Connecting the Disconnect: The Broken Link

By Michael A Francis

While the direction of policing is at a crossroad and we struggle to find fixes, there are issues we have ignored for years that have sown the seeds for the conflicts between police and the community. Connecting the Disconnect: The Broken Link, sought to point out some of these issues. The concepts shared are in no way the ultimate 'blueprint' to correct the existing problems between our community and law enforcement; instead, it is intended to bring an awareness to those who are lacking a cultural and socioeconomic understanding and the complexities and challenges it brings to our social relationship when interacting with other members within a certain group. This is solely an assessment from real life experiences that hopefully will have the intended result of bringing about some level of connection, or empathy if you will, between groups in order to diminish bias beliefs and bridge the gap that has disrupted our society for years gone and those to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886543599

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Connecting the Disconnect

The Broken Link

Michael A Francis

Copyright © 2022 Michael A Francis

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 979-8-88654-358-2 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88654-359-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

An Incident

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

About the Author

Dedicated in honor of those who died serving and the ones that died who could have lived

They say that the truth hurts. It really does not. While hearing the truth may be painful, telling it relieves pain.

—Michael A. Francis

An Incident

It was sometime after midnight on a Saturday in midsummer of the early nineties when a young man was driving around the inner city, looking for a house party location he was invited. It was still quite early, and he was not ready to go to bed, although he had to work the next day. Well, it was already Monday, if you know what I mean, at least a few minutes into it. In fact, he wanted more than just to go to this party; he wanted to show off his recently bought used car. It was clean, and he had spent the better part of the day shining the wheels and cleaning the newly tinted windows. It was his first weekend driving the car after it was tinted. Not to mention the shiny new wheels that he had saved up months of paychecks to acquire. It seems like years of hard work had paid off. He was truly excited.

As he continued in a slow drive around the city streets, checking out spot after spot and being deafened by the loud stereo system with the subwoofer in the trunk, he somehow became oblivious to everything around him except his vehicle. He was driving just to drive and not paying any attention to his initial desire to go to the party; he continued driving in the comfort of his own zone.

He then saw this vehicle in front of him, driving even slower than he was. It stopped, continued, then stopped again, and continued in this same slow manner as before. It was a single-lane roadway with no lane markers to indicate a division, meaning one lane in each direction of travel. However, it was not a one-way street, and no vehicles were coming in the opposite lane of travel. As he watched this car stop and go, he decided he was going to pass this vehicle since its driver did not seem to be going anywhere in a hurry and was busy being distracted by whatever he or she was doing. In fact, the manner in which the operator was driving clearly suggested in his mind that maybe they wanted him to pass, so he did. He went around the vehicle and on his way, not for long.

Flashing red and blue lights immediately blinded his peripheral vision, accompanied by the loud honking air horn and siren, almost blowing his eardrums apart since the vehicle was no more than three feet or so behind his. He could not see the headlights of the vehicle, just the dancing red and blue lights cycling in rhythmic movements around his vehicle and the surrounding residential buildings. The vehicle was so close behind him that one careless move in shifting his standard transmission into neutral would have sent his rear bumper into the front end of the vehicle.

Shortly thereafter, he was immediately startled by the extremely loud knocking on his driver's side window. The large rounded end of a police nightstick was slamming on the newly tinted glass; another two or three similar knocks and the window would have shattered to pieces. The plastic material of the tints was somewhat of a blessing, holding the window together. He did not know what he feared most, his nice window shattering or the screaming and angry look on this officer's face. He hastily rolled the window down, hoping to save it from breaking as the older officer was barking words he could not hear since his siren was still blasting from his vehicle and now even louder for the young man with the window down.

What is wrong with you? he screamed. Why did you pass me? Give me your driver's license!

The young man was still confused. Okay, now he realized the vehicle that was driving lazily with no display of the operator's intentions was a police cruiser. The vehicle that had stopped in front of him, to the far right of the roadway, seemingly indicating by its stopped position that it was okay to pass, was a police vehicle. So why was I stopped? he thought.

It must have been ten or fifteen minutes since he took the driver's license, not the insurance or registration, just the license, and was sitting in his vehicle. The officer then returned and was still yelling. But this time, a little more than just a scream, stronger deep biting words.

Are you from the Francis murderer family? he shouted. Do you live on the street, and your family is all murderers? Get out of here and never pass a police car again. I could take you to jail right now!

And with that said, he tossed the license inside the vehicle and walked back to his police car while the young man feverishly searched the floorboard of his vehicle for his license. The officer then sped off in his vehicle. That was it. No tickets. No documented warning. Just screams and classifications.

But he left one thing behind that was more powerful than not citing the young driver, his words. That was this young man's first bad encounter with a police officer, and he would never forget it. That also made the young driver feel he could do something about that encounter since the interaction was so painful and demeaning. He chose to fight back against situations like that.

So several years later, he was walking down the hall of a building at his own graduation, police graduation.

I know this incident well; the young driver was me.

Chapter 1

The Hard Truth

It is very difficult for any one angle to be taken as a solution to bridge the gap between police and society; this is complex because society itself is dynamic and comprised of different groups—and so is the police. We will look at this later. There are many studies and books out there that claim to find at least some kind of solution to bring communities and police together. Some of these solutions work, and some do not. And if a particular solution works, it is usually for a particular situation, not all situations. There is no one size fits all solution, or in this case, one solution for every problem of policing. If there were such a book, trust me, when I say it would be the bible for policing, every department nationwide would have access to this resource. The truth is, there is not any. There is a reason why there are so many different books; it is hard to be done and extremely complex, as I have mentioned. But must we give up on this task? No, we cannot. As difficult a task it may be, it must be undertaken. This is extremely necessary to attempt since society cannot survive without the police, and neither can the police without society. Both groups seem to have conflicts with this view, hence, the division. But some work-around must be accomplished in order to find common ground. The question is not how can it be done but which group is willing to compromise and move toward closing this gap.

But what makes this task so difficult? Anyone with little common sense would agree that difficulties derive from confusingly interrelated parts trying to function as one entity. Each time you try to fix something for a successful outcome, another issue is left out, or something else has to give for that variable to fit in. In fact, if you fix one thing, it tends to create a problem for another, as related to a certain section of the community and the police. If you don't agree with me, ask any city manager or someone who is in charge of a large budget, for example.

Nothing is ever satisfying or complete because of constant changes and demands that revolve around one core cause. If your government spends money on repairing bridges and highways, you can certainly believe that some funds were shortened from another project to facilitate the construction of these roads, like eliminating or minimizing music or sports from education, for example, to create available funds to keep teachers hired, so to speak, and vice versa; to channel money toward education, money was potentially moved from some other areas, like eliminating some highways or roadways that needed repairs but were considered not urgent. You can clearly see this theory at work with the noted examples.

What makes one think that the challenges law enforcement faces are exempt from this theory because it's not an infrastructure? It is going to come with its good and bad, ups and downs, positives and negatives, and in this case, its complexities. Making it more challenging is the demands on law enforcement. No other institution or organization is more scrutinized than law enforcement, in my view. I am sure this opinion is strongly shared by others, especially those of law enforcement background, and just by me saying this one, sensing the tone of bias, not emitting from my thoughts but from a societal standpoint.

But what if I told you that this demand of asking law enforcement to conform to society's rule rather than demanding society to conform with law enforcement's rule is one major source of this conflict? I hope I did not raise any eyebrows when I say law enforcement's rule, since this simply means complying with the laws and, of course, the people selected to enforce them rather than the bias and aggression demonstrated by those law officials that should not have been in uniform in the first place, the extremely low percentage, I must add.

Society, while I am still using the word in a general sense, has created the standard that grants the power to law enforcement to carry out the will of the justice system. In its quest for justice, it has created a system of selection for likely candidates who must successfully and acceptably pass tiers of the selection process: backgrounds, physical fitness, written and oral exams, interviews, etc. These are strict guidelines that must be met during the recruitment process for an individual candidate. Nowhere in this selection process can we safeguard from bad personalities or characteristics, law enforcement's downfall.

The level design in an effort to eliminate this trait is the psychological test. Of course, one can go through whatever psychological profile examination limited to the questions predetermined in the selection process and pass with flying colors, but being predictive is the limitation of this same process and with any process for that matter. There will never be a process that is 100 percent foolproof in finding a later ineligible candidate unless he or she displays patterns that were obvious to the naked eye prior to the selection. But some individuals are great at masking this, and it's covered deep within for later revelation, often when it's too