Fort Worth activists want reform in wake of what they term as violent police actions
“Build something new,” said a man who identified himself as Black Ross from a church parking lot Thursday in Fort Worth.
Ross, 22, of Fort Worth, said he is a member of the Black Lives Matter movement, and suggested that he did not come to the church to bring peace, he came with a sword. There has not been very much justice in the United States criminal justice system and where there is no justice there can be no peace, Ross said. The criminal justice industrial complex is akin to neo-slavery, Ross said.
“The reality is we’re tired,” Ross said.
Pastors with the Faith and Community Leaders United, the organization that called for a press conference Thursday in the parking lot of Mount Olive Baptist Church on Evans Avenue, stood in the background and clapped while members of the Black Lives Matter movement spoke.
“The answer to slavery is not to get better slave masters,” Ross said. “It’s to get rid of the system that produces slave masters in the first place”
Natasha Nelson, the next Black Lives Matter member to speak, encouraged police to resign and for city officials to abolish the police department.
“At the end of the day it is just a job,” Nelson said.
Barring mass resignations and ending the department, Nelson said police must retrain as often as weekly, so they can learn how to approach the veterans, soldiers, ministers, teachers, fathers and mothers who live in African-American neighborhoods. Police do not patrol these African-American neighborhoods to help, Nelson said.
“They are on the hunt,” she said. ...“They wait for the crime and then they attack. The police force have turned our neighborhoods into a war zone, into a battlefield. There are casualties, there are murders.”
There have been promises of police reform but in reality all that actually happens is the award of half-measures that yield neither justice or equity, Nelson said.
“Because pulling that trigger is too easy and it’s the cowards route,” Nelson said. “At the end of the day, it’s law enforcement versus the people, because the law enforcement are the ones behind the guns and pulling the trigger. They are the ones causing the murders.”
Nelson did not address police tactical responses to legally armed individuals, which have often led to tragic outcomes during police and resident encounters.
How does concealed carry impact policing?
According to a PoliceOne.com analysis published in November 2018, many officers have yet to come to grips with the idea that other people besides criminals and police officers are armed. Encounters with legally armed residents and police have often resulted in negative outcomes despite increased discourse about the expansion of a legally armed citizenry, the article said.
Officers, despite being trained about the physiological responses that come during high-stress situations, such as auditory exclusion or tunnel vision, often discount the effect of those reactions in residents when they encounter police, the analysis stated. Because of these physiological reactions to high-stress situations, a failure to drop a weapon doesn’t necessarily indicate hostile resistance to a police officer’s commands, the analysis said.
The armed person may not even hear those officer commands because of the ways people react to stress, according to the PoliceOne story.
But perhaps that is what Nelson was alluding to when she said she said she would go on ride-alongs with police officers to help them with their training.
We have issues in Fort Worth, said Rod Smith, a former Fort Worth City Council candidate said. Implementing a curfew will not solve these issues, and no one can say that people need to be in the house at 8 p.m., Smith said.
City officials ended the curfew on Thursday.
If Fort Worth city officials are willing to make the changes that will really reform policing in Fort Worth, they need to put that in writing in a consent decree that will be subject to judicial review, Smith said. While proclaiming Black Lives Matter protesters watched as judges who sentence a disproportionate number of Fort Worth African-Americans to prison leave the courthouse, Smith said.
“And it wasn’t no thugs like Donald Trump say,” Smith said. “It was army veterans, it was business owners, it was leaders in our community. It was not thugs.”
Black Lives Matter member Trice Jones said the group’s demands include defunding the Fort Worth Police Department, removing all Fort Worth Police Department officers from schools and ending contracts between the Fort Worth Independent School District and the Fort Worth Police Department.
Black Lives Matter is also demanding the creation of a community oversight board with subpoena power with members who are not appointed by city officials, police officer disarmament, especially in non-emergency situations, the demilitarization of the department and the reallocation of part of the police department budget to social and societal needs.
Police declined to comment on the group’s demands to defund the department or bar officers from schools. But a department spokesman did say that officers are prohibited from using excessive force. Police can only use the reasonable amount of force necessary within the totality of the circumstances presented to them at that time, the spokesman said.
This story was originally published June 4, 2020 at 5:53 PM with the headline "Fort Worth activists want reform in wake of what they term as violent police actions."
