The revolution will be televised
Yes, even in a blog about grief and a neurological disease, I must speak about the calls for racial justice and equality that have engulfed the planet.
Actually, I watch these protests and it seems to me we are witnessing millions harnessing grief to create change. I understand the way grief leads to transformation, after all, I wrote a whole book about the superpower of grief and how it changed me on a molecular level.
If I may declare myself (an unofficial) expert on grief, there can be little doubt the world is drowning in grief
Grief for the people that have died because of covid, grief for our old lives with our routines, rituals and connection. There is the grief over watching cities’ engulfed in violence and rage. We are grieving over lost jobs and the economic hardship. This grief is spreading. It is an astounding - and frightening- thing to behold. But, the world must break to be fixed, comfortable people are not moved to act.
While grief is a superpower, it is a volatile, unpredictable and dangerous thing.
It is easy and tempting to weaponize grief so others suffer with us, this is a way of reclaiming control and gaining power. That is the way trauma spreads like a social contagion.
As I watched the world veer more out of control deep in the midst of my own private grief, I longed to speak to Pat about the events swirling about around us.
Apparently, many of you had the same instinct, knowing that Pat was one of the leading scholars on community policing. Many people texted and called to wonder about Pat’s take on these remarkable events.
In imagining what Pat would say, I suspect, like most academics he would be annoyed that the research and ideas that most mayors and police chiefs had dismissed as liberal do-gooders calling on the cops “to hug thugs” now was enjoying its moment.
These ideas about de-escalation, bias training, getting police working in the community, the police as guardian not warrior….this is research that has been presented at conferences and published in journal and books for decades. It’s not as if the cops and political elite did not have the tools and ideas to address these issues, they lacked the will and a sense of urgency. Even African American police officers and police chiefs were a bit too willing to tolerate the status quo (I know, because I spent years pleading with Philadelphia’s African American mayor and police chief to change course, but no one wanted to take on the unions and no one wanted to stand at a press conference and talk about what they were going to do about 400 murders a year.)
As long as their cities were not rioting or their departments were being written about in the New York Times, no one had the stomach to take on the rank and file or fight for funding for body cameras.
While he would have been frustrated by the political grandstanding, the police commissioners kneeling beside the protesters and the media’s fickle interest in this issue, as a pragmatist, he would be grateful the world was finally paying attention to the issues he cared so deeply about.
Pat had a profound connection to the people who felt oppressed by the police. On the surface, that might seem odd: a white, Irish dude from Drogheda engaged in the cause of police reform. But, Pat had come of age in the 1980s and he had experienced- first hand -the abuses of power of overzealous law-enforcement. Traveling in England with an Irish passport and a mohawk meant the police assumed him to be a football hooligan or a supporter of the IRA (or both), he had been detained and strip-searched by the British security forces and harassed by cops pretty regularly. He had grown up with kids who could not escape the bleak poverty and blocked economic opportunities of the Ireland of his youth.
He had fought against Apartheid and faced arrest as a college student in Dublin. During those graduate school years, he also first encountered the writings of the descendants of the colonized subjects of the Empire and members of the working classes. These scholars were going to use Gramsci and Althusser to take British society to task. He wanted to be among the new voices of intellectuals dismantling the oppressive systems constructed around sex and sexuality, class, and race. As a master’s student at UCD, he had consumed the work of the Birmingham School, scholars like Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, Paul Gilroy and Angela McRobbie. These intellectuals were truly public intellectuals - not the pretentious Oxford dons - but champions of the oppressed, marginalized groups…after all, they were members of groups that had been declared a problem by Britain’s elite. These scholars would conduct the sort of research that would lead social action that was anti-racist, feminist and go to the heart of class inequality. How pleased Pat would be to see these ideas being repurposed and reimagined among a new generation of activists, including his own children. How funny it is to hear Camille speak about hegemony and anti-racism, Pat would be proud.
But Pat would be unsettled by the calls to defund the police. I suspect he would be cautious about where it all would lead to and how the authoritarian elements of society might resist the calls for change. He would disagree that there is no such thing as fair and just policing. He would say, “there are good cops and just policing is possible, it is hard work and takes time and dedication.” Of course we should spend more money on education than prisons, but the problems of violence and crime are real and disproportionately impact the segregated, high poverty communities now asking the police to stand down. All his research told him that people did not want to get rid of the cops, they just wanted fair, just and effective policing. It is not as if the drug dealing and gun violence have disappeared. Philadelphia is a violent city with thousands of shootings each year; that crisis is very real. Right before he died, Pat attended the court case of a murder where a three-year-old was shot in her mother’s arms because a rival drug dealer wanted to take revenge on the child’s father. The case haunted the entire city, and caused Pat great anguish.
One of Pat’s biggest criticisms of policing was that we asked the cops to solve problems they really had no business dealing with. Cops find themselves on the frontlines dealing with issues like poverty, mental illness, children and families in emotional turmoil, and addiction. Cops have no business doing this work, and they are the only ones responding to problems created by society’s indifference to the communities that are now engulfed in protest.
On whether all of this will change, I am guessing Pat would be cautious. I thing he might say: “I hope this will be the inflection point, the real change we have waited for so long.” But, being wary, he would add, “it is too soon to know, there is so much work to do. And people will want to move on to something else. This is a world with a short attention span.”
There are other things Pat might say.
No doubt he would lead a raging rant about the NFL finally acknowledging the error in their ways about forbidding players to kneel. He would call Goodall some choice names and wonder if the change of feeling was about money and selling tickets and jerseys after the league’s shameful treatment of Kaepernick (whom Pat admired greatly). A few months before Pat died, he said how Kaepernick “was so impressive” and how he wanted to invite him to speak at Rutgers.
But, I also know he would launch into his recurring critique of BLM and other youth social movements. There would need to be a way to engage with leaders who had the power and influence to affect sustained and enduring reform. This was the stumbling block that so many youth movements faced and Millenials and Gen Z activists are hardly immune. Today’s activists are brilliant at mobilizing millions to march and demonstrate, but they do not vote and find the politics of compromise unseemly and inauthentic.
But, I cannot help but think Pat would have watched in admiration and awe as thousands of Philadelphians took to the street in the name of a cause that defined his work for twenty years.
Pat loved his adopted home but was deeply frustrated by the incompetence, graft, and hubris that kept leaders from making Philadelphia a more just place.
Pat was always so far ahead of the curve, and how pleased he would be if the calls for racial justice and equality were more than academic pursuits but now mainstream concerns as regular folks called for “anti-racist” policies and accountability and transparency from the police.
How eager Pat would be to help these young leaders change the world for the better.
