Amidst Tuesday’s grandstanding at the Rose Garden as Donald Trump signed the executive order on police reforms, the belated initiative has been greeted in the United States of America as “woeful”, indeed one that leaves systematic racism intact.
The presidential initiative has conveyed the impression generally that the reforms are wholly inadequate, almost perfunctory. The President’s hint at measures to discourage “chokeholds” has already shifted to a riveting attention on the stock market and retail sales.
“He just doesn’t get it,” has been the general refrain over the past 48 hours.
Chiefly, the reforms have fallen far short of the demands of Black Lives Matter, whose activists have been shrilling for fundamental change ever since George Floyd, an African American, was killed when a white Minneapolis officer pressed his knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes.
The killing has ignited the biggest civil rights uprising for half a century and a moment of national reckoning on racism.
Trump’s response appears to be a mite grudging considering the enormity of the tragedy that has convulsed America and swathes of Europe as well. The President, who in the past has called on the police to rough people up when they are arrested, and who has denounced protesters as “thugs” and “terrorists”, could not resist his instinct to play to his support base not the least because of the November election. It is hard not to wonder whether the presentation was pegged on police reforms or an electoral strategy.
This executive order will not deliver the comprehensive meaningful change and accountability in the nation’s police departments, one that Americans have been demanding. It is moreover a woeful attempt to shift focus from the dangerous rhetoric and policies he has previously promoted.
Piecemeal reform effort will not achieve the transformative change needed to heal the country and usher in a new era of public safety in which all communities can thrive.
Mr Trump sounded a mite sympathetic with the police when he said that “I strongly oppose the radical and dangerous efforts to defund, dismantle and dissolve our police departments, especially now when we achieved the lowest recorded crime rates in recent history. Americans know the truth, specifically that without police, there is chaos.
Without law, there is anarchy.” Beyond the effusions of electoral rhetoric must lie the heart of the matter ~ A white man’s inhumanity to a black man, a deeply emotive issue that was somehow skirted on Tuesday. The colour of the skin seemingly determines the narrative in Trump’s America, an instance of remarkable insensitivity at the helm of the White House.
To put it succinctly, the President presides over racial prejudice. The fact that the fourth Confederate statue was dismantled in the US on Tuesday night was arguably a protest against Trump’s prescription. Altogether, the world bears witness to what has been called the “Other America”.