#BlackLivesMatter: Activists come up with a plan to end police killings. Here it is.

[thebighobgoblin]

105. I don't know the proper semantics

but I think we're basically in agreement. I'm definitely not an advocate of stop-and-frisk, which only poisons the well of trust between communities and law enforcement, not to mention it violates civil liberties. And despite Rudy Giuliani's insistence, it doesn't make communities safer.

But the problems with policing should really be a segue into broader problems with the criminal justice system, which is mostly a system of punitive measures and warehousing people we're angry at, rather than a place for constructive 'time-out' and individual rehabilitation. That corporations are involved and lobbying the federal government on these issues should be beyond disturbing to anyone.

The United States has the rather dubious and irreconcilable distinction of claiming its position as a paragon of liberty and democracy while having the world's highest incarceration rate. Not the highest number of prisoners, but the highest *rate* of imprisonment. People are convicted for non-violent offenses and locked up for years, and yet in some cities we have 50 percent of homicides that remain unsolved.

What are the priorities here? What should law enforcement be doing? What kinds of crimes should we be really prosecuting? How should we be dealing with convicts? The American voter keeps voting for more and more laws that erode individual freedom and criminalize protest. This is what we're left with.