Welcome to another episode of Civic Csicher. I'm your host, Ramsey's job. I'm back with Ramses again. He calls me qwar. Stick around. We got another interesting show for you and a lot to let you know about. Of course, we are going to talk about a video that was recently released showing some more behind the scenes activities of the shooting in Vallde, Texas, and it's important for us to
really talk about that. We've been I've certainly been wanting to talk about the role of police in society, and so we're gonna, you know, examine what the police did, at least in this one instance, and then kind of extrapolate and really derive some meaning from it. We of course, we all accept that was a failure on their part, but I think that a lot of times people overestimate the capability of police and assign police accolades that aren't
always warranted. And so I'm not trying to take anything away from anybody, but I really think that it's obviously we need to be critical about who they are in the role they plan society and who they help.
I think that I might assigned some of that to themselves that too public just blindly puts that on them.
That's a jack that they choose to wear. And we're going to get to all of that. Also, we're going to talk about black on black crime, or rather the fact that black on black crime is not a thing. We've mentioned that on the show before, of course, but we'd love for you to stick around as we make the points so that you understand that it is, in fact a white racist supprime, racist, white supremacist conservative narrative. And then our way black history fact is the three
fifths compromise. If you don't know what that is, be sure to stick around. We will let you know. But first and foremost, let's discuss some ebony excellence, shall we. I think we shall. Why don't you take this one too, because this is about some sports people and that's not my strong suit.
Y'all know, Ramsys is the biggest sports fan in the world. He's undercover about it.
I like the team with the with the winning touchdown ball.
Wow, we'll talk about that later. Abny Excellence Today brought to you by Armadel Vodka via Sports Illustrated. Sandra Douglas Morgan makes history as Raiders team president. The Raiders announced the historic the historic hiring of Sandra Douglas Morgan to Service Team President on Thursday, making her the first black woman to assume this role in NFL history. A lot of people may not remember, but the Raiders as an organization are the first to do a lot with underrepresented
groups and minorities. So shata the late great Al Davis and his son Mark for continuing to push that tradition forward. I'm always trying to make sure that we have seat at the table, Morgan said during her opening statement. In addition to her new job title, she both several professional ties with both the organization and the city. Over the last decade plus, Morgan has worked as director of External Affairs for AT and T, a city attorney for North
Las Vegas, and litigation attorney for MGM International. Seeing a woman in this space is one thing, Singing a black woman in this space is something altogether bigger.
Man. Black women are women winning right now as far as sports.
And I think that women are starting to make it very very clear this is not them getting some type of favor done for them. These are capable, brilliant, good qualified women that are getting these jobs and really showing us that this should have never been a thing in the first place of it. So shout out to the Oakland Raiders and shout out again to Sondra Douglas Morgan from making history. Now, that was necessary. That pause was very, very necessary. Okay, I'm going to say something.
Because I feel like in the t's and the intro for the show, you know, there's some there's a point that needs to be made. And then Q is going to do a lot more talking this time than I am. But I want to say something. If you think about what is the purpose of police, you know, perhaps what comes to mind is to protect people? Right, not not crazy by saying that, right, most people would perhaps agree
with some variation of that, to protect people. And then if you add, you know, dive a little deeper, ask more questions, Well, why do people need to be protected? I think you might find that the answer is so people feel safe. Right, Because for most of us, we don't live in a war torn country the United States of America, and most of us have some mobility, you know,
we don't encounter criminal activity on a regular basis. Statistically, a very small amount of the population actually commits an enormous amount of the crime.
But wouldn't Some people say that that's because of the presence of police officer perhaps perhaps so, I wouldn't.
I wouldn't take that from anyone. But what I'm trying to establish is that people might deduce, you know, if you dig deep enough, that police exist to make us feel safe by and large right now. Granted, there's certainly a they do have to fight crime and catch the bad guys, taking to jail, that sort of stuff, But for the most part, police make us feel safe.
I think people would deduce that. Or do you think it's the slogan on the side of their cars that give that impression.
I'm just I'm asking for a friend. Listen, man, you're not wrong, but let me continue, go and continue. Right, So, here's a question that I think is really important before we get into this topic, that we really need to discuss. Who are the people that need to feel safe in order for this narrative to continue to bolster the reputation and indeed the institution of policing in this country. Who are these people that need to feel safe? Is that everyone?
And if so, does everyone feel safe by the presence of police or is that some people and do only some people feel a protected, insulated because of the presence of police. Right. So I'm asking these questions not because I want to feed you the answer, but I want us to think critically about what it is that police are supposed to be doing to create this reality for
the rest of us. Yes, now, if you think that, like me, that police are here to protect us or otherwise make us feel protected, then it stands to reason that the population, if the police are supposed to protect the population of citizens, that the citizens would feel that way, and it should be assigned to all the citizens fairly and equally. I think that, you know, deductive reasoning would
suggest that not all citizens feel that way. Particularly the more melanated you are, the less safe you feel in interacting with police, and the more likely you are to feel afraid of the police. I know that's certainly true for me. I've never really interacted with police and felt
better about it. With that said, I do have some friends who are police officers, and I met them as police officers and we got to be cool because I recognize there are human beings underneath those uniforms, and once you get past all that cops, it's like if somebody comes to you and they're like dressed like Satan, you know what I mean. It's a costume and it freaks me out a little bit, But eventually I guess I could see there's a human in there. That's a weird comparison,
but you know not, it's not. It's you know, people fear for their lives when you're interacting with the police, so it's not too weird right now.
Some are some would be less afraid of the person in the Satan costume, and those would be people that Satan does good work for. I'd argue there's some Christians God Fair that look like you and I that would feel less threatened by the person in the Satan costume and by police.
Officers, So I think that that needs to be established. The other thing is, again, if these police are heroes, they're they're supposed to come out and catch the bad guys. They're supposed to come out and save the day. They're supposed to make people feel safe, often displaying bravery, which to me by definition is setting aside my own uh security,
uh and and safety to protect someone else. You know that that's bravery To me, it's it's not brave if I'm not going to you know, if I I'm not going to get harmed by doing someone a favor, that's called a favor. That's not bravery, you know what I mean. So bravery is like, you know, I'm not worried about my own wellbeing. I just needed to protect these folks.
I need you to understand that this is kind of the narrative that we've given to police, and it's not always true, and that police are not always the good guys, as we've seen time and again. So I want to to describe a video or I guess we can read. We do have notes from USA today here, but you've seen this video. I have not seen the video. Our producer, Maggie b Noan has not seen the video. We have school aged children, and it wasn't really wasn't going to
jump on that grenade. And you know, we do take turns with these videos, and Q went first and we decided to let him have that. So let's talk about this most recent video that showed the behind the scenes details of what happened in of All Day Texas.
I'm going to read about the video, let's do it, and then I'm going to tell you how it made me feel for those who haven't watched it, for those who don't want to watch it because they're just.
It's a lot to have these videos to watch so often.
We've said multiple times on the air, it sucks to always have content for this type of show. Yeah, we've never showed up to the studio like, hey, what we're going to talk about today? You want to try to make something up? Or nothing in the world is great, man, it's rainbows and unicorn would be awesome. I wish. However, we have to pass up things because we don't have enough time or enough show to talk about all these types of instances. This comes from USA Today. The gunman
walks into rob elementary school unimpeded. Moments after spraying bullets from his semi automatic rifle outside the school, and after desperate calls to nine one one from inside and outside of the school, he slows down to peek around the corner in a hallway and flips back his hair before proceeding towards classrooms one eleven and one twelve. Seconds later, a boy with neatly combed hair and glasses exits a
bathroom to head back to his class. As he turns the corner, he notices the gunman standing by the classroom door and unloading a barrage. The boy turns and runs back into the bathroom. The gunman enters one of the classrooms, children scream, The gunfire continues, stops and then starts again, stops and then starts again, and again and again. It has almost three minutes before police officers arrive in the hallway and rush toward the classrooms, crouching down, then a
burst of gunfire. One officer grabs the back of his head, then quickly retreats to the end of the hallway below a school surveillance camera. A seventy seven minute video recording captured from this vantage point, along with body camera footage from one of the responding officers, showed an excruciating detail what happened when dozens of local, state, and federal officers entered the school, heavily armed, clad in body armor, helmets,
and protective shields. In the video, officers walk back and forth in the hallway, some leaving the frame then reappearing, others training their weapons toward the classroom, talking making phone calls, sending text messages, or looking at floor plans. No one enters or attempts to enter the classrooms, even after hearing at least four shots from classrooms. Forty five minutes after the police arrived and waited, they asked for keys for
one of the classrooms. An investigators showed that this classroom was already unlocked, so they never even tried to enter. They brought tear gas and gas mask and carried a sledgehammer, but still they waited. Officers rushed into the classroom and killed the gunman an hour and fourteen minutes after they arrived on the scene. Nineteen graders and their two teachers died in the massacre on May twenty fourth, days before the end of the school year. That's days before no
one would have even been in this building. The video tells the brutal story of how heavily armed officers failed to launch a cohesive and aggressive response to stop a shooter and save more children if possible. It reinforces the trauma for those parents, friends, and bystanders who were outside the school and pleaded with the police to do something, and for those survivors who quietly called nine to one
one from inside the classroom begging for help. I'm not sure the description can make you as sick as watching the video does, but I hope that it at least illustrates what had to feel like forever for those kids and for their teachers as their heroes sat and observed and listened and watched and cowered and ran and hid. I very intentionally used the word coward because, by the nature of signing up for that job, covering your own backside and running and hiding should not be an option.
As you listen to children be murdered.
You can hear them screaming. In the video.
You can hear the children screaming, you can hear the gunshots. And there are several versions of these videos that exist where they had to digitally digitally remove the children screaming because it was too traumatic for some people to watch. These are our heroes. Ramses pose the question to serve and protect who? And to our incredible producer, Maggie, I'm going to have you do a favor for me whenever
you get some time. Does not have to be today, but just look up a photograph of to serve and protect on the side of those cars and see if there's an ellipsis at the end of that, if there's a period in a quotation, Mark or an ellipses, as it's left to our imagination who they are there to serve and protect, because one might argue the affluent, but
if the affluent look like Ramses, not so much. One might argue the helpless, the children, the women, But we have a seventy seven minute video that shows that's not the case either. It would be strange to argue that is to protect the shooters, who are somehow safely apprehended in most of these cases, except when left with absolutely
no choice. It is incredible the amount of outrage that you are met with when you say something as radical as defund the police, even in the wake of our children being murdered and those that murder them getting to safely, securely and with the full stomach see their day in court.
So here's the point that I thought we would end up making. Obviously, the institution of policing was it was designed to protect wealth, to protect you know, folks with means and with resources from folks without right.
Can you can you be clear about the haves and the have nots, and that historically speaking.
White people in this country and have not would have been non white people in this country prior to that. You know, there were no police, there wasn't policing. There's like a constable or a share for you know, something like that, and then oftentimes that that person also was the judge and the jailer and you know, all this sort of stuff. But obviously we know that the term patrol comes from slave patrols, where they would you know, patrol slaves, and then the evolution of police and kind
of stems from that. But I think that there's an argument that I had never considered before. Like I know that, let's just be real, a lot of times it's white folks of means that tend to get very chummy with police officers, and that's okay, that's how it was designed to be. So I'm not mad at I'm not mad at anybody. I'm saying doesn't work for everybody. Right. What I'm seeing now is that police, if we're asking who do they serve and protect, I'm starting to see a
case being made for them serving and protecting themselves. Here's your other. Here's what I mean, Here's what I mean when I say that, and I'm telling you this, I get it. Man. It sounds like I beat up on the police, and it makes me sick to my stomach to keep having this conversation. We have to have the conversation. We have to be critical of these institutions so that they get better. You have to be critical of this institution of me and Q and Maggie so that we
get better. We get it. We're still sharp and steal here, but we're doing our jobs. The reason I say that is because I feel if police and policing was as noble and as community oriented and as publicly serving as it postures itself as it prefers its narrative to be chronicled in these cities and in this country overall, if in fact this institution was as honorable as it purports itself to be, it would own its mistakes head high.
This is a mistake that we've made. This is what we are going to do to do better, to do right. We want to be better. We are the noble, brave, strong, you know, we are the heroes. Right. You can look at another officer doing wrong, overstepping, you know, being you know, brutalizing someone, or you know, whatever, whatever the case, you can learn from officers elsewhere and decide I will not allow that to happen in my city on my watch, right, But what do we see is they just go to
defend each other. And I'll be honest, I've seen a lot of police officers be very critical of this response in Valde, Texas. But I haven't seen as many police officers be critical of Jalen Ohio, Jalen Walker Walker, Jalen Walker right, shot sixty times, shot at ninety times, something like that, and he was unarmed at the time when he was shot. I haven't seen any of these folks take a step back to say, Okay, what are the social conditions that create the fear that we experience as
officers against black and brown people? What have we been taught that makes us assume the worst? What might we be dealing with in terms of you know, people wouldn't call their own ailment to God complex, But you know, what is my place in society? Am I really here to help? Or am I really here to bully people around? Do I get mad when people don't want to do what I say when I say it? You know, like
those like really be critical of themselves. And you know, when you start asking these really important nuts and bolts questions, I think you start to get to the essence of why a lot of us are very critical with police, saying why we can look at this failure, abject failure in Texas and say, listen, man, we didn't expect much, but y'all really, well, who's calling these people heroes?
I think when he said fear, he meant hate. I think when he said fear of black and brown people, I think he meant hate for black and brown people. Sometimes I just mishear things.
I know you might not be wrong. I recognize that there's a lot of white supremacists who you know, function in that capacity, in the police officer capacity, but there's also some people who just they don't they haven't come to terms with the fact that they're afraid, and so I try to be as generous as I can, but we're just going to have to leave that one right there.