice” family. The whitewash results were predictable. They came out with the same old tired cliches, such as “Officer Loehmann’s belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat.”
Again: There is no possibility of serious and widespread reform by relying on people within the existing institutions of justice to alter the system. They have no incentive to go against their peers. They have every incentive to conform. Furthermore, they belong to a culture that has instilled in them the perverse ways of thinking that are responsible for the ills of the system. They have been trained to defend the system and police. It’s absurd to think that they are about to tell it like it is and suggest serious and far-reaching alterations.
Change, if it is to occur, has to come from outside the existing institutions of justice.
8:11 am on October 11, 2015